Elfreth's Alley

The Elfreth's Alley Museum is the ideal destination to further enrich your next visit to the city of Philadelphia. Located in the heart of Old City between Front and 2nd Streets just north of Arch, the Elfreth's Alley Museum is one of few landmarks dedicated to the everyday American.

The thirty-two buildings along Elfreth's Alley were built between the 1720s and 1830s, and today they reveal the fascinating stories of everyday life, the spaces that America's founders knew. You can learn the house-by-house story of the Alley's early residents through our guidebook, available online and in our Museum Shop.

Only houses 124 and 126 are open to the public. Elfreth's Alley hopes to add House 128 to the museum complex as an exhibition space dedicated to the city's 19th Century industrial culture with a media/education center to further enhance our programming. The other houses remain private homes where Philadelphia families have lived in the same spaces for 300 years. Alley residents open some of these homes every year, as part of the Fete Day and Deck the Alley celebrations. Below are several ways in which one may enrich their visit to Philadelphia's historic sites.

Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia

                       




Elfreth's Alley — popularly known as "Our nation’s oldest residential street" – dates back to the first days of the eighteenth century. Twenty years after William Penn founded Pennsylvania and established Philadelphia as its capital, the town had grown into a thriving, prosperous mercantile center on the banks of the Delaware River.

Link: http://www.elfrethsalley.org/history
                                                       
                                                                   
                                                                 
Bladen's Court 3
                  
           
                Bladen’s Court is an alley within an alley and original provided access to the backs of several properties that faced Front Street.  Sometime between 1749 and 1753 the owners of the Front Street properties sectioned off a 9 foot path along the back of their lots and shared the cost of paving the small alley.

Other Information:

Sometime between 1749 and 1753 the owners of the Front Street properties sectioned off a 9 foot path along the back of their lots and shared the cost of paving the small alley.  

Link: http://www.elfrethsalley.org/houses/bladens-court-3


             Elfreth's Alley Museum Shop


         Early American artisans and shopkeepers often lived and worked in the same structures. Families slept in the rooms on the second floors and third — or "garret" — level. The large rooms on their first floors housed busy shops, where passersby could glimpse shop goods inside the street-level windows.

Link: http://www.elfrethsalley.org/visiting/museum-shop