ater
mayor of the city, put it up on land which he bought from Letitia Penn,
daughter of William Penn, the founder. Bradford was the first to use the
structure for coffee-house purposes, and he tells his reason for
entering upon the business in his petition to the governor for a
license: "Having been advised to keep a Coffee House for the benefit of
merchants and traders, and as some people may at times be desirous to be
furnished with other liquors besides coffee, your petitioner apprehends
it is necessary to have the Governor's license." This would indicate
that in that day coffee was drunk as a refreshment between meals, as
were spirituous liquors for so many years before, and thereafter up to
1920.

[Illustration: SELLING SLAVES AT THE OLD LONDON COFFEE HOUSE]

Bradford's London coffee house seems to have been a joint-stock
enterprise, for in his _Journal_ of April 11, 1754, appeared this
notice: "Subscribers to a public coffee house are invited to meet at the
Courthouse on Friday, the 19th instant, at 3 o'clock, to choose trustees
agreeably to the plan of subscription."

The building was a three-story wooden structure, with an attic that some
historians count as the fourth story. There was a wooden awning
one-story high extending out to cover the sidewalk before the coffee
house. The entrance was on Market (then known as High) Street.

The London coffee house was "the pulsating heart of excitement,
enterprise, and patriotism" of the early city. The most active citizens
congregated there--merchants, shipmasters, travelers from other colonies
and countries, crown and provincial officers. The governor and persons
of equal note went there at certain hours "to sip their coffee from the
hissing urn, and some of those stately visitors had their own stalls."
It had also the character of a mercantile exchange--carriages, horses,
foodstuffs, and the like being sold there at auction. It is further
related that the early slave-holding Philadelphians sold negro men,
women, and children at vendue, exhibiting the slaves on a platform set
up in the street before the coffee house.

The resort was the barometer of public sentiment. It was in the street
before this house that a newspaper published in Barbados, bearing a
stamp in accordance with the provisions of the stamp act, was publicly
burned in 1765, amid the cheers of bystanders. It was here that Captain
Wise of the brig Minerva, from Pool, England, who brought news of the