City’s 300-year-old records get new home
PHILADELPHIA — Alexander Hamilton's tax records, the blueprints for the largest municipal building in the United States and police logs of horse thieves all have a new home now that the Philadelphia City Archives has opened its state-of-the art facility.
The new 65,000-square-foot building houses documents going back over 300 years, and it officially opened to the public on Thursday.
It also features an interactive new mural by Talia Greene. The sprawling work incorporates a 1930s-era map that banks once used to highlight black neighborhoods to restrict access to mortgages.
Greene has virtually incorporated documents showing abolitionist and civil rights efforts within those neighborhoods.
Among them are the death certificate of Octavius Catto, the 19th-century civil rights activist, and a real estate transaction for Underground Railroad conductor William Still's house.