View showing two outlandishly-attired members of the Philadelphia gang known as the "Killers" carousing on the street. One sits on a fire hydrant and the other leans against a lamp pole (posted with a "Sale" notice") at a street tenanted by a "Grocery" and adorned with broadsides. The men wear patterned pants, jackets with tails, oversized neck ties, and top hats. One also wears a pin adorned "K." They each have their hands in their pockets and smoke cigarettes. The grocery displays a barrel of brooms in addition to signs reading "Coffee Sugar Tea" and "Teas Coffee 5." The broadsides adorning the opposite building advertise "Auction this Evening" and "Circus The Old Man of the Mountain..... Dan Rice Clown." The playbill is illustrated with a scene of an equestrian trick. The "Killers," organized circa 1846, were a band of young men who menaced the Moyamensing neighborhood and were associated with the Moyamensing Hose Company and the Democratic Keystone Club., Date from Poulson inscription on recto: 1848., Wainwright suggests date of circa 1855., Philadelphia on Stone, POS 761, Wainwright retrospective conversion project, edited., Reproduced in Edwin Wolf's Philadelphia: Portrait of American city (Published by Camino Books in cooperation the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1990), page 199.
Date
[1848]
Location
Library Company of Philadelphia | Print Department *W408 [P.2219]
