William Penn by Bill Cannon
We’ve become used to our own kind of “green-washing,” dyeing our
ideas and aspirations for a sustainable city in William Penn’s moniker “Green Country Town.”
But Penn only used this term once. “It actually applies to an earlier plan, which really was a very different layout,” says historian Lily Milroy, in an interview for the film series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment.”
On the other hand? “He was thinking about Philadelphia as a commercial center, as a port, a prosperous port,so he could exploit that for his own financial ends and profit from economic development.”
About the Author
Nathaniel Popkin Nathaniel Popkin is co-founder of the Hidden City Daily and author of three books of non-fiction, including Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City (with Peter Woodall and Joseph E.B. Elliott) and two novels, Everything is Borrowed and Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of Who Will Speak for America, an anthology forthcoming in June 2018, and the senior writer of the film documentary "Philadelphia: The Great Experiment."
