There’s a new 18th-century-style coffeehouse at Penn

When Penn Libraries envisioned an exhibit for Philadelphia’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, they sought to create a space that explored the school’s Revolutionary-era past but also transported visitors back to the fiery days of rebellion, when debate consumed every corner of the city, including campus.

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts revealed that space: a full-scale recreation of a colonial coffeehouse, a centerpiece of Penn’s first major exhibit of the Semiquincentennial, as the 250th is also known.

“We wanted to try to evoke as best we could what it might have been like in the center of the Revolutionary city,” said John Pollack, curator for the Kislak, standing inside the replica, located in a sixth-floor gallery at the Van Pelt Library. “We know that coffeehouses were places of conversation, argument, and debate.”

Designed in the style of the Old London Coffee House, 18th-century Philly’s most famous coffee spot, the replica is no mere esoteric exhibit, but a cozy historical spot where planners hope students and visitors will bring a beverage and plop down in a Windsor chair. (The temporary space does not actually serve hot drinks; guests are encouraged to bring their favorite nonalcoholic beverage.) There, amid the cozy, 18th-century atmosphere, students can study, indulge the arguments of centuries past, or tackle topics roiling campuses today.

“The times marry each other,” said Brittany Merriam, director of exhibits at Penn Libraries and the designer of the coffeehouse with Philly artist Preston Link. “These are turbulent periods, and Penn has been enmeshed in these really political areas all throughout the past. It is speaking to a time and place that could resonate.”

Replete with period furniture and chandeliers and papered with facsimile pamphlets and broadsides plucked from Penn’s Revolutionary-era collections, Penn’s coffeehouse has serious colonial cred. Dominoes and chess sets sit atop old wooden tables. Candles burn low on the bar (Revolutionary-era coffeehouses often served up imported rum). And above the fireplace mantle hangs an upside-down portrait of England’s King George III, in which the bottom-up monarch is famously posed beside a horse’s posterior.

“That would have been a form of protest,” Merriam said with a smile.

The replica recreates the first floor of a colonial coffeehouse, an austere, utilitarian space where everyday merchants met to ink details and exchange news. Most often, 18th-century coffeehouses — researchers say there were only a handful in the budding city — would boast upstairs rooms with mahogany tables and fine linen, where wealthier citizens could conduct their affairs in private rooms, and perhaps plan a revolution. Rowdier patriots stirred insurrection in one of colonial Philly’s more than 100 tippling houses and pubs.

“Here is where the business went down,” Merriam said.

The setting is also meant to pull visitors into the center’s larger exhibit, “Revolution at Penn?,” which opened Thursday and runs through May 27. It features dozens of original prints, pamphlets, student notebooks and writings, letters, maps, and manuscripts, including a first edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and a new, absurdly detailed map of nearly every homeowner and business in downtown colonial Philadelphia.

Founded by Benjamin Franklin and other leading Philadelphians by 1749, and originally located on Arch Street, just blocks from Independence Hall, Penn could not escape the fractious political turmoil of 18th-century Philadelphia. The exhibit powerfully explores conflicts that roiled campus during the Revolution, and provokes new questions about the place of universities in America, then and now.

“These were big arguments about what a school is, who should go to school, and who should manage it,” Pollack said. “Those arguments were political, they were religious, they were social, and cultural.”

It doesn’t avoid painful truths, such as how women and Black people were not accepted to the university until the 1870s. It offers new research into the roles women, free and enslaved Black people, and Indigenous peoples played in the campus conversation.

“Debates over education were part of larger arguments about liberty, freedom, and power,” Pollack said.

The coffeehouse will be open even when the gallery is not, he said.

“We want to get an audience in here,” he said.