Slate Roof House

Built for Barbadian Quaker merchant Samuel Carpenter, the house occupied a small hill overlooking the Delaware River.

It was built of brick in the Jacobean style with its façade featuring two projecting wings that flanked a recessed central entrance.

James Logan, the secretary of the Proprietary after Penn returned to England, later lived in the Slate Roof House.

The park features William Penn’s plan of the city of Philadelphia laid out in slate and marble, as well as a bronze model of the house.

A miniature version of the statue of Penn by Alexander Milne Calder that crowns Philadelphia City Hall stands on a pedestal in the center.

William Penn 's house, also known as the Slate Roof House, in a conjectural drawing from Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography in 1888
An 1850 sketch showing an addition between the two wings being used as a storefront. The artist noted the building's dilapidated state and correctly guessed it would be razed.