Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia's Row-Grid Parishes: William Penn's 1683 Plan and the 1,227 Churches Fitted Into It

A 1683 street grid and a 1701 charter of religious tolerance set the envelope that every Philadelphia parish after 1790 had to fit.

March 20, 2026 4 minute read Churches List editorial desk

Illustration of a narrow-front brick Philadelphia row-house church on a cobblestone alley at dawn, stipple ink with sepia wash.

Philadelphia holds 1,227 parishes inside the city limits, on a 1683 grid laid out by William Penn that predated every other American city plan except New Amsterdam's. The grid's narrow row-house lots determined what every later parish could look like.

Philadelphia holds 1,227 parishes inside its city limits, a count shaped by three forces that set very early: William Penn's 1683 street grid, the 1701 Charter of Privileges that made Pennsylvania the first American colony to guarantee Roman Catholic worship, and the 1820s row-house building boom that determined how much a neighbourhood could fit. The parishes that survived to the present sit mostly in small buildings on narrow lots because that is what Penn's grid allowed.

1,227Parishes inside Philadelphia

1683Year of Penn's street grid (the Greene Country Towne plan)

1733Founding of Old St. Joseph's, the oldest Philadelphia Catholic parish

Penn's grid and the row-house parish footprint

Penn's 1683 plan laid out Philadelphia on a rectangular street grid with four squares and a central town square. Building lots were narrow (typically 16 to 20 feet wide) and long. Churches built after 1790 had to fit that envelope, which is why Philadelphia's older parishes tend to be tall and deep rather than broad. Mother Bethel AME, Old St. Joseph's, Old St. Mary's, and the original Christ Church building all share this plan: a narrow front facing the street, a long nave, and a small rear yard. The plan persists in Center City Catholic and Protestant parishes alike.

Mother Bethel AME (1794): the oldest African Methodist Episcopal parish in the country

Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church at 419 South 6th Street is the mother church of the entire AME denomination. Founded by Richard Allen in 1794 as an independent Black Methodist congregation after Allen's protest against segregated seating at Philadelphia's St. George's Methodist Church, Mother Bethel is the oldest continuously-operated African-American parish in the United States. The present Romanesque building dates to 1889 and stands on the same plot of ground as the original 1794 blacksmith shop Allen converted for worship.

The St. John Neumann National Shrine at 5th and Girard

The National Shrine of St. John Neumann at 1019 North 5th Street holds the remains of the fourth bishop of Philadelphia, canonized in 1977. Neumann served the Philadelphia diocese from 1852 to 1860, the decade in which the Catholic parish network inside the city tripled. He founded 80 parishes and the first American Catholic diocesan school system, much of which survives in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's present school network.

The Calvary Chapel Philadelphia outlier on North Broad Street

Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia at 13500 Philmont Avenue is not a grid-era parish. The congregation sits in the Far Northeast, outside Penn's original plan, and its 3,500-seat auditorium was built in 1999. Calvary Chapel's inclusion here is instructive: the largest weekly attendance figures in Philadelphia now belong to non-denominational parishes outside the historical grid, not to the center-city mainline churches the grid was built to hold.

Old St. Joseph's (1733) and the 1701 Catholic exception

Pennsylvania was the only American colony that permitted open Roman Catholic worship through the eighteenth century, a legacy of Penn's 1701 Charter of Privileges. Old St. Joseph's Church at 321 Willings Alley, founded in 1733, was therefore the only publicly-operating Catholic parish in the British Atlantic colonies at its opening. The present 1838 building sits at the back of a walled courtyard off a narrow alley, a plan that reflects the Penn-era Catholic practice of keeping the church discreet even when legally permitted. Old St. Joseph's is typically grouped with the four oldest surviving American Catholic parish buildings, along with Saint Peter's in New York, Saint Mary's in Alexandria, and the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore.

Resurrection and Holy Innocents: the Kensington and Port Richmond ethnic parishes

Resurrection of Our Lord Church in Kensington and Holy Innocents Church in Port Richmond are representative of the 1880–1920 Polish and Italian parish wave that filled Philadelphia's near-Northeast mill district. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia at its 1950 peak had 268 parishes inside the city. The present figure is closer to 150 after the 2013 consolidation program that merged 40 parishes in a single year. Resurrection and Holy Innocents survived both waves and still offer Sunday Mass.

Saint John the Evangelist on 13th Street

Saint John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church at 21 South 13th Street is the Philadelphia Archdiocese's Center City parish. Founded in 1830 and rebuilt in 1845 after the nativist riots of 1844 damaged the original building, Saint John's sits three blocks from the Comcast Center. The parish retained its center-city Mass schedule through the 2013 consolidations and remains the weekday Mass anchor for Catholic professionals working in the Philadelphia financial district.

Philadelphia's 1,227 parishes sit on a 1683 grid that predates every other American city's street plan except New Amsterdam's. The grid's narrow lots determined what a nineteenth-century parish could look like, and most of the parishes that survived did so in buildings that fit those lots.