When Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820) arrived in cosmopolitan Philadelphia in 1798, the city had been the capital of the “new Republic” of the United States for eight years. By introducing Philadelphians to Grecian-influenced architecture with his Bank of Pennsylvania, completed in 1801, he ushered in a new style, already transcendent in Europe, that would come to dominate American design in the first half of the nineteenth century. Latrobe was to help make Philadelphia what, in 1811, he predicted it would become; “the Athens of the Western world.”1 Latrobe, a London-trained architect, was finely attuned to the broad interest in ancient cultures that had swept Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. He understood the connection, already fostered in America by Thomas Jefferson, between the rich architectural heritage of the Greek and Roman democracies and their natural successor flourishing on the banks of the Delaware.
