Philadelphia Map 1836 City Plan - Washington Square, Delaware River, Independence Hall

Henry S. Tanner, working out of Philadelphia, issued this Philadelphia city plan in 1836, included in the 1842 edition of his New Universal Atlas, the last he personally published after three decades spent building a reputation as one of America's most trusted cartographers. This printing renders the city's famous street grid in fine detail, with an index or directory keying specific sites to the map for easy navigation, its wards and districts hand-colored to separate them at a glance. The sheet maps Philadelphia itself, the city where Tanner had built his career and reputation, at a scale detailed enough to show individual streets and public spaces rather than the broader statewide view his Pennsylvania sheet provides.

Washington Square appears by name on the sheet, one of the city's planned public greens laid out under William Penn's original grid and, by 1836, a well-established civic landmark in its own right. The Delaware River anchors the city's eastern edge, the waterway that had made Philadelphia one of the young country's busiest ports and shaped the orientation of its street grid running inland from the riverbank. The city's street index rounds out the sheet's practical detail, a navigational tool as useful to residents as to visitors unfamiliar with Penn's grid. Together Washington Square, the Delaware River, and the indexed street grid sketch a city whose 1836 layout was already decades into its now-famous planned design.

For a Philadelphia family with deep city roots, someone who's settled there more recently, or a collector drawn to the earliest detailed plans of Penn's city, this sheet has a specific pull. The store also carries a Philadelphia-focused sheet in Bradford's 1838 atlas, which extends its coverage out to West Philadelphia and Germantown; this 1836 Tanner sheet is the tighter, more purely urban plan of the two, built around Washington Square and the Delaware River rather than the wider metropolitan view Bradford's sheet takes. It's printed unframed and available in a range of sizes to fit whatever wall it's headed for.