River City
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| Dock Street |
Looked at from a satellite or a large regional map, Philadelphia appears to have been founded at the junction of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. That's now, perhaps, but the area between the two rivers was a huge swamp when Europeans arrived, so the first Dutch fur traders sailed up the Schuylkill to the first dry land, now called Gray's Ferry. Decades later, on the Delaware side of the two-river junction the earliest settlements were also several miles north, at what was then Dock Creek. The river takes a big bend at the airport, so the slowing of the stream narrowed the channel with the deposit of wide mud flats in colonial times. Apparently, William Penn recognized the value of getting away from mosquitoes, the advantage of higher riverbanks for docking larger vessels, and perhaps anticipated the defensive value of the mud flats which was to be vital a century later. The landscape sort of splits at the entrance of Dock Creek, which is opposite the mouth of the Cooper river in New Jersey, providing convenient East-West local waterways. If you now walk around that area, you can see there is a curving cobblestoned street running up to and around the old custom house, and that's Dock Creek. It once was a cute little harbor for sailing ships, but it has been enclosed in a culvert, with a street built over it. So, you might well say Philadelphia was founded at the junction of the Delaware river and Dock Creek. Or , it was founded on the Delaware opposite the mouth of the Cooper River. And then it grew, eventually encompassing the mouth of the Schuylkill and a good deal more.
Benjamin Franklin was the first to point out that neither the Delaware nor the Hudson is, strictly speaking, a river. The Hudson has salt water to Poughkeepsie, and the Delaware is often salty as far north as Marcus Hook, although with heavy rainfall the salt line can be around Dover, Delaware. As Franklin said, the Delaware could more properly be called a fjord. By contrast, the Mississippi at its mouth pushes fresh water several miles out to sea; that's a real river.Both mosquitoes and fish know the difference without being told, but people can live along the banks for a lifetime without figuring it all out.
"Mosquitoes -- just remember Yellow Fever, Malaria, Dengue Fever -- were a big problem in colonial America, and the junction of Delaware and Schuylkill rivers formed a swamp that was ideal for mosquitoes. In the late nineteenth Century it began to seem sensible to fill in the swamp with whatever would fill it up, get rid of the mosquitoes and the disease. So it became a gigantic garbage heap, delicately called a land fill, and it was too bad for the fish which ate the bugs and hatched there. Perhaps the typhoid fever which was generated from the garbage caused as much trouble as the mosquito-borne illnesses had, but that's unlikely. The net effect was a lot of new land, and a lot fewer fish.
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| Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney |
The Navy Yard was moved from Federal Street down to the tip of this landfill, on an island that became a peninsula. The US Naval Hospital was built there too, but toward the end of the Twentieth Century both of them were closed. On the new landfilled area in the former swamp, was built stadiums. During the great economic depression of the 1930s, Municipal Stadium was built as a WPA project, and its first event was the return boxing match between "Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney (Tunney won). Not much happened in Municipal Stadium except that 110,000 people would nearly freeze to death at Thanksgiving, watching the annual Army Navy football game. The stadium was torn down. Veteran's Stadium, for football and baseball in their respective seasons, was built to hold 75,000 spectators in 1958. It was just torn down. The Spectrum is somewhat smaller, designed for basketball and hockey. It hasn't been torn down, but it is scheduled to be replaced. We now are watching in awe as a gigantic new football stadium AND a gigantic new baseball stadium are being built. It's sort of like the medieval European cathedrals, which were large enough to hold the entire population of the city at one service. Perhaps centuries from now archaeologists will come back to excavate the long lost city of Philadelphia and uncover the remains of eight or ten stadiums at the apex of the city where two big rivers flow together. They will probably suppose they represent some religious temples of the forgotten religion of the region, and perhaps they will be more or less right.
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The Confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers  |
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Google Earth |
