" Philadelphia was a cosmopolitan city, praised by a highborn British visitor as “one of the wonders of the world,” “the first town in America,” and one that “bids fair to rival almost any in Europe.” 27 Larger than either New York or Boston, it supported ten newspapers and thirty bookshops. Largely through the civic imagination of Benjamin Franklin, it boasted an astounding panoply of cultural and civic institutions, including two theaters, a subscription library, a volunteer fire company, and a hospital. As "

― Ron Chernow , Alexander Hamilton