Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront Read Online Free

many romantic moonlit nights paddling the length of Pegg’s Run.
    The creek’s later name was derived from Daniel Pegg (ca. 1665–1702), a Quaker brick maker who once possessed much of the Northern Liberties District north of the Cohoquinoque. In 1686, Pegg obtained 350 acres of marshy ground in that region from one Jurian Hartsfielder (ca. 1654–1690), a stray German or Dutchman who held a patent on the territory from the royal governor of New York, Sir Edmund Andros.
    The grant for this land, which he called “Hartsfield,” dated back six years before William Penn’s arrival in America. It was one of the earliest sections of the Delaware River developed by Europeans north of New Sweden, the Swedish colony founded in 1638 along the Delaware, not far from present-day Wilmington, Delaware. In 1655, the Dutch captured the Swedish forts on the river, thus incorporating the Swedish settlements into the Dutch New Netherland colony. This status lasted until the English conquest of the Dutch in 1664 at the start of the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The environs of what became Philadelphia were included in the Charter of Pennsylvania that King Charles II granted to William Penn in 1681.
    A bridge was built over Pegg’s Run in the 1750s to carry Front Street over the stream. It was termed the “North Bridge” because “North End” was the name given to the territory north of Vine Street in the Northern Liberties District of Philadelphia County. The causeway was also called Poole’s Bridge after a man named Poole who had his home and shipyard on a hill a stone’s throw away. There were sluices under it to permit the creek to flow freely. The ground on both sides was low and swampy, and quite a few people straying from the bridge died in the mud.
    Philadelphia’s first manufacturing sector was located along the banks of Pegg’s Run, especially textile makers and leather tanneries. The carpet industry in North America began in 1791 nearby along Second Street, as this is where William Peter Sprague started the first commercial carpet mill in the New World (the Philadelphia Carpet Manufactory).
    C URVY W ILLOW S TREET
    The North End’s industries discharged their offal directly into Pegg’s Run for outflow to the Delaware River. The creek thus became tremendously polluted by the late eighteenth century. Public outcry demanded that it be covered over and turned into a sewer, which happened in stages in the early 1800s. However, industries along the way merely obtained entrances into the culvert and continued discharging their waste into the underground stream.

    â€œThe Philadelphia of To-Day: The World’s Greatest Workshop” (1908), showing the entire central waterfront. Author’s collection .
    The curvilinear Willow Street was built on top of the sewer by 1829. The Northern Liberties and Penn Township Railroad (aka the Delaware and Schuylkill Railroad and the Willow Street Railroad) laid tracks on the surface in 1834. These tracks ran westward from the Willow Street Wharf on the Delaware and connected to the tracks of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad on Pennsylvania Avenue west of Broad Street.
    In the 1850s, the line became part of the Reading Railroad. The Reading also incorporated the freight houses of the North Pennsylvania Railroad, then located on Front Street between Noble and Willow.
    The railroad tracks on Willow Street were removed in the late 1960s as part of the East Callowhill Urban Renewal Area. Hundreds of houses and commercial establishments were torn down in this misguided city planning project that sought to create open space for industrial use. By necessity, the sewer under Willow Street had to remain, which is why Willow Street itself was not eliminated when other streets in the project area were. The sewer still flows to the Delaware at Pier 25, under Cavanaugh’s River Deck. Willow Street no longer makes it to Delaware Avenue due