A Stroll Through the Founder’s Philadelphia

Old City

The adventurous young nation thrived in the bustle of Philadelphia’s docks, and so did the Drexel family dynasty.

Anthony’s father, Francis Martin Drexel (1792–1863), was born in what is now Austria and escaped Napoleon’s invasion to immigrate to Philadelphia in 1817. He later married Catherine Hookey, whose great-uncle Simon Snyder had been the governor of Pennsylvania. By the time Anthony was born, Francis Martin had been a portrait artist on three continents before landing in America and using his international connections to open a currency exchange in the heart of Philadelphia’s financial district.

Francis Martin rented a room for his business at 48 S. Third St. and later pulled 13-year-old Anthony and his 15-year-old brother Francis Anthony (“Frank”) out of school to work alongside him. A decade later, Francis Martin purchased the entire three-story building, naming his sons partners of the expanded Drexel & Co. brokerage house.

In 1854, Drexel & Co. moved to a new four-story, colonnaded marble building — the tallest on the block — six doors north at 34 S. Third St.

The relocation inadvertently created a century-long mix-up. When the city’s street numbering system changed, the new building took the address of the former location. So when the 1854 bank was demolished in the 1970s to make way for parking (pictured), many believed it had been home to both bank locations. While researching his 2001 book “The Man Who Made Wall Street: Anthony J. Drexel and the Rise of Modern Finance,” biographer Dan Rottenberg uncovered the truth about the building and provided many of the details of Anthony’s life story cited throughout this article.

In response, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission installed a historical marker outside the original bank, which is still standing with only a curved dormer on the roof as its original architectural feature. Today, the ground floor houses Rocky Philly Souvenirs, a gift shop.

In 1885, after the deaths of his brother and father, Anthony moved Drexel & Co. to the southeast corner of Fifth and Chestnut streets inside a white marble building designed by Wilson Brothers & Co., a prolific firm that designed several buildings for Anthony (including his future university).

Anthony bought and razed buildings housing the Library Company of Philadelphia and a U.S. post office.  In his biography of Anthony, Rottenberg describes how Anthony was unable to buy the building in between, so he simply surrounded it — creating an “H”-shaped, 10-story structure named the “Drexel Building.” Completed in 1888, it became one of the city’s first modern office buildings, complete with an elevator, and it was the tallest in the skyline until City Hall opened in 1901. Drexel & Co.’s influence was so great that the Philadelphia Stock Exchange left its decades-long home on Third Street to join as a tenant.

The building is no longer there. In the 1950s, after Drexel & Co. closed, the federal government purchased the building for $1.6 million (worth about $19 million in 2025) and demolished it to develop Independence National Historical Park. The site now contains Signers Garden and a replica of the original 1791 library that Anthony had razed, rebuilt as Library Hall in 1959.

Anthony also entered the newspaper business with editor and publisher George W. Childs, whom Rottenberg describes as Anthony’s lifelong friend and who later became the University’s first Board of Trustees vice president. The two men met in the 1850s, bought the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1864, and opened its new headquarters three years later on the site of Anthony’s childhood home. For the next 30 years, Anthony was a silent partner as Childs grew the paper into one of Philadelphia’s leading publications. After both of their deaths, the Ledger and its holdings went to Anthony’s son George W. Childs Drexel (Childs’ namesake), who sold the business to New York Times owner Alfred S. Ochs and eventually publisher Cyrus H.K. Curtis.

In the 1920s, a new Public Ledger Building rose on the site, eventually becoming home to luxury condominiums and the largest-ever Wawa. It was also around this time that Curtis became a Drexel Trustee and funded Curtis Hall and the Curtis organ in the University’s Main Building.

Rottenberg reports that Anthony’s maternal grandfather Anthony Hookey operated a grocery store at Third and Green and was one of the original founders of the Holy Trinity Church. The 1780s Catholic church was the first in the country dedicated to an ethnic population, for German speakers. Anthony’s father held also leadership positions there. 

Holy Trinity’s fortunes changed in the 21st century. It merged with the equally historic Old Saint Mary Church in 2009 but closed in 2022 due to repair costs. Today, the vacant building is no longer considered a Catholic church, but its historic Flemish bricklaid exterior is historically protected.

Photo by Beverly Pfingsten, HMdb.org.

Center City

Generations of Drexels clustered around Rittenhouse Square, occupying grand homes in the fashionable district. Today only two of the original mansions survive, but a number of other family landmarks still stand.

In the same year that Anthony was preparing to open the University, his Drexel & Co. client Reading Railroad, one of the country’s biggest railroad companies, wanted to build a state-of-the-art base in Philadelphia.

His biography recounts how Anthony negotiated an $8.5 million loan (worth $294 million today) to pay for the construction of a complex on the 1100 block of Market Street for Reading Railroad’s main train shed, passenger station, company headquarters and the Reading Terminal Market. The train shed was designed by Anthony’s go-to construction partner Wilson Brothers & Co. 

Reading Terminal opened in 1893, and though the railroad ceased operations less than a century later, the complex lives on through the landmark Pennsylvania Convention Center and popular eateries and shops of the Reading Terminal Market.

Faith and philanthropy were closely bound for many Drexels. While Anthony became Episcopalian after marriage, his older brother Frank was a prominent, socially conscious Catholic. Frank helped fund the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter & Paul and reportedly donated the roof’s copper. He also bought an organ used in the cathedral and occasionally filled in for the organist.

Frank and his second wife Emma Bouvier Drexel (great-great aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis) attended mass at the Cathedral with their three daughters, and after Emma died in 1883 and Frank in 1885, the girls gave the church an altar memorializing their parents.

One Drexel descendent made charity her life’s work. Sister Consuela Marie Duffy writes in the biography “Katherine Drexel: A Biography,” how the middle child Katharine renounced her heiress lifestyle to become a nun in 1889 and founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, using her inheritance to support schools and care in Black and Native American communities. After Katherine’s death in 1955, funeral services were held at the Cathedral Basilica, and she was laid to rest at the congregation’s Motherhouse. Canonized in 2000, she became the second American-born saint. 

In 2018, after the Sisters sold the property, her sacred remains were moved to the Cathedral Basilica, where they now rest beside her parents’ altar and can be viewed today.

Cathedral Basilica vintage photo reprinted with permission of the Catholic Historical Research Center.

The photo on the left, which was taken at the school’s 1924 opening, is credited to the Curtis Institute of Music Archives.

The Curtis Institute music conservatory at 1726 Locust Street was originally the home of George W. Childs Drexel and his wife Mary Stretch Irick Drexel, who settled on Rittenhouse Square’s southeast corner in a limestone Beaux-Arts mansion. It was designed by the Peabody and Stearns architecture firm that also built their Maine summer residence, which is now owned by John Travolta. Archival photos from 1900 show the lush interior of the Rittenhouse mansion.

In “Seventy-Five Years of The Curtis Institute of Music” Diana Burgwyn describes how Mary Louise Curtis Bok purchased the mansion, along with two adjacent properties, in 1924 to open the Curtis Institute of Music for gifted musicians. She named the school for her father, the famed publisher Cyrus H. K. Curtis — who was at the time the owner of the Philadelphia Public Ledger and a Drexel Trustee.

The Drexels arranged for muralist Edwin Blashfield — who had also painted one of their Steinway pianos — to paint one room’s ceiling as a departing gift. The former family mansion has undergone additional alterations but still houses the Curtis Institute and the Blashfield mural. The piano that belonged to the Drexels has returned: upon her death in 1948, Mary Drexel bequeathed it and her art to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which donated it to the Curtis Institute in the ’90s.

The other still-standing Drexel family mansion on Rittenhouse Square belonged to Anthony’s youngest daughter Sarah “Sallie” Drexel Fell Van Rensselaer. In the 1890s, she used the same architects as her brother to build the four-story, 23,600-square-foot limestone Beaux Arts mansion at 1801 Walnut Street. She lived in what her New York Times obituary called “one of the finest [town houses] in the city” with her four children and, later, her second husband, Alexander Van Rensselaer.

The black-and-white image of the Rensselaer mansion is credited to "Fell-Van Rensselaer_House at 1801 Walnut Street” from Moses King’s Philadelphia and Notable Philadelphians. New York: Blanchard Press, Isaac H. Blanchard Co., 1901, p. 62.

She was a champion of women’s educational opportunities and funded the University’s Van Rensselaer Hall that opened in 1931 as a women’s dormitory. Her first husband, John R. Fell, was a founding member of the Board of Trustees until his death in 1895, and her second husband was a member from 1897 until his death in 1933, serving as president since 1908.

The property was sold to the Penn Athletic Club in 1942 and became a clubhouse for a few decades. In 1974, the abandoned space was remodeled to become a Design Research store, which closed in 1979. In 1982, an Urban Outfitters retail store opened there, which eventually transitioned into the Anthropology sister store that exists today. The external façade hasn’t changed as much as the inside, which still contains original features like a glass Tiffany & Co. dome and a ceiling with portraits of Italian princes.

On the left is a 1974 public domain photograph from the Library of Congress showing the original Tiffany stained-glass dome before the mansion was converted to retail space.

West Philly

Anthony was among West Philadelphia’s earliest and most prominent residents and helped shape it into a “streetcar suburb.”

In the mid-1850s, Anthony, his wife Ellen Rozet Drexel and their young family left Rittenhouse Square to settle at what was then the edge of the city limits. According to the biographer Rottenberg, they lived in a three-story, 41-room Italianate mansion where they raised their eight living children and, intermittently, two grandsons and two nieces (including Saint Katharine).

When his children began starting their own families, Anthony built nearby houses for some of them. The Drexels were the sole occupants of the entire block between 38th and 39th streets and Walnut Street and Locust streets, and the stretch of fine houses became known as the “Drexel Colony.” Two of his children’s homes survive today as University of Pennsylvania fraternity houses.

One is a Queen Anne-style house at 3809 Locust Walk, which was the home of Anthony’s daughter Frances “Fannie” Katherine Drexel Paul, her husband James W. Paul Jr. and their three children. Fannie was a member of the University’s Advisory Board of Women before she died and bequeathed her art to the institution; James was the last family member to be a partner at Drexel & Co. and was the founding secretary of the University’s Board of Trustees, serving as president from 1894 until his death in 1908. In 1920, their home became the fraternity house of Penn’s Sigma Chi chapter.

An Italian Renaissance-style house at 225 South 39th St. was the home of George W. Childs Drexel and his wife Mary before they moved to Rittenhouse Square. It was constructed, like so many Drexel projects, by the Wilson Brothers & Co. Mary served as a member of the University’s Advisory Board of Women and George was a founding Trustee until his death in 1944. Penn’s Alpha Tau Omega fraternity has occupied their West Philly residence since 1971.

After Anthony and his wife died, their house was purchased in 1906 by Samuel Fels, a wealthy businessman who razed the building to create his own mansion (now Penn’s Fox-Fels Hall). Some of the founder’s art and his piano can be seen on Drexel’s campus today. Drexel University Archives has also digitized Drexel family photo albums depicting the interiors of Drexel homes.

An undated photograph of the Drexel Colony. Anthony’s Walnut Street house is on the corner. To its left is the Walnut Street house belonging to his son Anthony J. Drexel, Jr. The 39th Street house of his son George W. Childs Drexel can be seen in the middle, behind the trees; it’s the only one left standing today.

In 1877, Anthony acquired land between 39th and 40th streets from Pine Street to Baltimore Avenue and commissioned G.W. & W.D. Hewitt to design 44 three-story Queen Anne–style rowhomes. Completed in 1883, the development reflected the rise of West Philadelphia as one of the nation’s first suburbs served by transit lines that made it possible for families to live amid tree-lined streets close to urban centers. Some of the houses still display their 19th century character — carved doors, ornamental moldings, iron gates and window grilles.

About 150 years later, preservationists recognized the development’s historic significance by including it in Philadelphia’s Drexel-Govett Historic District in 2022. The rowhomes remain a surviving example of the Victorian-era expansion that shaped West Philadelphia.

The Woodlands cemetery at 40th Street and Woodland Avenue was incorporated in the 1840s, and one of its first and biggest structures was for the Drexel family. After the death of Anthony’s father in 1863, a Drexel Family Mausoleum was erected in a prominent location in front of the Woodlands mansion. The large white mausoleum resembles a Roman temple and is closed to the public. For about 120 years, more than 40 members of the Drexel family were laid to rest in the mausoleum, including Anthony, his wife, some of his children and his parents. Additional Drexel family members, including his son George, were buried in a nearby ground plot.

In 1889, Anthony embarked on his largest project ever when he purchased and razed a home at today’s 3141 Chestnut St. to make way for the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry. The resulting Main Building was designed by his favorite firm, Wilson Brothers & Co. Throughout construction and afterward, when Anthony passed the school on his commute, “he always stopped at the Institute, so that hardly a day passed without an opportunity to advise with him about its affairs,” remembered Drexel’s first president, James MacAlister.

Main Building later expanded, with the Wilson Brothers firm (yes, again) designing the Randell Hall that opened in 1901 to replace a neighboring building donated by Anthony’s son-in-law James W. Paul Jr. in 1893. Only one other existing building on campus dates back to the founder’s era: the Paul Peck Alumni Center built in 1876, formerly the Centennial National Bank.

The University is no longer contained in just one building, and Philadelphia has similarly changed throughout the years. But you can still see remnants of the past that helped grow the city and institution — and the legacy of the man who made it all possible.

Drexel University was originally contained in this one building, Main Building at 3141 Chestnut St., when it was founded in 1891. The black-and-white photo was taken in 1900 (photo courtesy the Library of Congress) and the color photo was shot 125 years later in 2025.