The Pennsylvania Town is a characteristic settlement pattern in the Pennsylvania Cultural Area of the United States. A Pennsylvania Town is marked by a central square, often called a "diamond", and sometimes a set of outlying squares. The town’s streets are laid out in a grid plan, and the naming of the streets tends to follow a pattern. Typically, one set of streets is named for trees, and the cross streets may be numbered.Joseph A. Gambardello, “Are Philly’s streets named after trees ordered from hardwood to softwood?”, ‘’The Philadelphia Inquirer’’, May 25, 2019.
Within the town, houses and other buildings are typically built of brick. Houses are set close to one another, generally in rows. The houses are usually built close to the street, with no front yard; sidewalks are often brick as well. Alleys often run behind or next to houses, and many towns exhibit an abundance of shade trees, particularly in the diamond.
The Pennsylvania Town plan has its roots in the original plan for Philadelphia, designed by Thomas Holme and promulgated by William Penn in the 1680s. Settlers carried the plan westward. Although associated with Pennsylvania, this town plan influenced urban design in places far from the state.David J. Cuff, William J. Young, Edward K. Muller, Wilbur Zelinsky, and Ronald F. Abler, eds., The Atlas of Pennsylvania, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1989; p. 149. “Highly specific to the Pennsylvania Cultural Area, the Pennsylvania town is characterized by a rectilinear street pattern, the central diamond, and closely spaced structures. Several features of the Pennsylvania town, not visible on topographic maps, are: certain house types, emphasis on brick, many shade trees at the diamond, alleys and the Philadelphia street-name system in which tree names are used are used for one series of parallel streets, while numbers are used for the intersecting streets.”
Town types Pennsylvania, has a number of different town street patterns. These include linear, rectilinear/rectangular, and non-geometric layouts.Richard Pillsbury, “The Urban Street Pattern as a Culture Indicator: Pennsylvania, 1682–1815”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 60, issue 3 (Sept. 1970), pp. 428-446. The town layouts may be determined and influenced by such factors as the original land survey, landforms, waterways, and long-distance travel routes. The principal economic activities of a community have also influenced settlement patterns. The national origins of the founders of the town do not show a correlation with the street patterns.
Plan features
As noted in the seminal work of Wilbur Zelinsky, a Pennsylvania Town is marked by rectilinear streets (bounding square or rectangular blocks), a central diamond, closely-spaced buildings, and streets named for trees.Wilbur Zelinsky, "The Pennsylvania Town: An Overdue Geographical Account", The Geographical Review, 67(2): 127-147 (April 1977). Other features include rowhouses built next to one another with no setbacks from the street, and usually only small stoops connecting the private space to the public.Ola Johansson and Michael Cornebise, "The Pennsylvania Town 40 Years Later: Preservation and Planning in a Changing Townscape", Middle States Geographer, 49:43-54 (2016). Zelinsky also noted that houses in the historic core of a town largely do not have porches, but later row houses, built farther from the city center, often do have porches. The result has been described as "exceptionally compact", with little space between buildings, or between buildings and sidewalks.LandStudies, Inc., Lititz Run Watershed: A Community Improving Its Water Quality, 1999, p.17. The houses have red brick facades; these are sometimes painted. Buildings in the core of the town are often built in the Georgian or Federal style; few actual colonial buildings remain, but the style persists, marked by a flat roofline, slender chimneys, a square footprint, and shutters.Morgan, W., The Abrams guide to American house styles. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004.Johansson and Cornebise, note 1.
When the towns were built, nearby clay deposits were used by brick manufacturers, who sold their products regionally, resulting in towns dominated by brick as a building material.Winpenny, T. R., Industrial progress and human welfare: The rise of the factory system in 19th century Lancaster. University Press of America, Washington, D.C. 1982, in Johansson and Cornebise. Differences in the quality of the brick had a significant effect on the appearance of towns As lower-quality brick began to deteriorate, it was often painted; the phenomenon of painted brick façades is also an aspect of Pennsylvania German influence.S. Stallings, Historic Preservation Specialist, City of Lancaster, interview, August 9, 2012, in Johansson and Cornebise, p. 47 Outside the buildings, the presence of brick sidewalks is another characteristic (Zelinsky thought this was an especially important factor), dating back to before streets were paved. Bricking extended to the streets in the early 20th Century, but brick streets have been almost entirely replaced with tarmac.
The towns also have an abundance of multi-purpose alleys containing residences and occasionally businesses (Zelinsky thought this factor was also particularly important). The combination of houses built all the way to the street, plus deep lots (to provide agricultural space), left back yards large enough to allow subdivision of house lots in some places as towns grew. As a result, alley houses are common in Pennsylvania Towns. The towns also have an abundance of shade trees (Zelinsky’s third especially important factor), particularly maples and sycamoresEncyclopedia Britannica, " United States: Settlement Patterns". some cities have shade tree commissions charged with the regulation of trees.
Another characteristic is a mixture of land uses from a history of small-scale industrialization. When the towns were built, people would need to live near their workplaces. In factory towns, this meant living near the factory, so factories were often located in close proximity to residential areas.Johansson and Cornebise, p. 48, and works cited therein. Furthermore, difficulties with transportation meant that retail establishments would need to be located walking distance from residential areas as well; the “corner store” and, to a lesser extent, the “corner bar” were staples of land use patterns. This mixed land use faded with the widespread implementation of conventional “modernist” zoning and its preference for land use separation, but the recent rise of mixed-use zoning has begun to reverse that trend.
These characteristics are not unique to Pennsylvania towns. It is their combination that makes the townscape so named.
Streets
The streets of a Pennsylvania Town are laid out in a rectilinear pattern, although there are often exceptions for particular streets (especially those leading to other towns), and the pattern may be lost in outlying areas of the town. The streets are typically aligned with the points of the compass, although the grid may be rotated or otherwise adjusted, often because of local geography (such as being aligned with a river). In some parts of a larger town, entire sections of the street grid may be rotated to a different alignment than that of the central town, such as to match the road to another town.
The names of the streets also follow certain patterns. Typically, one set of streets is numbered, while the perpendicular streets are not. Frequently, the cross streets are named for trees, following the Philadelphia pattern. In Philadelphia, the streets south of Market St. (originally High St.) were named for local timber trees, in order of the hardness of their wood: Chestnut, Walnut, Locust, Spruce, Pine, and Cedar (now South). The streets to the north were largely named for food-producers: Filbert, Cherry, Mulberry (now Arch), Sassafras (now Race), and Vine.Laura Turner Igoe, "Trees" The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2013; accessed 2021.03.07.Joseph A. Gambardello, "Are Philly’s streets named after trees ordered from hardwood to softwood?", The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 2019.Molly Webb, "Greene Countrie Towne Full of Streets Named After Trees", Curbed Philadelphia, May 8, 2013.
The trees whose names are used for the streets in a Pennsylvania Town may be indigenous to the region (as they are in Philadelphia), but the streets are not always named for local trees; in addition, the streets named for trees are not always parallel to one another: Lancaster’s Lime Street intersects both Lemon and Orange Streets.Dan Nephin, "Site of former Gulf at Lime, Lemon to reopen as gas station", Lancaster News-Press, Lancaster Online, Jan. 15, 2015.Jack Brubaker, "City streets named for kings, queens, nuts", Lancaster News-Press, Feb 8, 2011, updated Sep 12, 2013. As towns grew, the original vision for the streets and their names was often lost: one can see the patterns fade away in outlying districts of larger towns.
Diamond
At the historic center of the town, the streets part or widen to form a central square, often called a "diamond". This, too, is in keeping with the Philadelphia plan, which had not only a central square, but also four smaller satellite squares in a quincunx pattern. In smaller towns, usually only the central square is found. In a county seat, the courthouse is typically located at (or sometimes in) the diamond, but towns that have never been county seats may also have diamonds, which are typically put to public use, such as parks. Many squares were originally used to hold public markets.Pillsbury, R., "The Public or Market Square in Pennsylvania before 1820", Proceedings of the Pennsylvania Academy of Science, Vol. 41 (1967), pp. 116–18. Towns with “diamonds” include Ligonier, York, Lancaster, Reading, Gettysburg, and Carlisle.
There are a number of different types of diamonds.Lee S. Sobel, York County, Pennsylvania: A Region of Diamonds, Pedshed: Walkable Urban Design & Sustainable Placemaking; posted December 10, 2007. The Lancaster style diamond is marked by a central square at the intersection of two major streets. The corner lots of each of the four surrounding blocks are recessed, creating an open space in the center, around which traffic circulates. A formal space occupies the center of the street loop; this may be the site of the courthouse, a statue, or green space. While the titular Lancaster diamond has been altered significantly, the pattern may be seen in such towns as Gettysburg, Goldsboro, and Ligonier.
The York diamond has no open space between the intersecting streets, but the recessed corners of the adjacent blocks are open and may be treated as four separate squares. Commercial buildings may front the smaller squares. In addition to York, York diamonds may be found in Schaefferstown, Middletown, and Carlisle.
Lebanon diamonds are found in two sub-varieties (it is unusual to find two diamond layouts in one municipality). A Federal Street style diamond is an elongated Lancaster diamond in that it has a formal center and a cross street. It is formed by extending the setback from the cross street beyond the corner lots. Towns using this pattern had the courthouse in the center, flanked by two greens used for markets, although those land uses may have changed. Federal Street diamonds may be found in Millersburg, Marietta, and Manheim. Reading had a Federal Street style diamond, but it has been removed.
A Ninth Street diamond (another Lebanon form) has an elongated setback on one of the intersecting streets, but no formal center. It can be seen as a stretched York diamond. Ninth Street diamonds can be found in Fredericksburg and Jonestown, not far from Lebanon.
Streetscape