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Philadelphia

Three identical apartment towers rise from a shared plaza two blocks off the Delaware, the centerpiece of the Washington Square East urban renewal plan, won in competition by developer Webb & Knapp with a young I. M. Pei as architect. Completed in 1964, they put a modernist exclamation point on a neighborhood of 18th-century rowhouses, and the pairing still defines Society Hill's skyline.

The facade is the structure: a load-bearing egg-crate of cast-in-place concrete on a six-foot module, with floor-to-ceiling aluminum-framed windows set deep into the grid. At the base the grid lands on a colonnade of slender columns around a recessed glass lobby. On the plaza stand Leonard Baskin's bronze Old Man, Young Man, The Future (1966) and, to the west, 37 flat-roofed brick townhouses Pei designed as the towers' low-rise counterpoint.

Every other building is extruded from its real OpenStreetMap footprint at its LiDAR-measured height: about 2,800 in detail around the towers, and hundreds of thousands more across the whole city from the Northeast to the airport. Roughly a quarter-million heights come from Philadelphia's 2022 aerial LiDAR survey (City of Philadelphia building footprints; USGS/NOAA point cloud), and in the Society Hill core the roof forms themselves are measured from the same flight: gable, hip, ridge direction, eave and ridge heights. Facades draw on the city's property records (OPA): each building's construction era, material, storefront use and story count pick its brick, siding, schist or curtain-wall dress and its true window rows, and every roof wears the color sampled from the city's 2024 aerial orthophotos. The blocks you walk (and fly over) are the blocks that are there.

The forest is real too: all 150,000 street and park trees in the city come from Philadelphia Parks & Recreation's 2025 tree inventory via OpenDataPhilly, each one at its surveyed spot, sized by its measured trunk and shaped by its species, from the rows along Kelly Drive to the woods of West Fairmount Park; tap a canopy to learn what it is. The bronze inlays on the ground trace the city's registered historic districts, Society Hill first among them, and the neighborhood names that appear as you climb come from the city's neighborhood boundaries (CC-BY). Historic districts and neighborhoods: City of Philadelphia / OpenDataPhilly. The city's farmers' markets keep their real hours: striped tents go up at each of the 34 markets only while the model's clock says it is open (Headhouse under the Shambles on a Sunday morning, Rittenhouse and Clark Park on a Saturday), and a tap on a tent gives the hours, the payments it takes and its website. Farmers' markets: City of Philadelphia Farmers' Market Locations via OpenDataPhilly. The state's 348 blue-and-gold historical markers stand at their posts across the city, each with its full text a tap away (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, public domain), and the city's Percent for Art works stand on their plinths with title, artist, date and medium (Percent for Art, City of Philadelphia via OpenDataPhilly); the search box knows every marker and title, and every school, church, park, rec center, hospital and library the city names on its own basemap, near six thousand places (City Landmarks, City of Philadelphia via OpenDataPhilly).

Served outside the artifact sandbox, the city also moves: SEPTA's real-time feed drives every tracked bus and street trolley through the streets at its live position, snapped to its street and refreshed every few seconds. Buses fly the SEPTA badge, trolleys a green pin; tap one (or search a route number) for its route, destination and how late it's running. Indego's bike-share docks are live as well: every station's racked bikes, classic and electric, with counts refreshed each minute; tap a dock for its station. The Market–Frankford El rides its steel viaduct from the Callowhill portal to Frankford, though trains are not shown: SEPTA publishes no usable live positions for its rail lines, so rather than guess, the model keeps to what's real. Amtrak's trains are another matter: every one through the city runs on the surface, over the Schuylkill, through 30th Street and up the North Philadelphia viaduct, and their positions are public, so the Acelas, Regionals and Keystones ride the real Northeast Corridor and Keystone tracks (drawn from OpenStreetMap), each consist articulated car by car and run along the rails between fixes; tap one for its route, next stop and how late it is. Amtrak positions: Amtraker, a community mirror of Amtrak's own tracker (ODC-By). PATCO's trains cross the Ben Franklin Bridge on their timetable, not live: PATCO publishes no live positions, so each train runs where its published schedule puts it, drawn only between the Franklin Square and Camden portals, and its card says so. PATCO schedules: PATCO's public GTFS feed. Car traffic follows the same honesty rule from the other side: no public feed of live car positions exists, so the Typical Traffic layer synthesizes cars at each street's real measured volume (PennDOT annual average daily traffic), swelling through rush hour and thinning to a true one-to-one count in the small hours: typical flows for the clock's day and time, never claimed as live. The closures are live, though: the Streets Department's permits in force put barrels across a closed block and cones along a partial closure or a closed sidewalk, refreshed every half hour, with the permit's purpose and dates a tap away, and the paving season's freshly paved blocks wear new black asphalt. Vehicle positions: SEPTA real-time API. Street closures and paving: Streets Department StreetSmartPHL via the City's ArcGIS. Bike share: Indego (City of Philadelphia / Bicycle Transit Systems). Bus stops and stations: SEPTA's GTFS schedule data; the buses on their way to a stop, the departure boards and the elevator outages: SEPTA's live feeds, read while a card is open. Weather alerts: the National Weather Service. Cooling and warming centers: the Office of Emergency Management's sites via the City's ArcGIS. Libraries: the Free Library of Philadelphia's locations; recreation centers: Parks and Recreation's program sites, both via the City's ArcGIS. A tapped building's card: the Office of Property Assessment, the Water Department's parcels, the Historical Commission's register and districts and Licenses and Inspections' permits, via the City's Carto service, looked up only when a building is tapped. Your location is used once, when you ask for it, and never stored. Weather: Open-Meteo. Air quality: the Philadelphia Department of Public Health's Air Management Services core-site readings (PM2.5 and ozone, hourly), which set the haze and the time panel's air quality line. Address search: OpenStreetMap Nominatim. Live flights: adsb.fi community ADS-B data. Live ships: AIS via aisstream.io. Concerts: the Ticketmaster Discovery API's listings for the city's music venues, read every fifteen minutes and shown as a placard over the venue from 9 AM on the day of the show, with a link to the tickets on Ticketmaster. Skyline lights: after dark the researched crowns, City Hall's tower and the Ben Franklin Bridge glow in the night's colour, a Philadelphia team's on its game day (ESPN's public scoreboards, Eagles before Phillies before Flyers before Sixers; the Comcast crowns and the FMC Tower stripe the team's pair) and otherwise the cause listed for the date on BOMA Philadelphia's Building Illumination Calendar, read from the calendar's public listing at each build and twice a day; only the dates, colours and cause names are kept. Wall colours in the outer districts: Mapillary street-level imagery, CC BY-SA 4.0. SEPTA and the SEPTA logo are trademarks of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Amtrak is a registered service mark of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, PATCO is a service of the Delaware River Port Authority, and Indego is a service of the City of Philadelphia; this unofficial model is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, nor by Ticketmaster or Amtraker.

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