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You would probably appreciate the new book "Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City," by two of the three founders of the website and festival by that name ("Hidden City").
In the book, co-authors Nathaniel Popkin and Peter Woodall speak of what another author referred to as "the long 19th century" Philadelphia experienced. This period, judging from the rest of the chapter in which it appears, lasted until World War II or thereabouts. One could say that the apotheosis of this city's importance was the Centennial Exposition of 1876, America's first World's Fair. That fair left a mighty legacy to this city, including its art museum, originally housed in Memorial Hall, and its fairgrounds, what's now called West Fairmount Park. The article points out that several of this city's more unusual and distinctive cultural institutions, such as the Wagner Free Institute of Science, are remnants of that same "long 19th century."
Of course, the city's role as an industrial powerhouse continued up through World War II but went into decline surprisingly rapidly after that. That too could be a remnant of the long 19th century.
I do recall saying at one point that Philadelphia and Boston had similar trajectories, the only difference being that Boston deindustrialized earlier, around the Great Depression, when the textile mills all decamped en masse for the South. The folks who engineered Boston's revival got to work earlier as a result, in the 1960s.
Of course, there was a revival going on in Philadelphia even as it was deindustrializing: Penn Center, Society Hill. But I'd say the real revival began right around the time I moved here in 1983. The continued depopulation of the outlying districts at the time masked its significance.
I think that is what made such a large difference though is that Boston and New England as a whole started the deindustrialization process as early as 1920 in some areas with cities such as Lowell and Lawrence reaching their peak population in the 1920s. Even Boston posted a slight population decline in the 1940 census before recovering in 1950. Additionally the real industrial powerhouses in the region were all the smaller satellite cities while Boston was where the owners of those companies and the banking and shipping industry that supported them was located which put it in a better position as well.
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