For nearly a century, Christ Church's spire was the tallest thing in North America: a 196-foot needle seafarers used to find Philadelphia from miles up the Delaware. They paid for it with a lottery, which sounds improbable until you learn Benjamin Franklin, a church member who never quite made it to services, was the one running it.

The Georgian sanctuary below took 17 years to build, borrowing heavily from Christopher Wren's London churches. After the Revolution, it became the birthplace of the American Episcopal Church. Above the central window sits a bas-relief of King George II, prised off during anti-British feeling in the 1790s and quietly put back: the only outdoor depiction of English royalty left on any colonial public building.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use Christ Church to trace Franklin's civic schemes, the lost Delaware waterfront and the graveyard out back, where America's first press-freedom lawyer rests near the Financier of the Revolution.