Rittenhouse Historic District

Centered on Rittenhouse Square, the southwest square of William Penn's original city plan, this residential district spans roughly Walnut to Pine and 15th to 24th streets. Its streetscapes mix two-story rowhouses, red brick blocks of three- and four-story houses, stone-fronted mansions, and churches and schools, dating from the late eighteenth century onward. Developers such as John McCrea and Lemuel Coffin built many of the rows, while architects including John Notman, Frank Furness, George Hewitt, Theophilus Chandler, and Cope and Stewardson designed the principal houses and institutions. The district is regarded as a rare case of a central neighborhood that kept a continuous residential character across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with few large-scale rebuildings. Its architecture is unified by a restrained, Ruskinian approach to design. Later apartment towers, including Art Deco buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, were built on the square's edges, replacing earlier mansions.