My Journey Through the Free Library of Philadelphia's Art Department's Archival Collection: Day 1

It's been almost exactly one year since I began volunteering in the Art Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia where my as-of-right-now seemingly distant goal is to develop a finding aid for the department's archival collection --  a set of drawers filled with folders containing pamphlets, postcards, maps, books, letters, newspaper clippings, and the occasional thing I can't categorize -- all (if not sometimes vaguely) pertaining to art in Philadelphia.

Over the near year I've been keeping a running list of questions and bits of information that I keep telling myself I'll research that night but end up leaving until later and, up until now, later never really arrived. But I'm finally ready to start writing about my experiences and lucky for myself and everyone else out there, I was very loyal to my collection in that I really did record random thoughts about my findings every single day with the exception of maybe one day (and I'll let you know when we get to that one). So I'm going to just jump right on in and discuss the things that I apparently thought were cool enough to write about on Day One of my volunteer experience:

Day 1: February 22, 2018

Adelphia Hotel

So my first subject may be of no interest to anybody else but me, but apparently the Adelphia House apartment building on 13th and Chestnut Streets, where one of my good friends since elementary school now lives, was once a snazzy downtown hotel. I guess I decided to write about it because my friend living there has made the building one of my first recognizable landmarks in Center City when I moved here in 2016. Below this rambling paragraph are the documents of interest found in the archival collection. The first article from The Inquirer was written in 1974 and notes that many fashionable-type hotels like Adelphia experienced decline around this time period because people began favoring hotels on the outskirts of the city from which they would then drive into the downtown area, and therefore parking was a much bigger concern than a "balconied lobby" or "marble-topped coffee tables." If the article could time travel into now I wonder if there would be any mention of the effect of websites like Airbnb on old luxury hotels because they have to have some kind of effect, right? And I hadn't even thought up until now about Uber and Lyft, which would make even parking less of a concern as well, and so now my thoughts are spiraling into a crazy futuristic-Philadelphia where hotels and parking lots no longer exist at all and instead everyone just sleeps in restaurants or something because nobody wants to deal with food delivery, and yet I'm also reminded of the fact that new technologies rarely completely replace old ones, and here we are, forty-five years after the Inquirer article was written, and not only do hotels still exist but I'm pretty sure a gigantic one is going to be built in the gigantic and historic building that is adjacent to and an almost exact replica of the Free Library of Philadelphia's Parkway Central Branch on Vine Street. The second image below is a "Pennsylvania Historic Resource Survey Form" which to me looks like someone was nominating the Adelphia Hotel building for designation as a historic building but I'm honestly not sure.