Philadelphia

Philadelphia - darkometer rating : 2 - A city on the East Coast of the USA which calls itself the "city of brotherly love" (after the literal translation of the Greek roots in its name) and was the cradle of US independence. For the dark tourist, however, it is rather two more unusual sites that warrant a trip to this pleasant old city, one a world-renowned medical exhibition, the other a grim former prison. > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos What there is to see: Philadelphia boasts two very special sites that are of particular significance to the dark tourist – and both are accordingly given their own separate entries: - Eastern State Penitentiary - Mütter Museum medical exhibition Apart from these two extraordinary highlights, there are a couple of memorials and historic ship that may be less significant but are perhaps worth a quick look when in good old Philly. Like so many places across the USA , Philadelphia also has its Holocaust monument , in fact this one is said to be the very first to have been erected in the USA, in 1964 to be precise. Astonishingly, some of names of places of the Holocaust engraved on one side of the memorial contain rather embarrassing spelling errors. The fact that Flossenbürg is misspelled "Flossenberg" is perhaps halfway understandable (though still not really forgivable) given that in an English pronunciation both spellings would sound the same. But the fact that the name Dachau is misspelled as "Dauchau" is really a hair-raising, whopping blunder, all the more so given that Dachau is – especially from an American perspective! – the best-known and most visited of the former Nazi concentration camps .