Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple

B. Jeffrey Stebar of the Atlanta office of Perkins+Will has been selected as the lead architect of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. Brother Stebar is bishop of the Whitewater Ward in the Jonesboro Georgia Stake.

The design for the temple is expected to be similar in concept to other temples in urban settings such as the Manhattan New York Temple and Hong Kong China Temple, which are multi-purpose high-rise buildings.¹ Gerald Prue, director of the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Metro Family History Center, affirms that the temple will be a multi-level building with offices and a visitors' center on the lower floors and ordinance rooms on the top floors.²

The temple will be erected in Center City Philadelphia on the site of a parking lot at the northeast corner of Vine Street and North 18th Street across from the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul and diagnol to beautiful Logan Square.³

The temple was originally to be built at the northeast corner of North Broad Street and Noble Street, which is a 33,423-square-foot parking lot purchased by the Church on October 16, 2007, according to the Philadelphia Board of Revision of Taxes.

President Thomas S. Monson announced that the City of Brotherly Love would be home to Pennsylvania's first temple during his opening remarks of the 178th Semiannual General Conference. The temple was announced jointly with four other temple locations including Calgary, Canada; Córdoba, Argentina; Kansas City, Missouri; and Rome, Italy.⁴

Several significant events in Church history took place in Pennsylvania including much of the translation of the Book of Mormon and the restoration of priesthood authority. The Church was first established in Pennsylvania in 1839—growing to 450 members by October 1840. Membership fell following the migration of the Saints to Salt Lake but grew again as Mormon European emigrants arrived. Eventually the first stake was organized in 1960 with 1,100 members located in congregations in southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Today there are nearly 48,000 members in Pennsylvania alone.⁵

The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple will be the first temple built in Pennsylvania.

The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple will be the third high-rise temple of the Church, following the Hong Kong China Temple (1996) and the Manhattan New York Temple (2004).