Colonial Philadelphia Essay

The infrastructure of colonial Philadelphia was much different then it is now. The roads dating back then were also different. William Penn had a great idea for the layout of the streets and also the city. The bases for his street layout came after the London Fire of 1666. He realized the fire burnt everything down because of how close the streets were. He noticed if you spread the building out and made the roads bigger then fire wouldn 't spread. Philadelphia was one of the few cities in the colonial that had better made roads and a better road plan. Throughout the 17 and 1800s very few cities had well done roads. Most roads were dirt and not paved or finished. Also Squares and circles were placed at the points where the principal streets

Most of the roads made in Philadelphia were paved with cobblestone built from ship ballasts, Gravel and blocks made of

He had lived through London 's bubonic plague of 1665 and great fire of 1666. Though like Penn, city leaders once again found salvation in greening and cleaning the town. City leaders in the 19th century also had to contend with the competing interests of business and public welfare, though unlike Penn they were not 'proprietors ' of the land. Though as lord of the manor, William Penn proved a relatively easygoing, and an almost always absent. This was a problem some of the timeOpen, though today seems normal for most American cities. Also with traffic it keeps everything flowing for the most part. With the exception of rush hour times and when a lot of things are happening in the city it is usually pretty smooth. Besides the streets in the city many roads around it were built during the founding of Philadelphia. A road such as The Great Conestoga Road, completed in 1741, and the later Lancaster Pike, went from Philadelphia to Lancaster. After the Lancaster Pike was completed, the Pennsylvania Legislature granted charters to extend it westward to Pittsburgh, following closely the route of the Forbes Road. Faced with the need to build a road to move troops during the French and Indian War, General Forbes ' troops constructed a