17th Century

When William Penn and his contemporaries were just settling this area, September's arrival meant the harvesting of crops and the annual Manor Fair celebration - a teeming marketplace and festival of live entertainment, crafts displays and hearthside cooking. Folks came by foot, horse and ox-drawn cart to buy, trade, sell, seek employment and even hire out indentured servants. The 17th-century tradition comes to life this weekend as Pennsbury Manor re-creates a rustic colonial market fair on the site where Penn once made his home.

When the first stone was laid for Sellers Hall in 1682, there was no Upper Darby, Philadelphia was largely an imaginary place, and Samuel Sellers was living in a cave near what is now Garrett Road in Delaware County. The house was completed a year or so later, Sellers moved in with his new bride, and the couple launched what would become a remarkable multigenerational engineering clan that ultimately tooled the machines driving America's industrial revolution. Sellers family members were founders and leaders of the American Philosophical Society and the Franklin Institute.

Thomas Wynne is best remembered as William Penn's close friend, personal physician and fellow passenger aboard the ship Welcome en route to America. Wynne served as first speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and he gave his name to Wynnewood and Wynnefield. Almost forgotten is Thomas Wynne's house. What a shame. Actually, Thomas Wynne never lived in Wynnewood, but some of his descendants settled there. They called their estate "Wynne Wood" in his honor, and the name was adopted for the nearest stop on the railroad's Main Line.

Worn ceramic shards from bowls and tea cups. Pieces of a metal bucket. The neck of a wine bottle. Bones of cows, pigs, sheep, goats and chickens - some still bearing the tiny cuts of someone's dinner knife long ago. They're clues left by the once-thriving and now-vanished river port of Raritan Landing - historic residue that is helping archeologists and historians piece together life on the Raritan River more than two centuries ago. ...

By presenting "a male point of view of male-female relationships," Carlyle Brown concedes that his play, The Pool Room, is on "a sort of dangerous terra firma" as far as women are concerned. He said women seeing the play, which opened yesterday as Freedom Theatre's first production of the season, may be surprised and disturbed by some of the things said by the two male characters, old friends who play pool and talk about their lives and their women. "I think they'll have a sense that they're flies on the wall.

The historic Zook House rolls slowly off to a new site in Exton, 200 yards from where it has been since the 17th century. The move, performed by a Kentucky firm, will permit Exton Square Mall to expand.

James and Helen Newell of Upper Gwynedd demonstrate lawn bowling, as it would have been played in the 17th century. The demonstration, which was given April 17 at Pennsbury Manor, was part of Bucks Fever '93, a celebration of the county's history and visual and performing arts. Events will run through June 14.

A reward is being offered for information leading to the recovery of about 50 antiques stolen from Pennsbury Manor last week. Rod Snyder, of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, refused to say how much the reward is for antiques and other items taken Tuesday night. Snyder also declined to place a value on the items. "We have been advised by the authorities not to designate an amount," Snyder said. Antiques dealers, artifact collectors and merchants are being asked by authorities to keep their eyes open for the items.

In the early 19th century, when there was little in the way of popular recreation, Barbadoes Island in the Schuylkill at Norristown passed as a resort of sorts. Scrapbooks and maps owned by the Historical Society of Montgomery County show that a small park was established at the north end of the 90-acre island in the first decade of that century. Although access to the island was by ferryboat only, horse racing and militia parades were held regularly during the summer months before 1820.

The last Friday afternoon in June is not the best time for an antiques auction in New York. Prices never seem to be as high in June, when the season is winding down, as in January, when the sales are in full stride. Consignors know this, making it difficult for New York auctioneers to put together an exciting summer sale. Nevertheless, Sotheby's was able to bring together some interesting items for an Americana sale June 26, and none of the major players stayed away. A pair of andirons, the earliest-dated American quilt, a pair of carousel roosters and two pieces of 17th-century furniture were the stars of the sale.

After extensive renovations, the Philadelphia History Museum, at 15 S. Seventh St., has reopened and among the exhibitions is "Face to Facebook," a look at how Philadelphians have pictured themselves from the 17th century to now. Match up the notable Philadelphian with his or her portrait. To learn more about the museum, visit www.philadelphiahistory.org or call 215-685-4830. Answers below. 1. William Penn. 2. Harriet Lee Smith. 3. Charles Willson Peale. 4. George Washington.

Michael Ogborn's new musical Tulipomania , commissioned by the Arden Theatre, has been through six years of development, several scripts, plus the addition and eventual subtraction of playwright Michael Hollinger ( Opu s Ghost-Writer ). Its story, pegged to the 17th-century Dutch tulip craze, remains a topical match for any number of parallels: subprime mortgage crisis, real estate bubble, Facebook IPO. No stranger to the Arden, Ogborn premiered two other musicals there - Baby Case and Cafe Puttanesca - both, like Tulipomania , directed by the company's artistic director, Terry Nolen.

On an otherwise unremarkable day about a decade ago, Lloyd DeWitt found himself poking around in the storage vaults of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Recently hired as assistant curator for the John G. Johnson Collection, DeWitt was seeking a deeper familiarity with the breadth of the collection, bequeathed to the museum in 1917. Among the paintings packed away in the darkness was a small head of Christ painted on wood and attributed by a stream of scholars to Rembrandt's workshop, but not to the great 17th-century master himself.

Some music is born on the cutting edge - and stays there, no matter how many centuries pass. That's one reason the seemingly unwieldy but ever-fascinating Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi is having performances in heady succession all over the world (including Sunday in Philadelphia) but also why it needed this 400th anniversary of its publication to make them happen. The music's eternal singularity has often attracted champions well outside early-music circles, from composer Osvaldo Golijov to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, encouraging performers to work through the challenges with a frequency of performances that increased the piece's visibility in ways that could barely be imagined 30 years ago. Nonetheless, there's still so little agreement over what the piece is and what it needs that the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia's collaboration with the Renaissance band Piffaro at 4 p.m. Sunday at First Baptist Church will sound quite different from a similar effort five years ago. The chorus of 90 in 2005 is down to 40 in 2010, allowing the kind of hairpin flexibility that makes this quickly shifting music more immediate to modern audiences.

The auction schedule for May will open next week with two major collections: one from a source that is anonymous, the other from one that was notorious - plus a third sale featuring a Norman Rockwell original. The collection offered by the anonymous source consists of 40 lots of 18th-century English furniture that will be featured by Freeman's at its two-day sale of English and continental furniture, silver, and decorative arts at the gallery at 1808 Chestnut St. Amassed over the last 30 years by the consignor, identified in the auction catalog as a Virginia gentleman and a "respected leader in the field of academic economics and engineering," they will be offered at the first session beginning at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

Breaking all Ten Commandments is a tall order, not to mention a lot of work. But that apparently could be accomplished in 17th-century Spain, where sacred and profane, absurd and profound, were potential bedfellows, as the weekend's concerts by the Renaissance band Piffaro suggested. Titled "Pomp, Piety, and Passion," the program tried to re-create musical theater of 17th-century Spain with vocal and instrumental pieces grouped roughly around a narrative about a woman who arrives at a Catholic confessional to report her rampant commandment breaking with her lover - with ensuing accounts as to how that happened.

Seven years ago, when Paul Kimport was looking for a house, his requirements were few: It had to be cheap and near the Standard Tap, the pub that he co-owns in Northern Liberties. Kimport settled a few blocks north, across Girard Avenue, in Fishtown, a neighborhood that got its name from its shad-fishing roots in the 18th century. Yet by the early 21st century, Fishtown had come to mean shut-down factories, a poorer working-class population, and continual news reports of petty crime and fires.

When the first stone was laid for Sellers Hall in 1682, there was no Upper Darby, Philadelphia was largely an imaginary place, and Samuel Sellers was living in a cave near what is now Garrett Road in Delaware County. The house was completed a year or so later, Sellers moved in with his new bride, and the couple launched what would become a remarkable multigenerational engineering clan that ultimately tooled the machines driving America's industrial revolution. Sellers family members were founders and leaders of the American Philosophical Society and the Franklin Institute.

THE extensive campaign in the media and elsewhere to embrace what has been the mantra of the waterfront "Vision" of Harris Steinberg and PennPraxis - "Grid is good" - misses the mark. Invoking the name of William Penn to justify an effort to put our most important development resource in suspended animation is bad history and bad planning. Before we superimpose on more than 1,100 waterfront acres a city grid that is neither Penn's plan nor grounded in reality, let's pause to consider the consequences.

Choreographer Lisa Kraus isn't worried about selling lots of tickets for the next chapter of "The Partita Project. " Not because she doesn't want people to see it, but because only a lucky 15 or so can attend each of the six performances this weekend at the Mount Pleasant mansion in Fairmount Park, the latest venue of her two-year-old traveling dance-theater "installation. " Previously, "The Partita Project" has been performed, in various forms, at such locations as colleges and cultural centers.