ThirstyFish

Artist: Michael Webb, 1992


Please read the two posts introducing the Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program and The Mural Mile before you follow the photo tour. You can also begin the tour with the First Mural.

This is a section from the multiple wall mural representing various professions that helped build Philadelphia. Most of the painted sculpture figures in the mural are images of actual sculptures found on the Philadelphia City Hall building. The mural was commissioned in 1997 by the renown Philadelphia trial lawyer James Beasley, Sr.

With over 3500 murals, more than any city in the world, the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is considered a success by many. Many prominent people, such as James Beasley, Sr. have supported the program and murals have become an attraction for many visitors. However, some elite neighborhoods in the city, such as Rittenhouse Square have held the position of "not in my neighborhood". Recently, the Mural Arts Program withdrew a proposal for a mural about justice due to resistance from some Rittenhouse residents.

While some Rittenhouse residents were allegedly "conveying the idea that murals belonged in less affluent neighborhoods", the person that gave their neighborhood his name, David Rittenhouse, a renowned astronomer, inventor and mathematician, was admired by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams for linking astronomy and the structure of nature to the rights of man, liberty and self-government and for his denouncement of slavery.