Philly

(City Hall, Philly - up close)

Whew! What a busy last few weeks. Theron and I went to Philadelphia for the ASC conference which is our big, national conference for criminologists. We had a lot of fun (outside of the conference of course). We had a good flight there, were a bit disappointed to learn we had to wait 30 minutes for the subway (you would think a bigger city would have trains running every 10 minutes like, say, Chicago, New York, etc.). Oh well. We finally arrived at our hotel and were thrilled with our room and its view. We had a corner room which faced City Hall!!

(View from our room. City Hall is the building in the middle, you can see the tallest building in Philly in the background - the one with he big antenna).

For those of you who don't know, City Hall was built hundreds of years ago. However, William Penn received a huge plot of land for a debt from the King of England. He was very progressive, was a Quaker, and decided to build a city that would cherish learning and the love of education. He believed that if a city was built around a central location, then it would be stronger. So, he chose the spot, City Hall was built around it and the city took shape around that. City Hall is beautiful, and many of you may have seen it in movies before but may not have known where it is from. A huge bronze statue of William Penn overlooks the city.

City Hall was built as a large building with a huge courtyard that you have to walk through to get to the other side of the city. This was intended to make people feel like citizens and that they had open access to government versus not having any say in monarchy-rule in England.