January, 1855 the principal attraction of a show at 13th Street and Market Streets, a grizzly bear, escaped from his cage and rampaged the streets for several hours. His victims included a horse, a mule, and finally a side of beef hanging in a butcher's shop. The bear was held at bay by local businessman with pitchforks until his owner was able to calm him down and lead him back to the theater by a rope. You can view hundreds of animals in complete safety at The Philadelphia Zoo, America's first (3400 Girard Ave., Philadelphia, 215-243-1100).

In a house at 239 Arch Street, Betsy Ross fashioned the first American flag. Right? nearly a full century after the alleged event, William J. Canby, grandson of Elizabeth Claypool Ross, adressed the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on the flag's origins. His authority, Aunt Clarissa S. Wilson , was Betsy Ross's sister. The proud anecdote, passes down through the family, had somehow escaped generations of Revolutionary War historians and anecdote collectors. According to the family, a committee of the Continental Congress had called upon the flag maker-to-be at her upholstery shop, on Arch Street somewhere between Second and Third Streets. After examining a sketch, Ross suggested that five pointed starts would be more attractive than those with six points. Would they cost more, the committee inquired? "Nothing could be easier," replied Ross, as she deftly folded a piece of paper and with a snip of her scissors displayed the result.

August 6, 1903, the most disastrous day in Philadelphia spectator sports. In the top of the fourth inning of the second game of a double header at the Baker Bowl (Phillies vs. Boston Braves), fans hear a brawl on the street outside. Hundreds rush to the top of the stands, and their collective weight cracks rotten timbers. The stadium collapses to the street, killing 12 and injuring 232.

October 3, 1924, the first game of the first "Colored World" is played at the Baker Bowl before a capacity crowd of 18,500 the Kansas City Monarchs beat the Philadelphia Hillsdale team, and KC goes on to capture the series.

Click here for lots of Fun Facts about the Philadelphia Phillies.

On August 11, 1994, a Phildelphian made interactive networking history. Phil Brandenberger logged on to a system called Net Market Company, based in Nashua, New Hampshire, and ordered a compact disk. He also provided his Visa credit card number (using a secret code), thereby completing the first-ever retail transaction on the internet that used data encryption to guarantee privacy.

How Does the Academy of Music clean its giant chandelier? Every year in September on the day after Labor Day, the five-ton chandelier with 274 lights and thousands of crystals drifts gently down from 90 feet to hover above the audience's seats. This annual motorized journey is made under the watchful eye of chief electrician Ralph E. Amadie. For the next four days, crystals, and hardware are cleaned. What special solution is used on this sparkling 1857 jewel? "It's a secret, " said Amadie. "No, I'm just teasing," he added. "It's ammonia and water. We've tried other stuff but it just smears it up. The key however, is to dry everything with a cloth."

Click here for Fun Facts about Philadelphia's rich jazz heritage.

December 13, 1766 two dozen dog owners of Philadelphia and Glouster Counties formed the first fox-hunting club in America.

If you can't come visit this week, rent one or all of these films and see a bit of our part of the world... Rocky, Blow Out, Trading Places, Witness, Philadelphia, Fighting Back, Birdy, Mannequin, Stealing Home, I Don't Buy Kisses Anymore, The "In" Crowd, Clean And Sober, Eddied and the Cruisers, Dressed To Kill, The Blob, Twelve Monkeys, The Philadelphia Story.

For the site of his giant clothespin, the sculpture installed west of City Hall in 1976, Claes Oldenberg originally proposed a 45-foot-long screw.

If you dug straight down from Philadelphia to the other side of the globe you would end up in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

The first automobile owner in Philadelphia is said to have been a man named Jules Junker.

Noted lawyer Nichols Waln (1742-1813) saw a piece of paper over a broken window. He walked up, jammed the end of his walking stick through, and shouted to the surprised woman seated within the house, "Sham pane and no glass." On his deathbed, Waln was reported to have quipped, "can't die for the life of me."

Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra collaborated with Walt Disney in the making of the 1940 animated film Fantasia. The orchestra recorded the score in the Academy of Music and later appeared in the film, which managed a handshake between Stokowski and Mickey Mouse.

Stokowski set out to prove that the Philadelphia Orchestra was as worthy a musical organization as any in the world. In 1916, Stokowski led more than a thousand musicians and singers in the American premiere of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony. This composition demands an augmented orchestra, eight soloists, and three separate choruses, one of them all children.

One of the great operas of the 20th century, Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly, was based on a short story by a Philadelphian John Luther Long. When the opera premiered in Philadelphia in 1907, Puccini and Long were both in the audience.

In 1937, the Philadelphia Museum of Art purchased Paul Cezanne's "The Bathers" for the record price of $110,000. One newspaper cartoonist depicted William Penn on City Hall holding out the canvas and saying: "Look it! I bought you a pretty picture." Forty thousand homes in Philadelphia then lacked bathtubs.

In 1956, Richardson Dilworth's first year in office, the new aristocratic mayor took his wife on their annual cruise. Forty-five miles off Nantucket, the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish Stockholm. Amidst chaos and tears, and a disaster that claimed 50 lives, the mayor helped his wife on to a lifeboat and stayed aboard the sinking ship, offering aid until the final lifeboat was lowered. When Dilworth returned home he received a hero's welcome and press coverage far more intense than during his recent campaign.

Center Square, site of City Hall, is not where William Penn's surveyor, Thomas Holme, intended it to be. Hampered by dense wood and swampy terrain, Holme thought he placed the square at the watershed dividing the two rivers. Later surveyors corrected the error and moved the square. What occupies Holme's original square today? The Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Architect Frank Furness liked patterns in red so much he had shirts made of red-checkered cloth. You can see the Furness Library at the School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, on 34th and Walnut Streets, Built 1888. This is Furness's most distinctive major work, recently restored to its original red-brick Gothic Revival brilliance.

How did Anthony Klinken get away with target practice on Market Street? The early 18th century Germantown hunter "never went to Philadelphia without taking his gun with him" and "never came home without several geese and ducks which he had killed in a spatter-dock pond," then on the corner of Fourth and Market Streets. For sport, Klinken took aim at the hundreds of rats in the flats below Poole's Bridge. He shot them for target practice as fast as he could reload.

How did they harvest all those nuts in Fairmount Park? They held an annual event for public schoolchildren. "The date of nutting-day last year was the 8th of October," in 1870, according to the Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fairmount Park, "the period of the first ripening of chestnuts. The walnuts fell a week earlier , and the hickory nuts a week or two later. The number of the persons present on the occasion was estimated to be sixty thousand."

In 1990 and 1991, a dozen ships sailed from Philadelphia to Aruba with as much as 200,000 tons of Delaware River water. Importers hoped to use it to help restart a dormant oil refinery where fresh water is scarce. The vessels, which had brought crude oil north, stopped in the Delaware and simply took on water until they could hold no more. "It's a very easy, one-day operation," says George R. Bonsall, assistant operations manager for local shipping agents Rice Unruh Reynolds Company. "Instead of heading back empty, these vessels...come up the Delaware, drop anchor and pull the plug." The water from the Delaware River may not be the cleanest around, he says, but compared to other rivers accessible by ocean "it is the freshest because it has less salt content." And for the Arubans, Delaware Punch was free.

William Still (1821-1902) helped fugitive slaves and kept extensive records on these intense encounters. Certainly these records could be legally incriminating, but Still felt justified, even moved, to keep them anyway. One fugitive Still interviewed turned out to be his own long-lost brother, abandoned in slavery by their mother on her final escape. The book Still wrote and published from these records, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, 1872), is the most authoritative study of Philadelphia's extensive fugitive slave operations during the 1850's.

Carbonated soda water was prepared by Philadelphian Townsend Speakman for Dr. Philip Syng Physick. In 1807, to improve the taste, Speakman added fruit juices. Soda water was bottled commercially in 1835.

Benjamin Jackson produced the country's first mustard in 1768 and sold it to fellow Philadelphians in glass bottles.

Benjamin Franklin demonstrated electrical cooking in 1749. He killed a turkey by electric shock, then roasted it over a fire started by his "electrified bottle".

England's Chelsea buns became known here as cinnamon buns.

Melons and cantaloupes, grown from seed brought from Tripoli, were first grown in the United States at a residence in Germantown in 1818.

In the 1839 book "Aristocracy in America" British author Francis Grund wrote that Philadelphians " have more taste, and have the best cooks in the United States."

Philadelphian John Landis Mason's invention of the hermetically sealed Mason jar revolutionized and simplified home food preservation.

"Centennial Cake," introduced at the 1876 exposition, lives on as "shoo-fly pie." It is now associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch.

The Centennial made popular the "hokey-pokey man," a street vendor selling ices, sandwiches, sausages, fresh bread, "zoologicals" (Philadelphia baker Walter G. Wilson's animal crackers), and small antipasto salad. When Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta "H.M.S. Pinafore" opened here in 1879, bakeries produced a long loaf of bread called the pinafore. Entrepreneurial "hocky-pokey men" sliced the loaf in half, stuffed it with antipasto salad, and sold the world's first hoagie.

The soft pretzel, a Philadelphia street tradition was introduced in the early 1820's. You can still enjoy the street treat baked fresh everyday!

The now-locally endangered oyster was consumed in such quantities in the 19th century that discarded shells were used to pave streets and build wharves along the Delaware.

Philadelphia confectioner Elizabeth Coane Goodfellow (1767-1851) gave America its first lemon meringue pie.

A better peanut butter grinder was patented in 1893 by A.W. Straub & Co.

Philadelphia wine merchant Lorenz Seckel (1747-1823) found tasty hard pears, believed to be a natural hybrid, growing wild on his farm along the Delaware. We call them Seckel pears.

Philadelphia was known for vegetarian cookery through the 18th and 19th centuries. The spiritual center of vegetarianism was the Bible Christian Church, Third Street above Girard Avenue - a building later demolished to make way for a slaughter house.

The first commercial ice cream freezer was patented by Philadelphia Quaker Eber C. Seamen in 1848.

Thomas Eakin's realism was sometimes at odds with the tastes of Old Phildelphians. One unsatisfied Chestnut Hill couple had Eakins paint their portraits, paid for the canvases, and had them packed and delivered. When the crate arrived, the paintings were unpacked, taken to the cellar, and burned in the furnace. You can see a number of masterworks by Eakins that were not burned at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Auguste Rodin's monumental "Gates of Hell" was never cast in bronze during his lifetime. The first-ever bronze was ordered by film palace magnate Jules Mastbaum, who established Philadelphia's Rodin Museum. Two bronze casts were made. One was brought to Philadelphia for the Rodin Museum and the other was given to the Mus'e Rodin in Paris.

Isamu Noguchi's "Bolt of Lightning" was considered avant-garde when it was installed in 1984. Yet the design of the sculpture had been conceived in 1933, when Noguchi planned a towering memorial to Benjamin Franklin for a site along West River Drive. The artist was partially inspired in his design by giant radio antennas. If you drive into Philadelphia from New Jersey over the Franklin Bridge, "Bolt of Lightning " is a welcome site.

The American Anti-Vivisection Society was established February 23, 1883, by Philadelphian Caroline Earle White.

Wireless telegraphers held a national contest in Philadelphia on February 23, 1910, to test speed and accuracy in receiving and transmitting signals.

In March 1877, a Philadelphia audience heard a concert performed in New York, transmitted by long-distance telephone. The program included "Yankee Doodle", Home Sweet Home," and "The Last Rose of Summer."

On April 3, 1945, Philadelphians found reports of the war knocked from the newspaper headlines. There had been a jailbreak at Eastern State Penitentiary! That morning, twelve prisoners had exited a tunnel onto the terraces along Fairmount Avenue and scattered out in the city. The public was riveted in communal anxiety and fascination by details of the manhunt. Folks waited anxiously for news of the captures and information on the remarkably engineered escape. Fifty years later, as with all legends, its details have become malleable . But the story persists in Philadelphians' memories. You can visit the Eastern State Penitentiary today (2000 Fairmount Ave., Philadelphia, 215-564-7926).

The day "will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival ...solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, illuminations, from this time forward forevermore." -John Adams, in a letter to his wife shortly before the first Fourth of July , 1776. An understatement indeed!!

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