Ice-skating on the frozen Delaware in the winter of 1856, near the first Philadelphia Naval Yard. This is an image of one of several instances of such a scene in the 1800s. Library of Congress.
Watson describes the scene vividly. On days the Delaware was frozen, booths were put up to sell refreshments to the gathered crowd; sometimes an ox roast would add to the excitement. Horses were also specially shod for racing sleighs on the solid river, and the course would go miles upstream. The ice could get so thick—often more than two feet—that horses pulled loaded ferryboats across the channel atop the ice!
It’s no wonder that the first steam-powered icebreaker in the world was built for Philadelphia in 1837 to keep traffic moving on the Delaware during winter months. Christened City Ice Boat No. 1, this was the first of a local fleet of such ships. Its original steam engine was made by Philadelphia’s Matthias Baldwin, who later won fame for his railroad locomotives. City Boat 1 cost $70,000 to build and remained in service for eighty years.
PIER 19 NORTH (THE VINE STREET PIER)
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.
EATING BY THE WATER
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
THE RIVERFRONT CAVES OF PRIMITIVE PHILADELPHIA
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.
CAVES?
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.
CAVE-BORN JOHN KEY
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 5th instant, died John Key, in the 85th 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.
THE SPACIOUS LAIR OF FRANCIS DANIEL PASTORIUS
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. P
astorius 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 three lots] lie thus along the Delaware, for it is a wide street [Front], upon which follows our first lot, one hundred feet wide and four hundred long, at the end of which comes a street, then our second lot, also of the same width and length. Further another street and then our third lot. Thus there can be built upon each one two houses in front, and two behind, directly alongside of each other, in all twelve houses upon the three lots, with their courts, properly, all of which front upon the street etc.
I have already upon the first, together with our servant put up a little house one-half under the earth and half above, which is indeed only thirty feet long, and fifteen broad, but when the people from Crefeld were lodging with me, it could accommodate twenty persons. Upon the window made of oiled paper, over the door I wrote, Parva Domus sed arnica bonis procul este profani! [A little house, but a friend to the good: keep away, ye profane!]—which W. Penn read not long ago and was pleased with. Besides this I dug a cellar seven feet deep, twelve wide, and twenty long, on the Delaware stream.
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.
DEBAUCHERY IN THE GROTTOS
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.
The 1680s caves along the Delaware River, as imagined by painter William Breton. It is hardly likely that the caves were so uniform in size and so regularly spaced apart. The Library Company of Philadelphia.
Ultimately, the forbidden grottos emptied. Some were filled in, while others became part of the basements of houses and stores that were built between Front and Water Streets, right on top of the caves. (The width of the strip of ground between Front and Water from Pegg’s Run to Pine Street ranged between twenty-five and forty-one feet but was usually forty feet.) Yet others were converted into arched vaults under the east pavement of Front Street and then connected to newly dug basements.
LEGACY OF THE RIVERFRONT CAVES
The buildings on Front between Vine and Callowhill represent the last bank houses of Philadelphia. While the actual structures may have changed, the historic property lines (generally denoted by party walls) in many cases remain unchanged and go back hundreds of years. All these structures were built after 1850, most using the foundations of buildings destroyed in the terrible conflagration on the Philadelphia waterfront that year (discussed in chapter seven).
But their basements—some under Front Street’s east sidewalk—may date back to the riverbank caves dug out by courageous Quakers in the 1680s. It is fortunate that a group of urban pioneers came to the block in the 1970s and resuscitated what had been a row of derelict storefronts and warehouses. In doing so, they preserved what may be the oldest man-made (or muskrat-made?) things in Philadelphia. Today’s residents use these chambers as storage closets, wine cellars and exercise rooms.
In short, Front Street between Vine and Callowhill corresponds to the last unbroken segment of the Delaware River shoreline since William Penn’s time. It’s a remnant of Philadelphia’s waterfront that has not been devastated by the forces of commerce, industry and transportation.
And what a narrow escape this block had—not once, but twice! It eluded its demise for the Delaware Expressway in the 1970s and then dodged another bullet when the Vine Street Expressway (I-676/U.S. 30) connected to I-95 in the 1980s. Interstate 676 opened in 1991 after years of planning, controversy and construction. Its high-flying ramps did away with many city blocks to the west.
6
FRONT STREET
PENNSYLVANIA’S FIRST STREET AND A KINGLY HIGHWAY
Front Street’s initial name was “Delaware Front Street,” and it was called that well into the 1800s. (A Schuylkill Front Street was planned for the Schuylkill River’s east bank; it wound up as Twenty-second Street.) Front Street takes the place of what could or should be “First Street” in Philadelphia, just as Broad Street takes the place of “Fourteenth Street.”
Laid out atop the Delaware’s western embankment when Penn’s settlement was platted, Front Street was the first street surveyed and built in Pennsylvania. It hugged the river north and south of Philadelphia and became the town’s principal thoroughfare during and after the colonial period.
Delaware Front Street was first a residential street with commanding houses facing the river from its western side. It then turned into a commercial corridor with shops, storehouses and boardinghouses. “Front street was the former great street for all kinds of goods by wholesale,” John Watson stated.
THE KING’S HIGHWAY
Front Street was the main road to Pennsylvania settlements along the Delaware, the town of Frankford above all. Revolutionary War armies, both American and British, used it as the primary entrance into Philadelphia from the north. Right before the Battle of Brandywine, the Continental army marched into the city via Front and then turned west onto Chestnut Street to head out of town. The only way to get into or out of Philadelphia during the city’s 1777–78 occupation was to pass through the military post at Front and Noble.
All this stems from Front Street being part of the King’s Highway, a road that followed an old Indian trail along the river’s west bank from New Castle, Delaware, to the falls of the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. The Provincial Council of Pennsylvania ordered construction of this, the first major highway in Pennsylvania, in 1686.
The King’s Highway (aka Kingshighway) reached New York City via central New Jersey by 1756, thus creating the key colonial link between Philadelphia and New York. It later became the first direct stagecoach route between the two cities and reduced travel time between them to three days. The King’s Highway would eventually extend north and south along the East Coast through several states. It still exists as U.S. Route 13, following closely its original configuration and paralleling Interstate 95.
FRONT STREET TODAY
The construction of Highway 95 resulted in the crude relocation and narrowing of Front Street from Race to Arch and its elimination between Vine and Race. This was a callous act to inflict on a historic street that had once been so critical to Philadelphia as a whole, as well as its bygone settlers and merchants and the great William Penn personally.
Front Street north of Vine does retain some of its early appearance, old-time Belgian blocks and all. It even rises and falls a bit from Vine to Spring Garden, especially as it heads past the former location of Pegg’s Run. This is a manifestation, to this day, of the rolling terrain of the original high bluff on the Delaware River’s edge. Front Street south of Arch is paved with asphalt, but it, too, undulates, particularly as it approaches where Dock Creek used to be.
Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront Page 4
