Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial Official Website

Memorial History

The Vietnam War
Although the United States' commitment of support to the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) began not long after the French were driven from Vietnam in 1954, the period from August 5, 1964 to May 7, 1975 is officially designated as the Vietnam Era. During that period, which began with the launching of US air strikes against North Vietnam after the August, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incidents, and concluded with the April, 1975 fall of South Vietnam two years after American combat troops had departed, nearly 2.7 million Americans served in Vietnam. More than 58,000 were killed in action, 300,000 wounded and more than 2,400 remain unaccounted for.

It was our nation's longest war, it became the lead story in the television networks' news broadcasts for nearly a decade and, ultimately, except for the Civil War, it was the most divisive war in United States history. And it took a long time for the nation to begin to recover from its wounds.

The Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Campaign
When the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated on November 13, 1982 in Washington, D.C., a shift in the public's attitude toward the country's Vietnam veterans began to surface.

This shift reflected a belated realization that those who fought in Vietnam were no different from those who fought in the nation's earlier wars, demonstrating the same kind of bravery, heroism and commitment as their predecessors.

The veterans marching in Washington on that cold, gray, damp November afternoon in 1982, set in preparing the way for what would eventually come to be called a "healing process" for the nation and its Vietnam veterans.

In the late spring of 1984, encouraged by the success establishing a ??? Memorial, a small group of Vietnam veterans in Philadelphia decided to begin a local campaign to build their own Memorial.

The group selected four veterans to serve as directors of the campaign - and on July 10,1984, Mayor W. Wilson Goode signed Philadelphia City Council's City Ordinance Bill 202, authorizing the establishment of the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. The Bill had been sponsored by Council Members Francis Rafferty, Joan Krajewski and Brian O'Neill and it passed City Council unanimously. The campaign was underway.

Site Selection
After scouring the city, the Site Selection Committee, soon settled on what was considered an ideal location at Front and Spruce streets in the burgeoning Penn's Landing area. The site was a small park on an overpass straddling, appropriately, Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway (Interstate 95). Obtaining the site, however, would prove to be a sometimes daunting, often frustrating endeavor.

With city, state and federal agencies each involved in the jurisdiction responsibility for the site — a park in Philadelphia on an over pass above a United States highway maintained by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation — the path to securing the site was strewn with bureaucratic obstacles. Though each of the responsible agencies agreed that the location was ideal as a memorial site and each fully endorsed the project, it would take more than two years before a lease for the property was obtained by the Memorial Fund.

The Memorial Design
To avoid the possibility of controversy over the design of the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial the directors and Design Selection Committee, agreed that the seven-member jury panel chosen to select the memorial's design must include a majority of Vietnam combat veterans. The panel also included three noted architects selected by H. Mather Lippincott, Jr., whom the Memorial Fund had commissioned to oversee the design competition.

The competition, which was limited to submissions from those residing within a fifty-mile radius of Philadelphia, ran from August through October, 1985. A total of 102 entries were received, and on November 21, the seven jurors deliberated for nearly twelve hours before choosing the design submitted by Perry M. Morgan, a 27 year-old landscape architect with Sullivan Associates of Philadelphia.

Landscape architect Perry M. Morgan, the Memorial's designer, said that what he had hoped to accomplish was to honor the memory of those who had been killed in Vietnam as well as provide a place of contemplations for those who had returned from the war to reflect upon their experiences. Thus he created the concept of two facing walls - a curved wall inscribed with the names of the men killed in action facing a straight wall engraved with scenes from the war.

The two walls, creating an amphitheater-like setting, are composed of panels of polished, charcoal gray granite, selected by Morgan and quarried in Cold Spring, Minnesota. Stencils and screens were applied to the panels which were then sandblasted to engrave the names and replicate the scenes. The sandblasting was uniform on the panels on the wall of names, but was adjusted to allow various shades of gray to emerge on the scene panels.

The Name Panels
The southern wall containing the name panels is a concave structure, slightly raised in the center, on a higher plane than the opposing north wall inscribed with the scenes. Each panel is 34 inches wide, 56 inches high and 13 inches thick. Each name is inscribed in letters measuring 1-1/4 inches in height.

The Scene Panels
Based on the sketches by Tom Rice, a graduate student at Temple University's Tyler School of Art, each of the eight scene panels measures seven feet in height, five feet in width and thirteen inches in thickness. They are arranged in a left to right chronological sequence, beginning with the launching of the US carrier aircraft in August, 1964 and concluding with the rescue of Vietnamese refugees at the US Embassy in April, 1975.

To the left of the scene panels is a similarly sized panel inscribed with the insignias of the five branches of service above a world map; to the right is a panel inscribed with a large map of Southeast Asia.