Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront (20 page)

Decommissioned in 1849 and placed in reserve at Norfolk, Virginia, the USS
United States
was seized in 1861 and commissioned into the Confederate navy as the CSS
United States
. The ship was scuttled in the Elizabeth River to form an obstruction to Union vessels, but Union forces raised it. The gallant old frigate was broken up for scrap wood in 1865.

T
HE
F
IRST
P
HILADELPHIA
N
AVY
Y
ARD

The federal government purchased Joshua Humphreys' shipyard for $37,000 in 1800–01. This was the first location of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, the first naval shipyard of the United States and the foremost building and outfitting plant of the U.S. Navy Department for seventy-five years. Its two towering ship houses were the most eye-catching structures on Philadelphia's riverfront for years.

Important fighting ships took to the water here, notably the
Dale, Franklin, Lancaster, North Carolina, Princeton, Raritan, Susquehanna, Vandalia
and
Wabash
, all destined to have a part in the nation's naval history. William Rush carved the figureheads for some of these vessels.

The most famous was the USS
Pennsylvania
(1837). One of nine ships authorized by Congress in 1816, it was designed by Samuel Humphreys, Joshua's son. The 120-gun
Pennsylvania
was the biggest and most heavily armed man-of-war built up to that time. About 100,000 spectators—some on some two hundred boats on the Delaware—gathered to watch its long-awaited launching on July 18, 1837. The
Pennsylvania
eventually wound up at the Norfolk Navy Yard, where it was burned in 1861 to prevent it from falling into Confederate hands.

Another distinguished ship of the Philadelphia Navy Yard was the USS
Mississippi
, launched in 1841. America's first sea steamer and the longest ship then in the American navy, the
Mississippi
became the first steam-powered U.S. naval vessel to reach the Far East when it served as Commodore Matthew Perry's flagship on his historic 1852 expedition to Japan. The
Mississippi
went under at Port Hudson, Louisiana, on March 14, 1863, when its magazines exploded after it was set ablaze to prevent capture by Confederates.

Currier-Ives print of the ship-of-the-line USS
Pennsylvania
, completed in 1837 at the first Philadelphia Navy Yard.
Library of Congress
.

A new ship is customarily christened before being put into the water, a ceremony that involves giving it a name and breaking a bottle of wine on it. Until October 22, 1846, only men had christened American naval vessels. But on that date at the Southwark yard, a “Miss Watson of Philadelphia” became the first woman to christen a warship (the USS
Germantown
).

This shipyard had the world's first floating sectional dry dock, constructed in 1851 at a cost of $830,000. The structure had nine wooden pieces, each one 32 feet wide, 105 feet long and drawing 10 feet of water. When used together, they had a displacement lift of fifty-eight hundred tons and could accommodate vessels 1,000 feet long. Ships requiring repair would be rested on the dry dock's floor when it was filled with water. A sliding cradle was positioned under the keel, and a hydraulic cylinder would slide it and the vessel onto slipways. This is much more intricate than the launching ramps James West employed at his shipyard a century before.

When U.S. naval ports in the South fell to Confederate forces during the Civil War, the Philadelphia Navy Yard stood as the Union's first line of naval defense. It was the main supply and repair yard for the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, responsible for blockading the Confederacy's coastline. Moreover, this yard converted and outfitted more than one hundred warships during the war, including a number of ironclads.

By then eighteen acres, the cramped shipyard became even more packed with the special fabrication shops and equipment needed to put together these new vessels. The place needed to expand, but surrounding development in Southwark precluded this. More significant was the fact that the success of ironclad warships made wooden warships—the yard's specialty—instantly obsolete.

In 1876, the U.S. Navy had moved the facility to open space at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in South Philadelphia. There, a sprawling new shipyard was laid out, and the Philadelphia Navy Yard entered its second glorious phase of American history.

W
ASHINGTON
A
VENUE
I
MMIGRATION
S
TATION

The Pennsylvania Railroad took over the Washington Avenue site when the Navy Yard departed. There, the railroad built extensive freight yards east of Front Street on both sides of Washington Avenue. This was a lively place from the 1870s through the 1920s, with a robust grouping of factories, grain elevators, sugar refineries, storehouses and shipping piers centered on the rail yard and Delaware Avenue.

The Pennsylvania Railroad also opened Philadelphia's first immigrant station at a pier in conjunction with the American Line Steamship Company. The Washington Avenue Immigration Station off Pier 53 South became a key point of entry for Eastern and Southern Europeans and was rivaled only by Ellis Island in New York City.

Between 1870 and 1915, millions of newcomers began their journeys into America from Philadelphia's Southwark quarter. The Pennsylvania Railroad's tracks on Washington Avenue led to Pennsylvania's coal counties and the steel industries in other parts of the state. The tracks also took immigrants toward the American Midwest and beyond.

Other immigrants, mostly Italians, tended to settle close by, thus giving South Philadelphia its special flavor and reputation for being an Italian enclave. Some went to work at the various wharves and shipyards along the Delaware. Others found employment in any number of local factories at a time when Philadelphia was the Workshop of the World.

A municipal immigration station was also at the Vine Street Pier (Pier 19 North). Other privately-owned stations were on the wharves at Callowhill and Reed Streets. These sites are critical for understanding Philadelphia as a major immigration port and for appreciating how bordering neighborhoods became home to successive waves of German, Irish, Slovak, Italian, Polish and Jewish migrants.

In the early 1900s, Congress began funding new immigrant stations around the country so as to lessen the traffic at Ellis Island. The Washington Avenue Station was demolished in 1915 with plans to build a larger replacement. World War I and immigration restrictions of the 1920s prevented this from happening and brought an end to fifty years of direct transatlantic migration to the Port of Philadelphia.

P
IER
53
AND THE
L
IFE AND
D
EATH OF AN
O
LD
C
OMMERCIAL
P
IER

Pier 53 South was the site of a spectacular fire on June 15, 1965. Aided by tugboats, six fireboats and some three hundred firemen put out an impressive blaze fueled by the pier's wooden construction and drums of oil stored inside. Ships tied alongside the warehouse pier were scorched and dockworkers trapped on the far end had to jump onto tugs to avoid the flames. Just like the great conflagration of 1850, embers were carried southward by the wind and started several secondary fires. The conflagration leveled the seven-hundred-foot-long structure.

As told in
chapter three
, what happened to Pier 53 happened to many of the old and abandoned wharves along the Delaware in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. They had timber frames and were clad with galvanized metal, so it's not surprising that they burned so readily. The items they stored made them even more susceptible to fire—particularly arson—if they were little used or vacant.

Other piers collapsed into the river, which is what occurred with the far end of Pier 34 South in 2000 (discussed in
chapter nineteen
). Following a fire or collapse, only the timber poles that once supported the pier's deck were all that usually remained after debris was removed. Many of these pilings can still be seen on either side of Penn's Landing at low tide on the Delaware.

W
ASHINGTON
A
VENUE
G
REEN AND THE
D
ELAWARE
R
IVER
T
RAIL

The Sheet Metal Workers' Training Center sits on the site of the Washington Avenue Immigration Station.

The United States Coast Guard Station Philadelphia is next door. Its area of responsibility encompasses the second-largest freshwater port on the East Coast. The Delaware River in the vicinity of Philadelphia has both recreational boaters and hulking commercial vessels sharing the waterway. This dual use of the river presents unique safety and security concerns for the Coast Guard.

Other ground formerly part of the Pennsylvania Railroad's rail yard here has been transformed into Washington Avenue Green. Built in 2010 on a sea of concrete and asphalt, this is the first public space established by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation. The atypical ecological park includes a rain garden, a “rubble meadow” and floating wetlands. Like Race Street Pier, it provides Philadelphians with a new respite on the Delaware and serves as a tribute to William Penn's desire for Philadelphia to be a Greene Countrie Towne.

Washington Avenue Green is accessible via the Delaware River Trail, a multi-use pathway along the river from Washington Avenue south to Pier 70 Boulevard. To the north, this trail incorporates the Riverwalk path created in the 1980s to connect major activity points along the central waterfront.

The Delaware River Trail will one day link to the trail planned for the entire western edge of the Delaware River. This trail will ultimately become part of the East Coast Greenway, a three-thousand-mile path from Maine to Florida.

17

W
ATER
(K
ING
) S
TREET

A F
ILTHY
S
TREET
T
RIGGERS THE
Y
ELLOW
F
EVER
E
PIDEMIC OF
1793

Water Street was laid down alongside Philadelphia's waterfront in the mid-1690s and perhaps as late as 1705. Early settlers first called it “the street under the bank.” It began as an uneven footpath, then turned into a muddy cartway and finally became a paved—with cobblestones and then Belgian blocks—lane. It was first named King Street, supposedly because goods crossing over it one way or the other had to pay a duty to the king of England.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, communities founded by the English up and down the Delaware River (and in other places) often had waterside streets named “King” and “Front.” King Street's name was changed to Water Street about the time of the American Revolution, for understandable reasons.

R
EGULATION OF THE
B
ANK OF THE
R
IVER
D
ELAWARE

Following William Penn's return to England in 1684, the growing demand for land along the Delaware's edge—and the correlating opportunity for profit—caused the Commissioners of the Proprietary to issue patents for larger bank lots on the east side of Front Street.

While these land grants restricted the height of structures that could be built on the embankment lots, they still ran counter to the policy that Penn established in 1684 regarding the bank lots. Furthermore, the
Minutes of the Board of Property of the Province of Pennsylvania
contain more than a few complaints against bankers who did not follow Penn's directives in one way or another.

Then, in 1690, Samuel Carpenter and neighboring bankers presented Penn's agents with a petition that sought “full and free liberty to build as high as they please above the top of the [bank of the Delaware], which they were not to do by a clause in the said rexive [recited] former Patents.” Their rationale for wanting to “build as high as they please” on Front Street toward the river was that “the more their improvements are” in elevation or value, “the greater will be the Proprietor's benefit at the expiration of said fifty-one years, in the said Patents mentioned.”

The fifty-one years refers to a stipulation in some land patents that required the lots and their improvements (i.e., buildings and the like) to be appraised by two mutually chosen men after fifty-one years, with one-third of the appraisal to be paid to the Propriety on the first day of every March thereafter. Carpenter and his neighbors wanted to get rid of this provision in particular, substituting it for a small sum of money to be paid to the Propriety at that moment.

Penn's commissioners acquiesced. The agents approved the petition and formulated the “Regulation of the Bank of the River Delaware,” an act executed on April 26, 1690.

John Watson recorded that James Logan wrote a letter to Thomas Penn about all this in 1741. Logan's letter read: