Running tour · Philadelphia

Station to the Woodlands

2.0 mi run

Open in Stride Stories

The stories on this route

1. Cira Centre

   Look at the silver glass tower beside the station, joined to it by a footbridge over Arch Street. That's the Cira Centre, 29 stories, designed by César Pelli. Two corners are cut away, so it looks different from every direction. One critic called it a "shape-shifter".

2. 30th Street Station

   Look at the long, columned front of 30th Street Station. It opened in 1933, replacing the old Broad Street station as the Pennsylvania Railroad's main station in Philadelphia.

3. ENIAC at the Moore School

   Look for the blue-and-gold state historical marker outside the Moore School Building. In 1943, secret work began here under the code name Project PX. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert designed a machine to calculate artillery firing tables for the Army. It was ENIAC.

4. College Hall

   Look at the long green front of College Hall, the oldest building on Penn's West Philadelphia campus. That green is serpentine stone. It went up between 1870 and 1872. The cartoonist Charles Addams studied at Penn in 1930 and 1931. Rumor has it this was a model for the Addams Family mansion.

5. Penn Museum

   Look at the brick building with its iron gates, glass mosaics and reflecting pool, and the round roof of the rotunda. This is the Penn Museum, founded in 1887 after a successful dig at Nippur, in today's Iraq. Architects from Penn's own faculty designed it. What stands is only about a third of their plan.

6. The Woodlands

   Look up the rise at the pale mansion with its columned portico. This was William Hamilton's house, rebuilt in the neoclassical style in the late 1780s. It's been called one of the greatest American domestic achievements of the eighteenth century.

Stories researched October 2026 · every fact checked against a source