Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront Read Online Free Page A

to Highway 95.
    C URVY W OMEN AND C ROOKED M EN BY THE D ELAWARE
    This locale was also Philadelphia’s first red-light district. Prostitutes frequented its hostels and boardinghouses, and drinkers gathered at any number of seedy taverns. There were also ramshackle shops and street vendors who sold exotic goods taken to them by sailors from ships arriving from all over the world. This commotion attracted a diverse group of people—common laborers, privateers, sailors, gamblers and swindlers of all types.
    The area became a center for revelers from Philadelphia and Northern Liberties looking for adventure away from the eyes of authorities. This is because the neighborhood—part of the Northern Liberties District but not Northern Liberties Township—was not fully represented by a municipal government or regularly patrolled by constables until it became part of Philadelphia in 1854. It was that year that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania combined Northern Liberties and other districts and townships in Philadelphia County into the City of Philadelphia under the Act of Consolidation (P.L. 21, No. 16).
    The North End was thus Philadelphia’s first “outlaw” district and had a history of violence in the eighteenth century. For instance, Gallow’s Hill near Front and Callowhill was the site of a number of public hangings. John Fanning Watson, in his Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania , reminisces: “In my youthful days Callowhill street was often called ‘Gallows-hill street.’”
    The following quote from Philadelphia and Its Environs: A Guide to the City and Surroundings (1893) suggests how poorly regarded these parts were by the 1890s and how many people lived and worked in the vicinity:
    The river-front, northward from the Willow Street freight-yards, is a scene of almost perpetual business movement upon a large scale. Commercial and manufacturing enterprise has here one of its busiest seats. It is not an attractive quarter of the city in its aspect to the stranger, but thousands of wage-earners here obtain subsistence for their families. Great factories seem to be elbowed by lofty warehouses; extensive lumber-yards are flanked by rolling-mills and foundries; and in many of the poorer streets, too often ill-kept and mean, there are battered and weather-worn, old frame houses, and dingy rows of old-fashioned, low, brick dwellings .
    T HE W ILLOW AND N OBLE S TREETS G ROUP AND Y ARDS
    The Reading Railroad owned Piers 24, 25 and 27 North, a group of covered finger piers at the bottom of Noble and Willow Streets. The Willow and Noble Streets Group, as it was called, was the second busiest general freight-handling station on the Reading system. These were strictly import piers; the Reading’s local export piers were at Port Richmond, a few miles north. Piers 24, 25 and 27 could process sixty-five rail cars of cargo a day, and about five hundred men worked on them in the early 1900s.
    The Reading also leased these piers: Pier 24 to the Allan Steamship Company, which operated steamers for freight and passenger traffic between Philadelphia and St. Johns, Halifax, Glasgow and Liverpool; Pier 25 to the Philadelphia Transatlantic Line and the Bull Line, both of which ran steamers for freight to London and Scotland; and Pier 27 to the Holland America and the Scandinavian lines for shipping freight to Rotterdam and Copenhagen.
    The Willow and Noble Streets Group worked in conjunction with the Willow and Noble Streets Station on the west side of Delaware Avenue. This was a major railroad freight yard in its day, and a great deal of freight traffic between Philadelphia and New York was exchanged at this point. It’s almost certain that the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia exported hundreds of steam engines to countries on all continents from this terminal. This harkens back to when Philadelphia was the “Workshop of the World.”
    Freight movement diminished in the 1950s