8 Best Sights in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

These architecturally varied, quaint-looking 19th-century buildings—city icons built in Victorian Gothic, Gothic Revival, and Italianate styles—are home to the rowing clubs that make up the Schuylkill Navy, an association of boating clubs organized in 1858. These clubs host various races, including the Dad Vail Regatta and the Head of the Schuylkill. The view of the boathouses from the west side of the river is splendid—especially at night, when they're outlined with hundreds of small lights. Lloyd Hall, at 1 Boathouse Row, is a public recreation center with a gymnasium, bicycle rentals in season, and a café.

This handsome, patterned red-and-black brick building dating from 1770 was the headquarters of the Carpenters' Company, a guild founded to support carpenters, who were both builders and architects in this era, and to aid their families. In September 1774 the First Continental Congress convened here and addressed a declaration of rights and grievances to King George III. Today re-creations of Colonial settings include original Windsor chairs and candle sconces and displays of 18th-century carpentry tools. The Carpenters' Company still owns and operates the building.

Congress Hall was the meeting place of the U.S. Congress from 1790 to 1800, one of the most important decades in our nation's history. Here the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution; Alexander Hamilton's proposals for a mint and a national bank were enacted; and Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee became the first new states after the original colonies. On the first floor you can find the House of Representatives, where President John Adams was inaugurated in 1797. On the second floor is the Senate chamber, where in 1793 George Washington was inaugurated for his second term. Both chambers have been authentically restored.

In a second-floor room that he had rented from bricklayer Jacob Graff, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) drafted the Declaration of Independence in June 1776. The home was reconstructed for the Bicentennial celebration; the bedroom and parlor in which Jefferson lived that summer were re-created with period furnishings. The first floor has a Jefferson exhibition. The display on the Declaration of Independence shows some of the changes Jefferson made while writing it. You can see Jefferson's original version—which would have abolished slavery had the passage not been stricken by the committee that included Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

This was the house of worship for the Free "Fighting" Quakers, a group that broke away from the Society of Friends to support the cause against the British during the Revolutionary War. The building was designed in 1783 by Samuel Wetherill, one of the original leaders of the group, after they were disowned by their pacifist flock. Among the 100 members were Betsy Ross and Timothy Matlack, colonel in Washington's Army and assistant secretary of the Continental Congress. After the Free Quaker group dissolved, the building was used as a school, library, and warehouse. The meetinghouse, built in the Quaker plain style with a brick front and gable roof, has been carefully restored.

No tickets are required, but call the Independence National Historical Park to check on availability.

This 20th-century building is a reconstruction of Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia, the first public library in the colonies. The American Philosophical Society, one of the country's leading institutions for the study of science, has its library here. The vaults contain such treasures as a copy of the Declaration of Independence handwritten by Thomas Jefferson, William Penn's 1701 Charter of Privileges, and journals from the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803–06. The library's collection also includes first editions of Newton's Principia Mathematica, Franklin's Experiments and Observations, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The APS also offers a small, rotating exhibit of its rare books and manuscripts in the lobby of its first floor.

When Second Bank president Nicholas Biddle held a design competition for a new building, he required all architects to use the Greek style; William Strickland, one of the foremost architects of the 19th century, won. Built in 1824, the bank, with its Doric columns, was based on the design of the Parthenon and helped establish the popularity of Greek Revival architecture in the United States. The interior hall, though, was Roman, with a dramatic barrel-vault ceiling. Housed here are portraits of prominent Colonial Americans by noted artists such as Charles Willson Peale, William Rush, and Gilbert Stuart. Don't miss Peale's portraits of Jefferson and Lewis and Clark: the former is the only one that shows the third president with red hair, and the latter is the only known portrait of the famous explorers. The permanent exhibition, "The People of Independence," has a life-size wooden statue of George Washington by William Rush; a mural of Philadelphia in the 1830s by John A. Woodside Jr.; and the only known likeness of William Floyd, a lesser-known signer of the Declaration of Independence.