Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront

by Harry Kyriakodis

  The standing water of this open sewer became a civic concern and was blamed for a variety of public health problems. One of the earliest visitations of yellow fever in Philadelphia was supposed to have had its origin in the creek’s filth. A good deal of controversy ensued, much of it cultivated by Benjamin Franklin in 1739, perhaps to initiate a public works project that would improve the city—or maybe just to sell his newspapers.

  Dock Creek’s main branch was culverted and paved over in sections beginning in the mid-1700s. The east part of the main branch was confined within stone walls and arched with bricks, while the western part and the secondary branches were filled in, all in keeping with a series of ordinances enacted over the years beginning in 1762. One in 1784 ordered the laying of paving stones to “form a public highway known by the name of Dock Street.”

  All this explains why Dock Street is a severely curved street in a city reputed for not having curved streets. Like Willow Street to the north, it follows the course of an old waterway. Dock Street was completed west of Front Street by 1821. The part between Front and the river was finished by 1839, when the first incarnation of Delaware Avenue was laid. Besides being curved, Dock Street is unusually wide (about one hundred feet), reflecting the original breadth of Dock Creek.

  Dock Street eventually became Philadelphia’s primary food market and served in that capacity for almost a century. As such, it became as dirty as the creek it replaced. Grimy warehouses and market stalls with tin roofs over the sidewalk lined both sides of the Belgian-blocked street for decades. Food of all kind was unloaded from ships that docked nearby. Dock Street teemed with sellers and buyers and their horse-drawn wagons in the morning. By afternoon, it was deserted—except for the rats.

  The crowded food distribution center on Dock Street about 1908. This was the street in its heyday. Trucks later made the scene even busier. Library of Congress.

  When larger motorized trucks replaced smaller wagons, the street was simply not able to handle the traffic. This state of affairs ended in 1959 when the sprawling Food Distribution Center opened on Packer Avenue in South Philadelphia. All the old food warehouses were torn down as Society Hill Towers and the Sheraton Society Hill took over Dock Street.

  THE BLUE ANCHOR TAVERN

  At the mouth of Dock Creek on the Delaware was the Blue Anchor Landing, which functioned as Philadelphia’s main public wharf for decades. It was named after the Blue Anchor Tavern, a renowned inn that was under construction but already in business when William Penn first came to Philadelphia in 1682.

  Penn arrived by barge from the downriver town of Chester, then called Upland. The tradition that he had a glass of ale at the Blue Anchor when he came ashore did not harm his standing among even the most pious members of the Society of Friends.

  The Blue Anchor was a combination beerhouse, merchant exchange, grain market and post office. Its story was written by Thomas Allen Glenn and published in 1896 in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography:

  For many years previous to William Penn’s proprietorship there had been at Philadelphia (later so called) a constant landing of traders and of those inhabitants of West Jersey who were accustomed to go down to the sea in ships. The favorite landing-place was on the bank of the Delaware, between the present Walnut and Dock Streets, and it was directly back of this landing, on the higher bluff, that the Blue Anchor Tavern was subsequently built.

  The first building known as the Blue Anchor Tavern was of brick, was sixteen feet front by about thirty-six feet long, and stood directly in the middle of the present Front Street, then Delaware Front Street, about one hundred and forty-six feet north of Dock Creek, now Dock Street. In front of the Blue Anchor was the primitive wharf whereat Penn came ashore on his arrival from Chester, and which he erected into a public landing-place for the inhabitants of Philadelphia forever.

  The saloon and its landing stood directly in the middle of the present Front Street, about 150 feet north of the former Dock Creek. This would be just a bit north of the current-day Dock Street. As the riverfront developed, the Blue Anchor moved to replacement structures closer to Dock Creek twice, the last time in 1690. This place was a house at the end of a line of row homes put up by builder Thomas Budd. The pub continued to serve fishermen and other customers until 1810, when it was taken down.

  Many other taverns and coffeehouses for the benefit of seafaring men were located along this strip of the Delaware during the city’s younger days. These establishments were more than merely places to drink and dine. They were where people transacted business, argued politics, got the news and otherwise socialized. Water Street linked them together, all the way to Penny Pot Tavern roughly a mile north.

  THE MAN FULL OF TROUBLE TAVERN

  At Second and Spruce is a peculiar old Philadelphia pub that still stands: the Man Full of Trouble Tavern. First named the “Man Loaded with Mischief,” it was built in 1759 along with the adjacent house. This is the only surviving pre-Revolutionary tavern in the city.

  The widow Martha Smallwood managed the tiny place in the 1790s, as that was when Philadelphia authorities would award tavern licenses only to “widows and decrepit men of good character.” That was also the time when there was one saloon for every fifty men in town.

  The Man Full of Trouble was subsequently used as a hotel and wholesale chicken market, surrounded by other ramshackle houses and shops. The low-ceilinged building was on the verge of falling down before a private foundation restored it as a museum in 1965. Unfortunately, it’s been closed to the public since 1996. At one time surrounded by unassuming buildings, the tavern now sits all alone—but with Society Hill Towers looming high above.

  The amusing tavern sign outside the building depicts a dour sea captain with a monkey on his shoulder and a parrot on his hand, walking arm in arm with a genteel lady holding a hatbox. The original sign featured a gaudy woman hoisting a glass of bubbly while carried on the sagging shoulders of an unhappy sailor.

  The closed but still standing Man Full of Trouble Tavern. The tavern itself is on the right. Photo by the author.

  The Man Full of Trouble Tavern in 1958, when it was unrecognizable as a food wholesale place and surrounded by tattered buildings, much like itself. Library of Congress (HABS).

  PIRATES AND BURIED TREASURE

  Besides the dutiful William Penn, the pirate Edward Teach (1680–1718), otherwise known as Blackbeard, was a patron of the Blue Anchor Tavern. Indeed, it was common to see pirates of the Atlantic Coast, including Blackbeard and William “Captain” Kidd (ca. 1645–1701), openly swagger along Water Street and vicinity. Working and retired sea robbers liked being in Philadelphia because of the mild temper of Quaker justice.

  But Penn, living in England at the end of the seventeenth century, did not endorse this. In 1697, he wrote to his American agent, William Markham—whose daughter married an alleged pirate—that Londoners maintained that Philadelphians “not onlie wink att but imbrace pirats, shipps and men.” While the Pennsylvania Assembly denied this accusation, it did respond by passing a stringent law for the suppression of piracy and trading with or harboring buccaneers. But this did not halt Blackbeard’s nefarious activities or his visits to Philadelphia. The same goes for other pirates.

  Rumors of buried treasure along Philadelphia’s waterfront persisted for hundreds of years. Watson claimed that a pot of money (at least $5,000) was once found buried in the cellar of a tavern at Front and Spruce Streets. Plus, many people hunted and dug for pirate plunder around where Fairmont Street met Front Street and also along Pegg’s Run.

  THE FLOATING CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER

  The Seamen’s Church Institute of Philadelphia was founded in 1843 to address the needs of both saints and scoundrels visiting ports on the Delaware River. The institute, now at 475 North Fifth Street, has had many offices over the years, but its first “building” was actually a boat—the Floating Church of the Redeemer. This unusual and impressive vessel was usually moored at the foot of Dock Street in
the early 1850s.

  Made in New York and dedicated on January 11, 1849, the floating Gothic church traveled up and down the Delaware River ministering to seamen whose ships were docked in the Philadelphia area. This was evidently the first floating church in the United States and apparently one of only three ever made. It was a venture of the Churchman’s Missionary Association for Seamen, an arm of the Episcopal Church.

  The wooden church, ninety feet long and thirty feet wide, rested on the hulls of two barges placed ten feet apart. With sailing flags waving from its seventy-five-foot steeple, it was deemed the most beautiful floating chapel in the world. The Floating Church of the Redeemer was so famous that a model of it was displayed at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851.

  Worshippers often left early due to seasickness, and the chaplain himself sometimes had trouble staying upright during services. The unpowered craft also tipped sideways in high winds and even sank once. By 1853, these problems and rising maintenance costs resulted in its sale. The floating church was towed to Camden, where it was hauled ashore and set on a brick foundation to become the landlocked Church of St. John’s on Broadway Street.

  The Floating Church of the Redeemer. Library of Congress.

  A fire devastated the structure in 1868, but its bell is still in existence. Seamen’s Church Institute now owns it after having found it via an e-Bay auction. The bell was missing for almost 150 years.

  FOGLIETTA PLAZA

  Thomas Glenn continued in his “The Blue Anchor Tavern” piece:

  At present the great wharves of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company cover the site, and a heedless crowd crosses constantly over the spot where the Founder first set foot on Philadelphia’s soil. The curious, however, can still mark, in the grade of Water Street, at the distance of about one hundred and fifty feet north of Dock, a slight depression, which runs from the river to Front Street, marking, doubtless, the shelving bank which formed a pathway over which William Penn travelled from the landing to the Blue Anchor Tavern in the year 1682.

  The “slight depression” is, of course, long gone, as is most of Water Street. Today, Dock Street from Front Street to Delaware Avenue is somewhat north of its original location owing to the upheaval caused by I-95. It was reconstructed atop the concrete cover above the superhighway, as was Spruce Street and Foglietta Plaza.

  Little used and rather forbidding, Foglietta Plaza is administered by the Interstate Land Management Corporation. The little greenery of this maze-like courtyard hardly camouflages the ventilation towers and fire suppression equipment required for the tunnel underneath. And the incessant roar of vehicles speeding underground is distracting, if not deafening.

  The plaza was named after Thomas Foglietta (1928–2004), an esteemed lawyer and Pennsylvania representative in the U.S. House from 1980 to 1997 (during which time he was involved with enhancing Penn’s Landing and the Port of Philadelphia). Later an ambassador to Italy, Foglietta grew up a few blocks south of the plaza, on a street where his grandparents settled upon emigrating from Italy.

  Foglietta Plaza lies squarely at the historic location of the mouth of Dock Creek, although the creek had long been buried by the time the courtyard was built. This spot was also the site of the Delaware Avenue Market, built in the mid-1800s and topped by a clock tower. This was the place to go to for fruit and vegetables, with heaps of watermelons, peaches, tomatoes and so forth on sale daily.

  Incidentally, Front Street used to go straight through; it was not interrupted at Foglietta Plaza until the courtyard was installed when I-95 came through. So the plaza, in a way, represents how the drawbridge over Dock Creek connected the northern and southern segments of Front Street.

  The Delaware Avenue Market at Dock Street in 1914. This building was torn down in the 1960s. Foglietta Plaza—atop I-95—occupies the space today. Philadelphia City Archives.

  MEMORIALS AT PENN’S LANDING

  The Philadelphia Korean War Memorial is next to Foglietta Plaza. Dedicated on June 22, 2002, and again on October 7, 2006, after being enlarged, this reverential place pays tribute to the 610 servicemen from southeastern Pennsylvania killed or missing in action in the Korean War. The names of those who died are carved into four columns, while etched images on six granite walls portray the war itself. The memorial includes a bronze sculpture of a kneeling soldier, entitled The Final Farewell, by Lorann Jacobs.

  Close by at Spruce Street is the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the concrete cover of Interstate 95. The monument remembers the 646 local residents who lost their lives during the Vietnam War. Scenes from the war and the names of soldiers killed in action are engraved on its two facing walls of polished granite. Dedicated on October 26, 1987, the memorial is sadly forgotten as a visitor’s destination, largely because it is a secluded amphitheater. The Purple Heart Memorial, honoring men and women wounded in all American wars, is incorporated into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

  Foglietta Plaza contains the Philadelphia Beirut Memorial, dedicated on October 20, 1985, to remember Philadelphia’s U.S. Marine casualties of the Beirut Peacekeeping Mission killed in the terrorist bombing on October 23, 1983. And across Columbus Boulevard at the USS Becuna submarine is a memorial paying homage to Americans lost in World War II submarine combat.

  THE LENNI-LENAPE AND WILLIAM PENN (II OF II): PENN TREATY PARK

  These modern memorials have their antecedent in the monument that the Penn Society placed by the Delaware River at what is now Penn Treaty Park back in 1827. Still located there, this stone marker is, however, a monument to peace, not war. The Penn Treaty Monument commemorates the “Treaty of Amity and Friendship” between William Penn and local Indian leaders led by Chief Tamanend.

  The extraordinary gathering occurred on June 23, 1683, under a giant elm tree (the “Treaty Elm”) at Shackamaxon—an ancient Native American meeting place along the Delaware in present-day Northern Liberties/Fishtown. An interpreter read the deeds that Penn had prepared to the chiefs, who then made their marks. While the treaty itself was probably an informal unwritten pact, it was the primary reason why there was relatively little strife between the Quaker newcomers and the Delaware Indians living in the region.

  Wm. Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, a Currier-Ives print from about 1845. This is one of countless views of the famous Treaty of Amity and Friendship made alongside the Delaware River between William Penn and local Lenni-Lenape leaders. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

  Penn paid for Indian land with various goods, which Tamanend divided among his people. The chief then gave Penn a belt made of wampum beads as a sign of friendship. It featured a depiction of two men clasping hands: one large and with a hat (Penn) and the other smaller and hatless (a Native American). The Penn family kept this belt until 1857, when a descendant gave it to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which still has it.

  The French philosopher Voltaire hailed the 1683 Treaty of Amity as “the only treaty between those nations and the Christian nations which was never sworn to and never broken.” Its imagery—the Treaty Elm in particular—became a worldwide symbol of religious and cultural tolerance and an inspiration to the drafters of the U.S. Constitution.

  Native Americans have always respected the location of this legendary event along the Delaware, handing down its story in their oral tradition. They have gathered on numerous occasions at Penn Treaty Park, which was officially established in 1893 as Philadelphia’s first recreational park on the edge of the river.

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  DOCK TO SOUTH

  HEAD HOUSE SQUARE AND A PROGRESSIVE SAIL LOFT IN SOCIETY HILL

  These parts were called “South End” in the old days, just as the northern section of Philadelphia was called North End.

  THE SOCIETY OF FREE TRADERS

  In 1682, William Penn chartered the Society of Free Traders to foster commercial development within his Pennsylvania settlement and maritime trade between Pennsylvania and England. The organization was basically a joint-stock company managed by
a group of some two hundred affluent English Quakers to whom Penn turned for financial backing in establishing his colony.

  The society purchased twenty thousand acres of ground in Pennsylvania and received a charter granting manorial rights, exemption from all quitrents and a choice of waterfront sites in Philadelphia. It also organized and dispatched some fifty ships to Pennsylvania and established a tannery, saw-and gristmills, a brick kiln, a glassworks and a fishery that actually caught dozens of whales (for the oil) in the Delaware Bay. (A beluga whale swam up the Delaware past Philadelphia as recently as 2005.)

  While great results were expected, the society’s influence diminished, and little came of its efforts. The company folded in 1723, in debt and having irritated many Philadelphia Quakers. Their chief complaint was that the Free Society received favorable treatment from Penn as to the best city plots.

  One of those tracts was a 468-foot-wide swath of land between Spruce and Pine Streets from the Delaware River all the way to the Schuylkill River. In a letter written in 1683, Penn described it to society members: “Your city lot is a whole street and one side of a street from river to river, containing near one hundred acres not easily valued.” This territory included high ground overlooking and immediately south of Dock Creek, where the firm set up its local offices and storehouses.

  This knoll became known as “the Society’s hill.” The name continued long after the demise of the organization itself.

  In November 1739, Anglican Protestant George Whitefield preached fourteen sermons over a week from a platform atop the Society’s hill. Several thousand people of all religious backgrounds came from far afield to hear the young field minister each day. His commanding voice was heard by men in boats on the Delaware and even two miles away in New Jersey. Whitefield returned the following April, and in later years, to preach from there and elsewhere in Philadelphia.