17 August: Philadelphia

On this date in 1790 the capital city of the United States moved from New York City to Philadelphia. 10 things you might not know about Philadelphia:

1. When William Penn acquired the land for the Pennsylvania colony, he planned a city which would serve as a port and a seat of government. That city was Philadelphia. The name is composed of the Greek words for love (phileo) and brother (adelphos), hence one of the city’s many nicknames is “The City of Brotherly Love”.
2. Penn planned the place to be more like a rural town than a city, using a grid plan for roads which kept houses and businesses apart with room for gardens and orchards for the residents. However, his plan was scuppered by the people who moved in, who subdivided their lots and sold them off.
3. Many of the streets in central Philadelphia are named after trees. While nobody knows for sure why this is, there are a couple of theories, both connected with William Penn. One is that he was simply a nature buff and named the streets after trees because he liked them. Another is that it was an idea he came up with to help illiterate people find their way around the city. They wouldn’t be able to read the street signs, but they would be able to recognise the type of tree planted along the street.
4. Philadelphia is known for a number of American firsts. The first American daily Newspaper (The Philadelphia Packet and Daily Advertiser, which began in 1784) The first zoo, chartered in 1859; the first church for African American people (Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1787); the first general purpose computer (which weighed either 27lbs or 27 tons depending on which source you read); America’s first Piano (built in 1775 by John Behrent); the first hospital (founded in 1751 by Dr. Thomas Bond and Benjamin Franklin to care for “the sick-poor and insane” living on the streets of Philadelphia) and by association, the first medical school. One in six of all doctors in America train in Philadelphia.
5. Philadelphia’s first business was a brewery called the Philadelphia Brewing Company.
6. Philadelphia’s City Hall is the largest municipal building in the country. It was also the tallest building in the country until 1908. The trouble started, though, when a building called One Liberty Place was built in 1987 – because it was taller than the statue of William Penn on City Hall, it unleashed a curse on the city’s sports teams. No Philly team would win a championship so long as there was a building taller than the statue. So in 2008, when an even taller building, the Comcast Center, was built, the builders installed a 25in statue of Penn was installed at the top of the building, and sure enough that same year the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series. Now there’s an even taller building, The Comcast Technology Center, which opened in 2018; there’s a figurine of William Penn on top of that one, too and the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New England Patriots in Superbowl that year.
7. The term “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving was coined in Philadelphia. It was nothing to do with profits or businesses being “in the black”. It came from the local cops to describe the horrible traffic conditions on that day.
8. Things to see in the city include the Liberty Bell and the Mütter Museum, where you can see slides of slices of Einstein’s Brain and a book bound in human skin. Fans of street art will have a field day here, too as there are more than 2,000 outdoor murals, making the city the “mural capital of the U.S.”
9. Famous people to come from here include Kevin Bacon, Bill Cosby, WC Fields, Richard Gere, Grace Kelly, Sidney Lumet, David Lynch, Will Smith, Louisa M Alcott, Isaac Asimov and The Three Degrees.
10. Philadelphia has eight official twin cities – Florence, Tel Aviv, Toruń (Poland), Tianjin (China), Incheon (South Korea), Douala (Cameroon), Nizhny Novgorod (Russia) and Frankfurt.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book