Backstage at 1985 Live Aid in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

This iconic image was taken backstage at Live Aid on July 13, 1985, at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It features some of the biggest music stars of the era including: Keith Richards, Daryl Hall, John Oates, Ron Wood, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, Madonna and Bob Dylan.

Live Aid was a monumental dual-venue benefit concert (held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia) organized by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia. It was one of the largest broadcast events in history, viewed by an estimated 1.9 billion people across 150 countries.

The image captures a rare moment of many legendary artists gathered together, highlighting the incredible star power and collaborative spirit of the event. Tina Turner had an explosive performance with Mick Jagger during the concert, and Bob Dylan performed with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. Madonna also performed a set.

Women Garage Attendants at Atlantic Refining Company Garages, Philadelphia, 1943

Petroleum refining is one of the most dominant industries in South Philadelphia. Atlantic Refining Company began business in 1866 as a storage facility but quickly expanded operations to include refining as the possible uses of petroleum were discovered. By 1882, Atlantic Refining’s plant at Point Breeze, was one of the largest refineries in the United States; it employed 2,950 workers and producing over 100 million gallons of refined oil during that year. In 1891, Philadelphia was exporting 35% of all U.S. petroleum and the Atlantic Refinery was producing nearly 50% of the world’s illuminating fuel.

The refinery has been continuously modified over the years. Initially the Atlantic Refining Company produced gasoline, lubricating oils, waxes, solvents and other petroleum-based substances. A major restructuring occurred in 1971, when the plant began producing only gasoline, industrial fuels, and asphalt. Major components of the facility include a c.1958 hydro-cracker, a c.1979 fluid catalytic cracking unit, and a variety of environmental controls, such as de-sulfurization and sulphur recovery units.

Below are some photographs of women garage attendants taken by Jack Delano at Atlantic Company Garages in Philadelphia, 1943 for the Office of War Information.

Miss Frances Heisler, pump attendant at one of the Atlantic Refining Company garages in Philadelphia. She was formerly a clerk in the payroll department of the Curtis Publishing Co.

Miss Frances Heisler, a garage attendant at one of the Atlantic Refining Company garages. She was formerly a clerk in the payroll department of Curtis Publishing.

Miss Ruth Gusick, formerly a clerk in a drugstore, now works as a garage attendant at one of the Atlantic Refining Company service stations in Philadelphia.

Miss Natalie O'Donald, service-station attendant at the Atlantic Refining Company garages.

Miss Natalie O’Donald, attendant at the Atlantic Refining Company garages. A Gibson Girl in coveralls.

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In 1983, the Band Cinderella Made a Commercial for Pat’s Chili Dogs So They Could Get on MTV

In 1983, the band Cinderella made a commercial for a chili dog restaurant called Pat’s. In 30 seconds it combines wonderful local advertising with a snapshot of a band on the rise.

When the band Cinderella was still a rising force in the nascent hair metal scene, they starred in a local commercial for Pat’s. Located in the Philadelphia area, where Cinderella was also based at the time, the commercial seemed like natural synergy. The band could make some extra money and get some free advertising for their new album.

Pat’s on the other hand could attempt to attract all those hungry kids who were stumbling out of music clubs late at night. While the Cinderella Chili Dog commercial ran only locally on MTV in the area, it has since gone on to become a cult hit on the internet.

Pat’s Chili Dogs had two locations. The one at Route 420 and McDade Boulevard in Folsom, PA and a second on Route 291 in Lester, PA. Both locations were open 24 hours a day. Sadly Pat’s didn’t stay in business!

In an interview with Loudwire, Cinderella frontman Tom Keifer related the tale of how Cinderella came to make the ad: “In recent years, the commercial “Pat’s Chili Dogs” I did with my band Cinderella years ago has been surfacing on the internet quite a bit lately. And the way that came about was, that was right when early ’80s MTV was just starting to take off, and we were a young baby band kicking around in the clubs in the Philadelphia/Jersey area, and we wanted to be on MTV, and we sent our video, which was horrible, to like Basement Tapes or something like that. They wouldn’t play it, they wouldn’t touch us. So a local proprietor who owned a chili dog stand asked us to sing. He saw us in a club and he liked us. He said “would you do a rock ’n’ roll commercial for my place?” And he said “We’re gonna buy local TV advertising on MTV,” and the light went off, we were like “Well, we’ll be on MTV, then!” [laughs] Only locally, but that’s what it felt like to us, so we said “Sure, we’ll do it.” Plus we got free chili dogs any time we wanted.”

Asked if he had any memories that stand out from the commercial shoot, Keifer said: “Not really… I really don’t. I barely have any memory of it. We just kind of pulled up, and it was the first time we had done anything like that, and before I knew it, it was over.”

(via Retroist)

Audience After a Neil Young Concert, Philadelphia, 1973

A view from the stage at The Spectrum in Philadelphia after a Neil Young show in 1973. Neil Young chose a cropped and faded version for the Time Fades Away album cover.

The cover art for the album Time Fades Away by Neil Young.

(Photos by © Joel Bernstein)

The Centennial International Exhibition: The First Official World’s Fair to Be Held in the United States in 1876

The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World’s Fair to be held in the United States, was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 10 to November 10, 1876, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Officially named the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, it was held in Fairmount Park along the Schuylkill River on fairgrounds designed by Herman J. Schwarzmann. Nearly 10 million visitors attended the exposition, and 37 countries participated in it.

Here below is a set of amazing photos that shows the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Arms and Trophy Department, Centennial International Exhibition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1876

Art Gallery, Centennial International Exhibition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1876

Art Gallery, Centennial International Exhibition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1876

Art Gallery, Centennial International Exhibition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1876

Centennial International Exhibition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1876

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Philadelphia in the 1980s Through Fascinating Photos

Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States. It is the sixth-most-populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Pennsylvania, and the second-most populous city in the Northeastern United States, behind New York City. It is also the economic and cultural center of the greater Delaware Valley along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill rivers within the Northeast megalopolis.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Philadelphia became a major industrial center and a railroad hub. The Philadelphia area's many universities and colleges make it a top study destination, as the city has evolved into an educational and economic hub. The city is known for its arts, culture, cuisine, and colonial history. It is also a biotechnology hub.

Philadelphia is the home of many U.S. firsts, including the nation's first library (1731), hospital (1751), medical school (1765), national capital (1774), university (by some accounts) (1779), stock exchange (1790), zoo (1874), and business school (1881). It contains 67 National Historic Landmarks and the World Heritage Site of Independence Hall. The city became a member of the Organization of World Heritage Cities in 2015, as the first World Heritage City in the United States.

These fascinating photos were taken by Roy N. Weiner that show what Philadelphia looked like in the 1980s.

Philly girls, 1986

Credit, Philadelphia, 1982

Dead Head, Philadelphia, 1982

Estro, Philadelphia, 1982

Estro, Philadelphia, 1982

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Amazing Photos of 1970s Philadelphia Folk Festival

The Philadelphia Folk Festival is a folk music festival held annually at Old Pool Farm in Upper Salford, Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Philadelphia. The four-day festival, which is produced and run almost entirely by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Philadelphia Folksong Society, is claimed to be the oldest continually-run outdoor music festival in North America.

The event hosts contemporary and traditional artists in genres under the umbrella of Folk, including World/Fusion, Celtic, Singer/Songwriter, Folk Rock, Country, Klezmer, and Dance.

Gene Shay and folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein founded the festival, along with George Britton, Bob Seigel, David Baskin, Esther Halpern, and others. Shay has acted as Master of Ceremonies since its inception and Goldstein served as Program Director for the first 15 years.

Originally held on Wilson Farm in Paoli, Pennsylvania, each year the event hosts over 35,000 visitors and nearly 7,000 campers at the Old Pool Farm. The event presents over 75 hours of music with local, regional, and national talent on 8 stages.

These amazing photos from Nancy White that show people at the Philadelphia Folk Festival around 1973-74.

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Philadelphia in 1971 Through Amazing Black and White Photos

Philadelphia is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States. It is the sixth-most-populous city in the United States and the most populous city in the state of Pennsylvania. It is also the second-most populous city in the Northeastern United States, behind New York City. The city is also the economic and cultural center of the greater Delaware Valley along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill rivers within the Northeast megalopolis.

Philadelphia is one of the oldest municipalities in the United States. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became a major industrial center and a railroad hub. The city grew due to an influx of European immigrants, most of whom initially came from Ireland and Germany. In the early 20th century, Philadelphia became a prime destination for African Americans during the Great Migration after the Civil War. Puerto Ricans began moving to the city in large numbers in the period between World War I and II, and in even greater numbers in the post-war period.

The Philadelphia area’s many universities and colleges make it a top study destination. The city has more outdoor sculptures and murals than any other American city. Fairmount Park, when combined with the adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the same watershed, is one of the largest contiguous urban park areas in the United States.

Philadelphia is the home of many U.S. firsts, including the first library (1731), hospital (1751), medical school (1765), national capital (1774), First university in the United States (1779), stock exchange (1790), zoo (1874), and business school (1881). Philadelphia contains 67 National Historic Landmarks and the World Heritage Site of Independence Hall. The city became a member of the Organization of World Heritage Cities in 2015, as the first World Heritage City in the United States.

These amazing black and white photos were taken by Laurence Salzmann that show street scenes of Philadelphia in 1971.

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1923 Christie Monowheel, the Mother of All Monowheels

The product of the fertile imagination of a Professor E. J. Christie of Marion, Ohio, this gyroscopic unicycle was supposedly capable of speeds of up to 400 miles per hour, although at the time of an article from the April, 1923 issue of Popular Science, it had yet to be tested. To be fair, the inventor only claimed “a speed of at least 250 miles per hour, and possibly 400 miles per hour” though this is the sort of uncertainty that suggests he hadn’t a clue what he was about.

Professor E.J. Christie atop a version of his 14 foot monster monowheel in 1923, which may or may not have been tested. Note the smaller model.

The design had a centre wheel of 14-foot in diameter, and weighed 2400 pounds. The “gyro wheels” on each side of the driver weighed some 500 pounds each. The machine, which was reportedly “being constructed in Philadelphia” at the time, was to have been powered by a 250-horsepower airplane motor.

Here is the text of the Popular Science Monthly article:

Will Gyroscopic Wheel Shatter Speed Records?

DOWN the track of a motor speedway a wheel 14 feet high whirls at such a dizzy speed that racing automobiles traveling at top speed––115 miles an hour––seem almost to stand still. So fast does the giant wheel travel that the details of its design can scarcely be distinguished. This is a possibility prophesied by Prof. E. J. Christie, of Marion, Ohio, for an amazing gyroscopic unicycle of his invention, now being constructed in Philadelphia, Pa. The 2400-pound 14-foot model of the speed wheel is almost ready for a trial spin and Christie confidently predicts that it will develop a speed of at least 250, and possibly 400 miles an hour!

In design, the strange vehicle resembles a giant bicycle wheel with an exceptionally long hub, at the end of which supporting spokes are fastened. Attached to the axle, on each side of the center are 500-pound gyroscopes designed to rotate at a speed of 90 revolutions a minute––a speed sufficient to maintain equilibrium.

From April, 1923. Chrstie has numerous automotive patents in his name for inventions or improvements.

Suspended from the axle by a frame, the upper end of which supports the driver’s seat, is a 250-horsepower airplane motor, the power of which is transmitted to the axle through a friction clutch, three-speed transmission, and jackshaft. An additional chain drive in the center of the axle connects the engine transmission with the gyroscopes.

The machine is controlled and operated like an automobile from the operator’s seat immediately above the axle. Here the driver is saved from swinging about the axle by the steadying weight of the engine slung below.

“How can such a strange vehicle be turned?” you may ask.

This problem Professor Christie has solved in a unique way. By means of the steering wheel, he shifts the position of the two gyroscopic flywheels on the axle to the right or to the left. When the center of equilibrium is thus shifted, the unicyle immediately turns in its course, without tilting, the degree of turn depending upon the distance the gyroscopes are shifted. In other words, the farther the shift, the shorter the turn.

The wheel is supplied with a seven-inch rubber tire, the manufacture of which proved a problem in itself. Pressure resistance was found to be so great that several attempts were made before a strong enough tire was produced.

The new gyroscopic unicycle is not the first machine of its kind Professor Christie has produced, although it is by far the most pretentious. He first used a gyroscope to demonstrate the rotation and momentum of the earth.

Colossal Hand and Torch of the Statue of Liberty, on Display at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia

Originally designed as a lighthouse that would have stood at the mouth of the Suez Canal in Egypt, the Statue of Liberty took a meandering path to its ultimate destination in New York Harbor. After the Egyptian project collapsed, sculptor Frederic Bartholdi repurposed the idea for a U.S. market.

Financing the 22-story colossus through donations, he displayed the torch at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition – a celebration of the United State’s 100th Birthday in 1876. For 50 cents, attendees ascended a ladder to the balcony encircling the copper torch. The money earned through that and souvenir sales allowed him to finish the 225-ton statue.

(Library of Congress)

In the late 1860s, Bartholdi approached Isma’il Pasha, Khedive of Egypt, with a plan to build Progress or Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, a huge lighthouse in the form of an ancient Egyptian female fellah or peasant, robed and holding a torch aloft, at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal in Port Said.

Sketches and models were made of the proposed work, though it was never erected. There was a classical precedent for the Suez proposal, the Colossus of Rhodes: an ancient bronze statue of the Greek god of the sun, Helios. This statue is believed to have been over 100 feet (30 m) high, and it similarly stood at a harbor entrance and carried a light to guide ships. Both the khedive and Lesseps declined the proposed statue from Bartholdi, citing the expensive cost. The Port Said Lighthouse was built instead, by François Coignet in 1869.

These Found Photos of a Gay Wedding in Philadelphia From 1957 Offer a Mystery, Some History, and a Tribute to Heroes

Decades before gay marriage became legal anywhere in the US, same-sex couples were committing themselves to each other in front of friends and loved ones. Few records of these ceremonies existed - until now.

In 1957, a young man went to a photo shop on the corner of North Broad Street and Allegheny Avenue to have his wedding photos developed. The photographs captured the usual moments: the exchange of rings in front of witnesses, an officiant leading the ceremony, the first kiss, dancing, opening of gifts, cutting of the cake and more.

But the young man would never see them. That’s because the photos depict him in a commitment ceremony with another man, and unbeknownst to him, the store manager allegedly deemed these particular wedding photos to be inappropriate and refused to return the photos to the grooms.

The photos, though, lived on because the manager of the shop had another policy: Staff were allowed to do whatever they pleased with confiscated pictures. An employee held on to the photos, which her daughter discovered in her Cherry Hill home 60 years later, after she passed.

“My mother had a somewhat photographic memory for faces and retained these in the event the customers who dropped them off ever came back to the shop so that she could give them to the customers on the sly,” she wrote in a letter to the ONE Foundation, an LGBTQ archive in Los Angeles.

In 2013, she sold the photos on eBay to a donor who later gave the photographs to the ONE Archives in Los Angeles and the John J. Wilcox Jr. Archives in Philadelphia. Since then, the organizations have been looking for the grooms, their friends or family. In the photographs, the two men and their friends appear to be mostly in their twenties and thirties; if they are alive today, they would be in their eighties or nineties. Archivists have reached out to local business owners and elder LGBTQ Philadelphians. But so far, their efforts have been fruitless.

“It’s a needle in a haystack—there’s too many questions and not enough information about this photo collection,” said Michael Oliveira, an archivist at ONE. “While many people and families tend to stay put in the Delaware Valley area, we can speculate about where they were taken, who took the photos and so much more—and never arrive at an answer.”

Do you think you might recognize anyone in these photos? Or maybe you might know someone who might know someone? They request any tipsters to contact them through their website and Facebook page.

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The Original Tattooed Lady: Portraits of Irene Woodward aka “La Belle Irene” in the Late 19th and Early 20 Centuries

La Belle Irene was the stage name of Irene Woodward often refereed to as “The Original Tattooed Lady”. She was one of the first American women who decided to get completely tattooed, step onstage, and make a living from her art. Her public life is remembered –– she was incredibly famous in her lifetime, she worked for both big name sideshows and small, not well-remembered dime museums in the United States and Europe, traveling widely for most of her long career. She was immortalized in various wax museums and in posters and pictures.

Born Ida Levina Lisk on August 24, 1857 to a shoemaker and his wife, Ida grew up in a series of alley apartments in what is now Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood. This neighborhood, which includes Independence Hall, was redeveloped in the 1960s –– most of the dilapidated old homes and businesses, including the places were Ida lived as a child, were razed for modern structures.

She got out of Philadelphia, got herself completely tattooed, and transformed herself into Irene Woodward. She rewrote her history, transforming her miserable-sounding childhood into a tale of adventure that audiences loved. According to a booklet she sold as part of her act, The Facts Relating to Miss Irene Woodward, the Only Tattooed Lady, she grew up in the American West with her brother and father. In the booklet, Irene explained that her father, who had once been an English sailor, not a Philadelphia shoemaker, tattooed her to pass the time in the lonely cabin they shared. She was delighted by the tattooing and convinced her father to continue until nearly her entire body was covered. When her father died in an Indian raid in 1879, the hostile natives were fascinated by her tattoos and released both her and her brother from captivity unharmed. She gave herself a new identity and a new story, one that drew on popular themes of American dime novels –– the allure of the west, the conflicts settlers had with native populations, and the theme of captivity and escape –– all of those went in to constructing Ida’s new identity as Irene.

When Irene Woodward retired from life on the road in the early 1900s, however, she returned to her old haunts in Philadelphia. She and her husband George lived a quiet life in a neighborhood just north of where she grew up, another now transformed area that, these days, houses a freeway.

In 1915, at age 58, Irene was diagnosed with uterine cancer. A newspaper account reported her admission to the hospital in the fall of 1915, claiming that “the poison of the tattoo marks she had worn all over her body” was the cause of her illness. Irene Woodward was admitted to the Philadelphia General Hospital on Sept. 14, and by Oct. 9th, 1915, she was dead. She was buried in Monument Cemetery in Philadelphia on Oct. 13th, 1915.

(via Amelia K. Osterud's blog)