Independence Hall

Independence Hall was built as the Pennsylvania State House in the 1730s and was never intended to be a national landmark — it was a colonial legislature, a working government building. What happened inside it between 1775 and 1787 made it something else entirely. The Second Continental Congress met here and voted for independence. The Declaration of Independence was adopted and signed in its east room. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 met in the same chamber and produced the document that still governs the United States. In the span of a dozen years, a mid-sized colonial building in Philadelphia became the birthplace of the American republic.

The Assembly Room on the ground floor is where both documents were debated and signed. It is a modest space — not a cathedral, not a palace — with plain wooden furniture and tall windows that let in the Pennsylvania summer heat. The delegates who sweated through the Philadelphia summer of 1787 were doing so in a room they had already invested with enormous symbolic weight. George Washington presided from a high-backed chair whose carved sun prompted Benjamin Franklin's famous observation, at the convention's close, that he had wondered whether the sun was rising or setting. He now believed it was rising.

Independence Hall survived the Revolution, the Civil War, and the industrial transformation of Philadelphia, though not always without threat. The Liberty Bell hung in its steeple until the weight cracked the tower; it was moved to a nearby pavilion and eventually its own museum directly across the street. The building was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 — one of the first American sites so recognized — on the grounds that the ideas debated inside it had shaped the political development of much of the world. The argument is not exaggerated.