Ad Disclosure
Show of Hands: Did You Know There’s a William Penn Statue at Welcome Park?
Published:
The National Parks Service wants to rehabilitate a park in Philadelphia, and its proposed plans include permanently removing a William Penn statue.
Welcome Park is located on the site of William Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House, in Old City.
The park was named “Welcome” after the ship that transported Penn to Philadelphia, and was completed in 1982.
Last week, the National Parks Service announced plans to rehabilitate and re-imagine the park “to provide a more welcoming, accurate, and inclusive experience for visitors.”
The William Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed as part of the plan, and not reinstalled.
The story goes on to say that they’re proposing an “expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia.”
The funny thing is that a lot of people were completely unaware that a William Penn statue even existed at this location. Were you? Be honest.
Welcome Park is kinda lame, if we’re being real. It’s diagonal from the Custom House and (former) City Tavern and has four trees, some benches, and a half-wall with writing. It was built in the 1980s and meant to be some sort of outdoor museum dedicated to Penn’s legacy.
The park could use a facelift for a variety of reasons, but basically what you have here is conservatives alleging that the Biden administration is trying to erase history because they’re America-hating “Communists” and all of that. Maybe that’s true, maybe not. We’ll let people fight it out on social media, though it is fair to wonder who asked for this. When did Welcome Park become problematic?
What’s most interesting to me is that Penn’s statue has been on top of City Hall for more than 100 years, so if the government was really looking to do some sinister shit, wouldn’t they dismantle that thing first and replace it with some contemporary liberal, like Whoopi Goldberg? Now that would generate some clicks!
What’s happening here is that they’re axing Billy Penn at ground level while he continues to look over the entire city. You could make a case that having two Penn statues in two different spots is redundant, but using words like “rehabilitate” is stupid and combative because all you’re doing is pissing people off while being hypocrites at the same time. If there’s some moral dilemma with Penn, then the other statue would also have to come down. Otherwise it’s just a half measure. Plus, the park is named after his ship, so you’d have to change that too, if the aforementioned reasons are the catalyst for all of this.
We’re not history majors at Crossing Broad, but one thing they taught us at Boyertown Junior High East is that Penn was one of the good ones. He was a Quaker and apparently treated the Native Americans well. I wasn’t alive to see it, so I don’t have any empirical evidence, but William Penn is generally regarded as a decent dude who was big into religious freedom. A big democracy guy. Did he have slaves? Apparently he did, but most of the founding fathers did, so we’ve gotta make a contemporary decision on whether we’re honoring these dudes or not. But let’s make it a real discussion, not some random “oh by the way we’re gonna remove this statue.” Let’s have some reasonable discourse about this. I’ll moderate the forum alongside Liz Magill and Claudine Gay.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com