Even More Cool Stuff You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Philadelphia: Part 3

Who doesn’t love a rousing round of Philadelphia trivia? We’ve got all your facts about the City of Brotherly Love right here. You can check out previous installments of this series here and here.

Philadelphia is a city of firsts. Find out more about notable Philly firsts here!

Philadelphia has a lot of history. Of course, it was the nation’s first capital city. But Philly is a city FULL of firsts. In the United States, Philadelphia had the first hospital, first medical school, first natural history institution, first engineering classes, first pharmacy school, first children’s hospital (the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, or CHOP, which has been the site of many medical firsts) and the  world’s first general-use computer. That computer, named ENIAC, was built at the University of Pennsylvania. Unlike our modern, slimmed-down notebooks, this beast was 150 feet wide and had twenty banks of flashing lights. It was also home to the first cancer center in the US (the Hospital of Fox Chase Cancer Center) and the first stock exchange in America: the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which opened in 1790 at the London Coffee House.

In addition, Philadelphia was home to the first play produced in the United States: Thomas Godfrey’s Prince of Parthia, produced in 1767. It can also claim the first grand opera, Leonora by William Fry, which opened in 1845. It’s appropriate then that the country’s first theater was here – Walnut Street Theater, which made its debut in 1809. Proving that Philly is a true birthplace of the arts, the first art museum and school, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, opened here. Philly’s Academy of Music is another landmark first: the oldest musical auditorium in American still serving its original purpose.

More Philly firsts? Wanamaker, which is now Lord & Taylor, became the country’s first department store when it opened at Broad and Chestnut Streets. The nation’s oldest diamond district, Jeweler’s Row, is also the country’s second-largest.

And, as one last fact, licorice, ice cream, bubble gum, and the Girl Scout cookie were all products of Philadelphia!