Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront (6 page)

P
IER
19 N
ORTH
(
THE
V
INE
S
TREET
P
IER
)

In 1907, the Pennsylvania legislature and the City of Philadelphia established the Department of Wharves, Docks and Ferries as a division of the Philadelphia Department of Commerce. The new port authority replaced the Board of Port Wardens, which had regulated Philadelphia's harbor activities and maintained its wharf line since 1766.

Pier 19 North from the water, September 9, 1919. Dave & Busters occupies this pier today, along with a Japanese restaurant at the far end.
Philadelphia City Archives
.

Given broad regulatory power to condemn and improve the city's waterfront, the Department of Wharves promptly began construction of a series of municipally owned piers and other port facilities along the Delaware. The first of these was Pier 19 North between Vine and Callowhill. The city built this, the Vine Street Pier, in 1911 as a 571-foot-long, double-decked structure with an exposed steel superstructure.

At one time the biggest pier in Philadelphia, Pier 19 was first leased to the Philadelphia & Gulf Steamship Company, a firm engaged in passenger and freight service to southern ports. The city also leased the Vine Street Pier to the Italia Line, which brought immigrant-laden ships from Italy to America.

Pier 19 is better known today as Dave & Busters, a dining and entertainment center that opened in 1994. Few people who go there for food and fun know that the building was once a municipal immigration station that processed thousands and thousands of Italian immigrants.

E
ATING BY THE
W
ATER

Other dining venues along Delaware Avenue today include: Hibachi Japanese Steakhouse at the far (river) end of Pier 19, formerly Meiji-En; Cavanaugh's River Deck at 417 North Columbus Boulevard; Octo Waterfront Grille at 221 North Columbus (closed); Ristorante La Veranda, an Italian eatery in the head house between Piers 3 and 5; Keating's River Grill at the Hyatt Penn's Landing;
Spirit of Philadelphia
, offering lunch and dinner cruises; Chart House Philadelphia, a longtime restaurant at Penn's Landing Marina; and
Moshulu
, a South Seas eatery aboard the world's oldest four-masted sailing ship.

Some folks, men in particular, will remember the Hooters of Penn's Landing at the foot of Callowhill Street. This place opened in the mid-1990s on a hundred-year-old ferryboat. Hooters closed in 2002, and the ferry sank into the mud after it was abandoned. It was raised in 2005 and then scuttled off Cape May as an artificial reef.

And old-timers may recall the Riverfront Restaurant and Dinner Theater. It opened in 1974—very early in the waterfront's rebirth—and closed in 1993. The site is now part of the Waterfront Square Condominium complex.

5

T
HE
R
IVERFRONT
C
AVES OF
P
RIMITIVE
P
HILADELPHIA

Striving to endure the dawn of their new lives in the New World, pioneering Quakers lived in man-made caves dug into the muddy bank of the Delaware River. Early settlers wintered in these caves in 1681; about one-third of Philadelphia's population was living underground the following year. The grottos were often on riverbank land that the newcomers had acquired or hoped to acquire from the Pennsylvania Proprietary.

C
AVES
?

The caves sheltered these stalwart men and women of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) while they built their homes close by or farther inland. In some cases, the settlers may have been trying to stake a claim to an advantageous spot on the riverbank at which they hoped to build a house. (Dubbed “bank houses,” the dwellings built on the bank lots were among the first homes constructed in Philadelphia.) As Watson tells it:

Most Philadelphians have had some vague conceptions of the caves and cabins in which the primitive settlers made their temporary residence. The caves were generally formed by digging into the ground, near the verge of the river-front bank, about three feet in depth; thus, making half their chamber under ground, and the remaining half above ground was formed of sods of earth, or earth and brush combined. The roofs were formed of layers of limbs, or split pieces of trees, over-laid with sod or bark, river rushes, &c. The chimneys were of stones and river pebbles, mortared together with clay and grass, or river reeds
.

The local Delaware Indians had long used such hollows by the river for temporary winter shelter. They told the Quakers that the holes had been created by muskrats and were then enlarged for human use.

Settlers constructed some of the caves by burrowing horizontally into the high bank of the Delaware. Other caves were made by digging down three or four feet deep atop the bank and then building a wall of earth a yard high around the excavation, thus forming a chamber half above and half below ground. The roofs were made of layers of limbs or logs covered with sod or bark and thatched with straw or river rushes. Most of these hollows had chimneys consisting of stones fixed with mortar.

John Faris in
The Romance of Old Philadelphia
(1918) provides additional details:

Many of the first colonists were compelled to put up with rude cave houses, built in the sloping ground above the Delaware. These could not have been very different from the sod houses on the prairies or the potato cellars still to be found on many farms. A bank formed the back of the house, while timbers were driven into the ground for the sides and the front. Earth was heaped against the side timbers, a door and a window or two were cut, and a roof of timbers covered with earth completed the whole. The window aperture contained a sliding board which, when closed, shut out some of the cold as well as the light. Sometimes a bladder or isinglass
[mica]
was stretched across. Those who were able to display a small paned window were proud of the achievement and were looked on with envy by their neighbors
.

Watson recounts that the Coats family, Quaker brick makers, lived in a cave at the southwest corner of Front and Green in Northern Liberties. They preserved their little grotto as the cellar of the house they raised at that spot. It stood until about 1830.

C
AVE
-
BORN
J
OHN
K
EY

John Key (1682–1767) came into the world on July 20, 1682, in a shallow cave on top of which the Penny Pot Tavern was later built. The first English child born in Philadelphia County (and the second or third born in all of Pennsylvania), he lived a long life in primal Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin reported the news of Key's death in the
Pennsylvanian Gazette
on July 16, 1767:

At Kennet, in Chester County, the 5
^th
instant, died John Key, in the 85
^th
year of his age, and the next day was interred in the burial place belonging to the people called Quakers, in that township, attended by a large number of reputable people, his neighbours and acquaintance. He was born in a cave (near the Delaware River), long afterwards known by the name of Penny-Pot, near Race-street, and William Penn, our first proprietor, gave him a lot of ground, as a compliment on his being the first child born in this city
.

T
HE
S
PACIOUS
L
AIR OF
F
RANCIS
D
ANIEL
P
ASTORIUS

The most famous denizen of these riverside hovels was Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1720), the German scholar and lawyer who came to America in 1683. He was the agent of a group of German investors—the German Society, aka the Frankfort Company—who were interested in procuring land from William Penn. Pastorius did so and founded the community of Germantown, where he went to live in 1685. (An ardent abolitionist, he drafted the first protest against slavery in America there; the town is now part of Philadelphia.)

Before leaving for Germantown, Francis Pastorius lived in an elaborate cave somewhere near modern-day Front and Lombard. It was located on one of three bank lots that Penn sold to the German Society, together with tracts in Philadelphia County and fifteen thousand acres elsewhere in Pennsylvania. The following is from Pastorius's description of the bank lots and his earthen abode, from a letter written on March 7, 1684, and reproduced in
The Settlement of Germantown
(1899):

The thirteen original settlers of Germantown drew lots for their new homes at this place on October 25, 1683.

In 1924, members of the Site and Relic Society of Germantown and the Pennsylvania Historical Commission placed a tablet on a wall at 502 South Front Street to commemorate Pastorius's connection to that spot. The tablet is long gone, as is the house. Newer housing is on the west side of Front nowadays. The Delaware Expressway is on the east side.

D
EBAUCHERY IN THE
G
ROTTOS

The settlers often operated unlicensed taverns and other businesses in their embankment chambers. These places were the scene of illicit activity of all kinds. Gambling dens and brothels flourished. When families vacated the burrows for better housing, new families—or gamblers or prostitutes—usually moved in. Watson continues:

In 1685, the Grand Jury present Joseph Knight, for suffering drunkenness and evil orders in his cave; and several drinking houses to debauch persons are also presented. They also present all the empty caves that do stand in the Front street, “which is to be 60 feet wide,” wherefore, the court orders that they forthwith “be pulled down,” by the constables, and “demolished.”

How did William Penn feel about all this? The
Minutes of the Board of Property of the Province of Pennsylvania
(1893) disclose that he issued a “Proclamation Concerning the Caves of Philadelphia” in 1686 while he was in England:

Whereas I did at first, in regard of the infancy of things and specially out of tenderness to the poorer sort, permit divers Caves to be made in the Bank of Philadelphia fronting Delaware River, for a present accommodation, and perceiving that they are commonly disposed of from one to another as a kind of Property, and taking farther notice of the great Detriment that is like to insue to the
[Front]
Street by the continuation of them, as well as the Disorders that their great Secresy hath given occasion to loose People to commit in them, I do hereby desire and strictly order and warne all the Inhabitants of the said Caves to depart the same within two Months after the Publication hereof
.

Still, enforcement was difficult, as the following 1687 entry in the
Minutes of the Board of Property
attests:

David Lloyd, ye attorney General, according to Request, in the forenoon met the Commissiones, they consulted about a Method to prosecute those who would not go quietly out of their Caves, it was the attorney's opinion to prosecute them for a Nusance. It was ordered y't ye Messenger should go to Every respective Cave and warn ye Inhabitants to depart the same within one Week, and those that did not should be prosecuted accordingly
.