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Weird But True

WHY WEST PHILLY ARCHITECTURE GIVES US THE CREEPS Among the trivia that all prospective students learn on their official tour of Penn is that College Hall was the inspiration for the mansion that houses the Addams family, the “creepy and kooky” clan created by renowned cartoonist and Penn alum Charles Addams.

by INNA LIFSHIN

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

“C’mere, this is how it happened,” began Joe Kelly, bartender at Smokey Joe’s since 1962. He leaned down close to the bar, about to recall one of the establishment’s many legendary tales. This one involved former President Harry S.

by MAXINE MENDOZA

From Campus to Couture

Despite a looming paper deadline and an early morning lecture, Ethan Lipsitz, then a Penn sophomore, threaded the eye of his sewing machine and set off to work on a navy cotton hoodie.

by MAGGIE RUSCH

Philly Via Baghdad

It was a late August afternoon in Iraq's sweltering desert when James Kania, a Fire Direction Control Specialist in Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry Division, decided not to shoot.

by JESSICA GOLD HARALSON

140 Years of Solitude

Pennsylvania miscreants of the 18th century could expect to serve out their sentences in overcrowded, disease-ridden prisons, typically awaiting either public humiliation or public execution.

by CHIP KRACHMER

Honest To Blog: Exercise Your Right To Post

“Think drama is just for your girlfriends? Think again — because Election ‘08 just got very dramatic!” So wrote College junior and DP staffer Sara Himeles on Seventeen.com’s Electionista blog in a late September post, referring to John McCain’s controversial announcement to postpone the first presidential debate.

by LAURA MANDEL

Hurrah To The Wed And The Blue

Browsing for a necklace to match her wedding dress two years ago, Natalie Kelly, then a College sophomore, wandered through the packed stalls of Locust Walk during Family Weekend, she recalls. “My dress is taffeta,” Kelly told a jewelry seller, craning to see what she had to offer.

by ,

Getting Frank With Franklin

Ralph Archbold is heavyset, wears wire-rimmed bifocals, walks with a cane and spends the majority of his days dressed in a ruffled shirt, brass-buttoned coat, bloomers and buckled shoes.

by SAMUEL DANGREMOND

Forming A More Perfect Union

The biting winter winds of January 1896 whipped across campus, inaugurating the New Year. Penn, in the freezing cold, unveiled a new building that straddled the north-south view of College Hall and the Quad.

by ALISSA EISENBERG

The Sweet Taste of Success

It all started with a boy on Beige Block who liked to bake. As a junior at Penn in 2003, Seth Berkowitz found himself traveling back and forth to see his girlfriend in Boston on weekends with nothing to occupy him during the long solo weekdays.

by ALLISON STADD

The View From The Top

It's two weeks into the semester, and you're a freshman still studying a now-faded campus map in a desperate attempt to find the way from the Quad to DRL C12 for that 9 a.m.

by 34TH STREET

Bottoms-Down

Front lawns littered with red Solo cups and crushed beer cans. Trash cans brimming with frat party flyers and drained bottles.

by ALLISON STADD

Knowledge Is Power

At the KIPP Philadelphia Charter School on 27th and North Broad Streets, the eighth grade English room is named for Penn, the alma mater of its teacher, Elizabeth O'Flanagan, C'97.

by INNA LIFSHIN

History Through Headstones

Mary died on December 7, 1912, still in love with her first husband, Thomas. Though she had remarried by this time, she relayed specific instructions while lying on her deathbed: her body was to be buried alongside her second husband, but her heart was to be removed and interred next to Thomas at another cemetery.

by TALI YAHALOM

Best of Penn 2008

You party here, you sleep (around) here, you study here (sometimes). And a lot of you voted for Best of Penn 2008 - in fact, enough of you voted to re-elect someone to the UA, and then some.

by 34TH STREET

Wheels of Change

Situated near Harrison, Harnwell and Rodin College Houses, the neo-Gothic fa‡ade of St. Mary's Episcopal Church at 3916 Locust Walk looks conspicuously out of place.

by JAMES YU

A Turn-of-the-Century Soda Fountain Whips Up Crowds

The small shop stands beyond the looming shadows of turquoise-glass skyscrapers, sheltered in the anachronistic Old City Philadelphia that preserves an America we only recognize as novelty - an America paved with cobblestone and filled with the faint aroma of manure from horse and buggies circling Independence Mall.

by ERIC KARLAN

A Quarter Century In The Queer

As an undergraduate at Penn in the early 1980s, Susan Miller used to stroll down Locust Walk nearly every day, trekking over the bridge and passing the row of historic fraternity houses.

by ALISSA EISENBERG

Love In The Time Of Facebook

The story broke just before lunch one Thursday afternoon this past October. Gawker, the popular Manhattan media blog, had uncovered someone so heinous - or as they put it, a "mindbogglingly douchey douchebag"- that they dubbed him "The Worst Person in the World." Within hours, John Fitzgerald Page's crime had been disseminated so widely and grown to such heights of infamy that he was being harassed, ridiculed and judged by millions of strangers hailing from the farthest reaches of the Internet.

by MEREDITH ASKA MCBRIDE

Notes On A Scandal

From pedophilia to drug dealing, Street looks back at Penn's top 10 most scandalous moments of the past 20 years. Perhaps 'Hippopotami' would have been better? The Incident (with a capital I) of 1993, that garnered nothing of consequence but a lot of media hoopla (and a personal call from Jesse Jackson), innocently began with then-freshman Eden Jacobowitz slaving over an English assignment in his dorm.

by 34TH STREET

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