Curse of Billy Penn
Philadelphia sports curse
The Curse of Billy Penn (1987–2008) was a sports-related curse, urban legend, and popular explanation for the failure of major Philadelphia professional sports teams to win championships following the March 1987 construction of the One Liberty Place skyscraper, which exceeded the height of William Penn's statue atop Philadelphia City Hall. For decades prior to the construction of One Liberty Place, there had been a gentlemen's agreement in place to ensure that no building in Philadelphia would be permitted to be higher than the William Penn statue atop Philadelphia City Hall. This agreement ended with the construction of One Liberty Place in 1987, at which point the curse ostensibly began.
The curse ended on October 29, 2008, when the Philadelphia Phillies won the 2008 World Series, a year and four months after a statuette of the William Penn figure atop City Hall was affixed to the final beam during the June 2007 topping-off of the Comcast Center, which made it the highest building structure in the city at the time.
Origins
Atop Philadelphia City Hall stands a statue of William Penn, the city founder and original proprietor of the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania. For decades, a "gentlemen's agreement" stated that the Philadelphia Art Commission would approve no building in the city which would rise above this statue. This ended in March 1987, when a modern steel-and-glass skyscraper, One Liberty Place, opened three blocks away. One Liberty Place is taller than City Hall by 397 feet (121 m), rising 945 feet (288 m) in height compared to the height of Penn's hat on City Hall, 547 feet (167 m). Its sister skyscraper, Two Liberty Place, at 848 ft (258 m), followed in 1990.
Philadelphia sports teams had previously enjoyed a run of success in the years prior to the construction and opening of One Liberty Place.
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