Look Up, Look Out is a product of the Commonwealth Monument Project. The project organizer is the IIPT Harrisburg Peace Promenade, a project of the Foundation for Enhancing Communities, fiscal sponsor. Visit the landing page for more information about the project. Click on the images of the posters below to read stories about the Old Eighth Ward.

The “Look Up, Look Out” campaign seeks to reimagine the Old 8th Ward, the multi-ethnic neighborhood demolished from the 1910s to create the area now known as Capitol Park. A once-thriving neighborhood now teems with a new population–government workers and those associated with the everyday business of a capital city. Using a combination of historical research and digital tools, we seek to connect the present with the past.

In 2018-2020, the Commonwealth Monument Project chose 12 sites throughout the various buildings of the Capitol Complex to place posters that tell the varied stories of the Old Eighth Ward. We invite visitors to Pennsylvania’s capitol district to stop, look up, look out, and imagine a thriving neighborhood that once existed before the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania appropriated the grounds a century ago for state use.

We invite visitors to this digital exhibit to explore the Eighth Ward.

Read about the history of the Eighth Ward with the neighborhood’s notable residents and visitors:

  1. Civil War & Emancipation (featuring T. Morris Chester)
  2. Great Speakers (Frances Harper)
  3. Educational Reform (William Howard Day)
  4. Church Communities (Jacob Compton)
  5. Seeking Shalom (Rabbis Eliezer Silver and Nachman Heller)
  6. Business & Social Life (Colonel Strothers)
  7. Serving the People (Sister Mary Clare Grace)
  8. Vice & Virtue (Joseph L. Thomas)
  9. City Beautiful & the Capitol Extension (Dr. William H. Jones)
  10. Gateway to the Capitol (Gwendolyn Bennett)
  11. Political Life (Anne Amos)
  12. Making a Home (Hannah Braxton Jones)

Click on the map below to explore and compare the modern capitol park with the neighborhood and city as it appeared in 1901. This image shows the locations of the twelve Look Up, Look Out Posters and Stories.

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