WATCH: City Hall Drone Footage Captures Rarely-Seen View of William Penn
Credit: Chad Aaronson / JerseyDrone
Don’t know about you, but we don’t remember ever seeing William Penn from this angle!
We’re talking, of course, about the Penn statue that sits atop City Hall. Thanks to Chad Aaronson, the guy behind Jersey Drone, we got a sweeping view of our city’s seat of government and its long-standing silent icon in a drone video that Aaronson filmed two days ago. Funnily enough, the cool vid wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for… well, we’ll let him explain.
“I actually did not go to Philly with the intention of filming City Hall,” he told Property. “My original plan was to get some footage of the SS United States, however I could not get permission from the security guards to fly there. So, the next best thing was a cool building.”
City Hall was the natural answer, as Aaronson recalls admiring it and other nearby buildings as a kid. “I’ve always been drawn to amazing architecture and [the] incredible detail of older buildings like Center City has to offer. You just don’t see that kind of work put in to modern construction.” He adds that during his visit, a police officer gave him and his wife a mini-tour of City Hall, during which time he was awestruck by the detail of the sculptures inside.
More importantly, the tour gave way to a stop at the gift shop, which is where he was inspired to film at City Hall in the first place: he noticed several photos of City Hall with the Penn statue clearly visible – but none looking down from above Penn’s hat.
“I immediately thought how cool it would be to have a photo looking straight down, from the top of Mr. Penn’s hat with the bustling streets below in the foreground,” he says. “I’ve searched through thousands of pictures online and was unable to find anything that comes close to that shot.” Indeed, we haven’t either – which makes this drone footage pretty neat.
Aaronson, who says he used a Blade Chroma 4K drone from Horizon Hobby, tells us this was his first trip to Philadelphia in a long time (and the video, his first Philly drone footage), but he intends on revisiting soon, saying, “I saw many places of interest I would like to film.”
Below, the aforementioned video, which includes night shots:
