Tours

Founder’s Hall at Girard College, the old Metropolitan Opera House, and the Wagner Institute of Science (seen above, in that order) will be among the sites featured on our upcoming Robber Barons tour of North Broad Street.

After a busy fall, we’re spending the winter planning our spring events and tours.

Check back, we’ll have some new postings up soon.

Hidden City Stranger’s Guides

In collaboration with Whit McLaughlin of New Paradise Laboratories, writer/actor Brian Osborne, and other local artists, we are developing a new docent training program in which theatre and performing artists of various kinds facilitate your tour experience. The name of the program is derived from the historic Stranger’s Guide to Philadelphia, a legendary guidebook to the city, first published in 1863.

Our Stranger’s Guides program will develop a corps of performing artists from the theatre, dance, and performance art disciplines, and a series of published guide books. The result will be a growing body of “wonder-plays,” our working name for these tour-like, but more playful interactions between public and artist.

Inspired by artists such as Lenore Malen and her New Society for Universal Harmony and David Wilson and his Museum of Jurassic Technology, our Stranger’s Guides will explore the narrative potential and poetic interstices between historical fact, autobiography, myth and legend, and creative fiction making. We anticipate launching the program in fall of 2012.