Prim and proper Philadelphia has been rocked by the clash between excessive vice and social virtue since its citizens burned the city's biggest brothel in 1800. With tales of grave robbers in South Philadelphia and and harlots in Franklin Square, "Wicked Philadelphia"; reveals the shocking underbelly of the City of Brotherly Love. In one notorious scam, a washerwoman masqueraded as the fictional Spanish countess Anita de Bettencourt for two decades, bilking millions from victims and even fooling the government of Spain. From the 1843 media frenzy that ensued after an aristocrat abducted a young girl to a churchyard transformed into a brothel (complete with a carousel), local author Thomas H. Keels unearths Philadelphia's most scintillating scandals and corrupt characters in his rollicking history.

How does a landmark become, after just a few generations, a landfill? In Forgotten Philadelphia, Thomas Keels takes the reader through a lavishly illustrated journey through three centuries of Philadelphia's architecture: what was built; how the public perceived the value of certain buildings; and why those buildings were eventually demolished? Keels does not simply lament the loss of buildings. Instead, he argues that in some cases there were good reasons to demolish places like the Broad Street Station; while some people today see this as a loss on par with the destruction of New York's Penn Station, at the time its demolition was to many a symbolic liberation from political corruption. In writing that celebrates Philadelphia past without ever being sentimental, Keels describes a city that was always reinventing itself, filled with people who always had a very measured view of the worth and beauty of its public architecture.