Benjamin Franklin Museum

Benjamin Franklin is everywhere in Philadelphia, but Franklin Court is where he actually lived. Tucked between Market and Chestnut Streets, between Third and Fourth, the courtyard sits on the site of the house Franklin built in the 1760s and where he spent his last years, and it is now part of Independence National Historical Park. The house itself was demolished in the early nineteenth century, so the Park Service marked it with a striking open steel frame, a ghost structure that traces the outline of the home and its print shop above the courtyard, with viewing ports that look down into surviving foundations. Beneath the courtyard is the Benjamin Franklin Museum, an underground museum organized not chronologically but around the facets of Franklin's personality: ardent and dutiful, ambitious and rebellious, motivated to improve, curious and full of wonder, and strategic and persuasive. Each room mixes personal artifacts with animations and interactive displays, so you meet Franklin the printer and publisher, the scientist of electricity, the civic inventor of libraries, fire companies and hospitals, the diplomat in Paris and the complicated man who owned enslaved people before becoming an abolitionist. A Library area plays excerpts from his Autobiography. Along Market Street, the restored row of Franklin-built houses includes a reconstructed printing office, where rangers and volunteers demonstrate an eighteenth-century press when it is staffed; it keeps its own, more limited, hours. The museum opens daily from 9am to 5pm, with a small interpretive fee, discounted for seniors and children and free for kids five and under. Tickets are sold at the door on the day of your visit, and federal recreation passes do not cover the fee. Allow at least an hour.

What makes it worth the hour: the museum manages to be both playful and honest. Younger visitors get games and animations, and a family guide stars Franklin's pet squirrel; adults get a rounded portrait of a self-made printer who became the most famous American in the world, with real attention to his contradictions. The courtyard above is free and open even when you are short on time; the ghost structure is one of the most photographed pieces of architecture in Old City and one of the cleverest pieces of historical interpretation in the country. Designed for the Bicentennial in 1976, it shows how to commemorate a building that no longer exists without faking a reconstruction, and the open frame lets light, trees and the surrounding houses into the picture. Read the quotations set into the paving, taken from Franklin's letters to his wife about the house while he was abroad.

Visit craft: buy tickets at the door; there is no advance booking for individuals. Check the park's alerts before you go, since National Park Service sites can change hours or close for federal reasons. Come on one of the fee-free days, October 6 and January 17, if your dates line up. Look for the printing office demonstration on Market Street, which is the best ten minutes in the complex when it is running. Combine your visit with the Franklin grave at Christ Church Burial Ground two blocks north, where visitors toss pennies onto the stone.

Pairing and fit: Franklin Court is a three-minute walk from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and makes an easy add-on between a timed Independence Hall tour and lunch. A Franklin day might run Franklin Court in the morning, Christ Church Burial Ground, lunch at Reading Terminal Market, and the Franklin Institute in the afternoon. It suits history buffs, families with school-age kids and anyone who wants the founding story told through its most entertaining character.