Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront

by Harry Kyriakodis

  Work to remove the islands began in earnest in 1893 and was completed by 1897. The river along the Philadelphia front was also dredged for the first of several times since then. The twenty-six-foot-deep channel was near the center (but closer to Philadelphia) of the pre-existing nineteen-hundred-foot-wide channel between the Philadelphia and Camden pier heads. (The Delaware is much shallower on the Camden side.) The shipping channel is now forty feet deep in the Philadelphia region, but efforts are underway to dredge the river to forty-five feet.

  With Windmill and Smith’s Islands gone and the channel enlarged as needed, Delaware Avenue could then be made 150 feet wide, and longer replacement docks could be built out into the river as far as 650 feet (but usually not that long). About a dozen new finger piers were built in the ten years following 1897. They were considered vital to Philadelphia’s commercial development, since the piers they replaced were too short for vessels being built at that time.

  The removal of these islands is an instance of the commercial use of the Delaware taking precedence over preexisting recreational uses. Their elimination to redouble the river’s shipping utility presages another mammoth federal transportation–related project about seventy years later: the routing of I-95 through the Philadelphia waterfront. Both projects were the respective superhighways of their day. And fundamentally, they were both implemented to speed commercial traffic through Philadelphia, be it ships and barges or cars and trucks.

  THE BELT LINE RAILROAD

  Besides providing access to ferries linking Philadelphia to Camden and other New Jersey river towns, Delaware Avenue was the primary transportation corridor for the shipping and handling of food and general cargo for the entire city during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All early photographs of the thoroughfare show a horde of horse-drawn wagons jamming the street. The situation didn’t change when motorized trucks took over.

  Two sets of railroad tracks ran on Delaware Avenue since the 1890s to meet the freight hauling needs of the docks and industries along the river, with siding tracks connecting to various facilities on both sides of the avenue. Known as the Philadelphia Belt Line Railroad, these tracks ran about eighteen miles from Port Richmond to South Philadelphia.

  The Belt Line Railroad was chartered in 1889 and was jointly operated by the three trunk railroads—the Pennsylvania, the Reading and the Baltimore & Ohio—that served Philadelphia during its industrial heyday. The line enabled the efficient moving of merchandise to and from the central waterfront.

  Many Philadelphians remember how the Belt Line’s tracks and the street’s crumbling Belgian-block surface made automobile travel on Delaware Avenue perilous for years and years. Not only that, but wagons and motor vehicles also had to share the jarringly bumpy road with steam locomotives pushing and pulling boxcars.

  The Philadelphia Belt Line was never an operating railroad, although it did have track and maintenance equipment and employees. It still exists—chiefly a real estate holding company—and its tracks are still active in South Philadelphia. One set of seldom-used tracks remains in a separate right of way in the middle of Delaware Avenue up to Race Street.

  PENN’S LANDING TROLLEY

  There is talk of using these tracks for a $500 million light-rail line on Delaware Avenue. It would be more for tourists than commuters, but this is nothing new.

  From 1982 to 1995, a private group called the Buckingham Valley Trolley Association ran a tourist-oriented trolley service on a one-mile stretch of Belt Line tracks. Volunteers of the Penn’s Landing Trolley operated three or four historic trolleys every day during the tourist season. The trolleys ran between the Ben Franklin Bridge and South Philadelphia, making stops at major intersections on Delaware Avenue.

  Ridership peaked in 1987. Then, pedestrian ramps over Market, Chestnut and Walnut Streets were completed, diverting foot traffic from Columbus Boulevard (Delaware Avenue). The city government also lost its enthusiasm for trolleys as other activities at Penn’s Landing moved to the forefront. The Penn’s Landing Trolley shut down in 1995, and the trolley fleet went to the Electric City Trolley Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

  “GOODISVILLE”

  Delaware Avenue featured many bars for sailors and stevedores in the early years of the 1900s. Some of them were welcoming establishments where men could take a break from manual labor and escape the crowded living conditions of ships and boardinghouses. Others were bawdy places to which sailors would run as soon as they received shore leave.

  Some of these taverns doubled as houses of ill repute and contributed to the drunkenness, crime and prostitution that infested sections of the Delaware waterfront. A few bar owners raised fighting dogs and roosters for underground gambling action. As the river was prone to flooding Delaware Avenue, dockworkers could earn free booze by helping bail out saloon cellars. (The Delaware still floods the street now and then.)

  It was in this seedy port district that 1950s and ’60s paperback author David Goodis (1917–1967) set most of his bleak crime novels. In the essay “David Goodis’s Hardboiled Philadelphia,” cultural historian Jay Gertzman gave a name to the grimy old waterfront: “Goodisville.” It was a tired industrial area of broken paving stones and worn railroad tracks, populated by flophouses, taverns and diners amid decaying warehouses and piers. Philadelphia’s Tenderloin (Skid Row) was to the immediate east, above and including the Old City and Callowhill neighborhoods.

  The demise of Goodisville, for good or bad, took about twenty years, beginning in the late 1950s. Southwark was cleared for the Interstate, Society Hill was redeveloped and the once-thriving but then-dying central waterfront was remade as Penn’s Landing. Urban pioneers, restaurateurs and night clubbers arrived. Hardworking Delaware Avenue became haughty Columbus Boulevard. By the 1980s, Goodisville was finished.

  Even so, a 1990 Philadelphia Inquirer editorial on Delaware Avenue declared, “The roadway is so damn ugly, decrepit and dangerous no one would want to be anywhere near it.”

  DELAWARE AVENUE VERSUS COLUMBUS BOULEVARD

  In 1992, the Italian community of South Philadelphia persuaded Philadelphia City Council to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus sailing to America by renaming Delaware Avenue after the explorer. Citizens in the northern precincts of the city, aided by members of the local Lenni-Lenape tribe, fought the name change. A compromise was reached in which the avenue was renamed only south of Spring Garden Street. Nevertheless, street signs reading “C Columbus Blvd” were defaced for years after.

  Christopher Columbus did get something else: the Columbus Monument at Penn’s Landing, facing Dock Street. This three-sided stainless steel obelisk commemorates Columbus’s 1492 voyage and the role that immigrants have played in developing Philadelphia and the United States. Designed by world-renowned architect Robert Venturi, the Columbus Monument was installed in 1992 and rises 106 feet.

  The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania paved and landscaped Delaware Avenue in the 1990s. Instead of a rough stone roadway filled with ruts, rats and railroad tracks, the street is now smooth, well lit and ornamented with greenery. Columbus Boulevard is, indeed, a fulfillment of Stephen Girard’s desire for a wide, tree-lined thoroughfare along the Delaware.

  THE PORT OF PHILADELPHIA TODAY

  The tough longshoremen of Goodisville were mostly a memory by the 1970s, as containerization and highway-based shipping had made the original Philadelphia port obsolete. The city’s cargo-handling operations by then had moved to more spacious port facilities along the Delaware River.

  Most Philadelphia-bound cargo ships dock primarily at the quay-type piers at the 112-acre Packer Avenue Marine Terminal south of Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia. Others head to the 116-acre Tioga Marine Terminal far north of the city’s original waterfront. Both of these facilities were built in the 1970s by the Philadelphia Port Corporation, a nonprofit, quasi-public port agency established in 1965 to replace the Department of Wharves, Docks and Ferries.

  Just a handful of workers a
re needed at these terminals to operate overhead cranes that unload containers stuffed with cargo from around the world. (These massive gantry cranes are a bit more powerful than the “fine necessary Crane” on Samuel Carpenter’s Wharf.) All this goes on behind barbed wire and chain-link fences. This is a far cry from when visitors would drop by Joshua Humphreys’ shipyard for a firsthand look at naval vessels being constructed or when prostitutes used to prowl the busy docks and markets along the Delaware.

  A 1930s WPA poster. Library of Congress.

  These days, the Port of Philadelphia is among the largest freshwater ports in the world and one of the most active in the United States. It’s the largest port of entry for produce in the United States and the nation’s chief break-bulk port. It is also the fourth-largest port for processing imported goods in the country and the only American port serviced by three railroads. And Interstate 95 is, of course, nearby.

  The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, created in 1990 as an independent agency of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, manages Philadelphia’s cargo piers and terminals today. The authority’s mission statement includes this: “Nothing is more important than protecting the Port of Philadelphia’s 300-plus year legacy as a major center of maritime industrial commerce.”

  19

  PENN’S LANDING

  FESTIVITIES AND TRAGEDIES ON THE WATER

  Penn’s Landing is so named, obviously, because of its proximity to where William Penn first entered the future city of Philadelphia and to honor this event.

  GENESIS OF THE MODERN WATERFRONT

  The old cargo and passenger piers along Delaware Avenue had become decrepit by the mid-twentieth century. Only six of the twenty-three piers along the waterfront were still in use for waterborne commerce by 1956. Once the foundation of Philadelphia’s commercial development and strength, the downtown docks had become outmoded and a blight to the city. Some of the old piers, vacated one by one, suffered fires that destroyed them. Others, mainly those between Market and South Streets, were removed or filled in to create the recreational area known as Penn’s Landing.

  The germ of Penn’s Landing can be traced back to December 1947. This is when the Philadelphia City Planning Commission released its Preliminary Plan for Old City Area as part of the Better Philadelphia Expedition. An illustration showed a marina between Chestnut and Spruce Streets, a large wholesale center surrounding a waterfront park between Market and Chestnut Streets, and an expressway taking the place of Delaware Avenue.

  Then, in late 1951, Thomas Brown, director of the Department of Wharves, Docks and Ferries, proposed creating a “small and attractive yacht basin and a large recreation pier which visitors will remember” on the site of the derelict piers then between Market and Chestnut Streets. Brown observed that the condition of these docks—most owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad—did “nothing to enhance the appearance of [the] waterfront.” The modest plan was contingent on the railroad abandoning its ferry and freight operations in that area, which it did in 1952.

  The first incarnation of Penn’s Landing. From the Philadelphia City Planning Commission’s 1947 Preliminary Plan for Old City Area.

  However, Penn’s Landing, as it ultimately became, was envisioned in the 1950s and ’60s by Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), head planner and executive director at the Philadelphia Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970. He based his plan on the 1947 Preliminary Plan and his underlying conviction that publicly financed improvements would stimulate private investment in Philadelphia’s downtown waterfront.

  The architectural firm Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham issued the first true master plan for Penn’s Landing in 1963 on behalf of the Planning Commission. The prologue of Penn’s Landing: A Master Plan for Philadelphia’s Downtown Waterfront states:

  The City of Philadelphia has acquired the waterfront properties in this nautical mile and has prepared a comprehensive master plan designed to realize its full historic, aesthetic and commercial potential. A careful balance will be maintained between public and private investment throughout the two main stages of construction—so that the direct income from privately financed elements and indirect (tax-generated) income from publicly financed elements will support the high standards of design and operation essential at this key location.

  An early drawing of Penn’s Landing. Note the unbuilt Crosstown Expressway (I-695) on the left. Note also the mirror image of Penn’s Landing as planned—only the southern portion was built. From Penn’s Landing: A Master Plan (1963).

  The plan included a recreational wharf at Dock Street, a boat basin, a maritime museum and a “Port Tower” at the base of Market Street. To put this all into effect, Mayor James Tate, in 1970, set up the Penn’s Landing Corporation as a subsidiary of the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation.

  CONSTRUCTION BEGINS!

  The first of the rotting ferry landings and wharves to be demolished in the late 1950s were those of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Actual construction of Penn’s Landing began in 1967. The segment between Market and South Streets was constructed on landfill (made-earth) in preparation for the U.S. Bicentennial. This first phase of the project consisted of a marina and a protective breakwater with a promenade on top.

  Penn’s Landing was designed to mirror itself: a comparable breakwater and marina were to be built north of Market Street. If this phase of the project had been completed, Piers 3 and 5 would have been demolished, as would Piers 9 and 11. But only half of Penn’s Landing was finished due to the lack of both public funds and private investment. There’s certainly no intention of ever carrying out the full design, especially with the condo communities of Piers 3 and 5 in the way.

  The rough-and-tumble dock area along Delaware Avenue was slowly transformed into an appealing place for Philadelphians and tourists to pursue leisure activities as Penn’s Landing evolved into Philadelphia’s premier multi-use riverside park. At the same time, sailboats and cruise ships supplanted tugboats and cargo ships in plying the Delaware.

  In the 1980s, the City of Philadelphia built the Great Plaza at Penn’s Landing, a public amphitheater at the bottom of Chestnut Street. Together, it and Festival Pier at Spring Garden Street provide a venue for various free and fee-based festivals, performances and other events. Fireworks are routinely presented on the Delaware, and a seasonal ice-skating rink, the Blue Cross RiverRink, is often jam-packed. What’s more, the Penn’s Landing Marina supports kayak and swan boat rentals. All these activities on the Philadelphia waterfront would have been deemed preposterous as recently as 1970.

  The periodic pyrotechnics at Penn’s Landing bring to mind the fireworks display that Captain John André organized in 1778 for the Mischianza. Plus, the outdoor skating rink is reminiscent of the era when ice skaters twirled atop the frozen Delaware.

  FAILURES TO LAUNCH

  Enhancements to Penn’s Landing have been planned for decades, but all have been shelved for one reason or another. The first proposal was in 1973 for a complex of office and apartment towers. Several grandiose schemes have been offered and withdrawn since then. The most recent serious plan, a $200 million Family Entertainment Center, would have had retail shops, restaurants, a three-thousand-seat amphitheater, two ice-skating rinks and a fifteen-screen movie theater. Proposed by Simon DeBartolo Group, it was dropped in 2002 after five years of talk.

  The canyon of Interstate 95 paralleling Penn’s Landing is what has doomed all of this possible redevelopment. The Delaware Expressway will continue to stifle the central waterfront of Philadelphia for a very long time. With its six lanes of traffic and Belt Line tracks, Columbus Boulevard does not help matters.

  A bridge at Market Street helps provide access to the Delaware River from Old City Philadelphia. This high viaduct crosses over both I-95 and Columbus Boulevard and then loops to Chestnut Street. Its excessive height was dictated by the need to clear the partially elevated highway. Two ungainly vehicular ramps (the “scissor ramps”) lead from Columbus Boulevard up to Market Street and from Che
stnut Street down to Columbus Boulevard.

  A drab flight of concrete steps at the end of Market Street connects the viaduct to the waterfront’s lower level, providing pedestrians a way to get to Penn’s Landing. This tall, spindly stairway can be deemed a contemporary successor to the bank steps of William Penn.

  Penn Praxis’s thirty-year plan for the Philadelphia riverfront calls for all parking lots and other unsightly hardscape at Penn’s Landing to be turned into green space. Whether any of this will ever happen is uncertain.

  THE SKYLINK AERIAL TRAM AND THE “KEYSTONE STATE ARCH”

  The strange concrete arch by the river between Market and Chestnut Streets is the tower support for the Skylink Aerial Tram, a never-completed ski lift–type ride to Camden. Gondolas were intended to have whisked as many as two thousand people an hour across the river at this point.

  The Delaware River Port Authority spent some $13 million building the tower structure and its counterpart in Camden before work ceased in 2003. Controversy had erupted over whether the Skylink was a transit project or a tourist attraction and whether toll money from local Delaware River crossings should be used to construct it. The tram’s tower support was left standing in the wake as a stark example of conflict relating to activity by the water and the riverfront’s overall use and enjoyment.

  One proposal is to make the π-shaped support a state memorial to commemorate Pennsylvania’s founding not far from that locale. The monolithic structure would be named the Keystone State Arch.

  THE IRISH MEMORIAL

  A proper memorial is already located at Front and Chestnut Streets: the Irish Memorial. This striking bronze sculpture-in-the round brings to life the story of An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger) and pays respect to the Irish men, women and children who perished during the famine between 1845 and 1850 caused by potato blight. It also celebrates the millions of Irish immigrants who came to the United States seeking a better life. Crafted by eminent sculptor Glenna Goodacre, the work was dedicated on October 25, 2003.