Modern hotels on Delaware Avenue—the Hyatt Regency at Penn’s Landing and the Comfort Inn Downtown—are two blocks away in either direction from the old Ridgway House site. Interestingly, all three of these imposing edifices were built on made-earth.
The 350-room Hyatt opened in 2000, although residents of Society Hill Towers tried to stop its construction because the twenty-two-story tower would block their view of the Delaware. (Another instance of conflict about who gets to use or enjoy the river!) The ten-story Comfort Inn hotel was built in 1987 on the site of a row of decrepit commercial structures that had narrowly missed being demolished for I-95 a few years before.
SECOND AND HIGH STREETS
The intersection of Second and High Streets was the next town center of Philadelphia. A Quaker meetinghouse surrounded by a brick wall stood at the southwest corner. This was the Great Meeting House, built in 1695 and enlarged in 1755. Upon arriving in Philadelphia on a Sunday morning in 1723, Benjamin Franklin made his way to this place of worship to take in a fiery sermon (as per his experience in Boston). Not hearing anything at the silent Quaker meeting, he promptly fell asleep. A restaurant-nightclub and a food store occupy that spot today.
The Continental restaurant-martini bar is on the southeast corner. This hip place was a trailblazer in Old City’s renaissance when Stephen Starr opened it in 1995. Its early success catalyzed the area, and other bars and restaurants soon followed. Today, Starr Restaurants is among the fastest growing multi-concept restaurant companies in the country.
The Old Court House (aka Town Hall) stood in the precise middle of High Street above Second. Built about 1707, the building served as Philadelphia’s first city hall, prison, auction house and legislative hall. It was torn down in 1837, by which time the city’s municipal work had been conducted at the Pennsylvania State House for decades.
It was at Second and High Streets that Stephen Girard was struck and knocked down by a horse-drawn wagon on December 21, 1830. The wheel grazed his head, causing a gash on his face and practically cutting off his right ear. Girard was then eighty years old, and his bleeding was severe. But he refused help. Retaining his composure, he got up on his own and made his way unaided to his home on Water Street. “I am an old sailor…I can endure suffering,” he said as doctors cleaned his wounds. Girard died a little over a year after the accident.
CHRIST CHURCH STEEPLE
Anglicans of the Church of England in 1695 founded Christ Church just north of this still-busy intersection. They set up a small wooden place of worship on Second Street. They later decided to replace this with the most sumptuous church in the colonies. Constructed between 1727 and 1744, Christ Church is considered among the nation’s most beautiful eighteenth-century structures, a superb example of Georgian architecture and a monument to colonial craftsmanship.
Christ Church steeple was financed first by subscription and then by two lotteries managed by Benjamin Franklin and other leading Philadelphians. The slim white tower was built by Robert Smith and was finished in 1755, when bells from Great Britain were installed. It pierced the sky at 196 feet high and was the tallest structure in North America for almost one hundred years. John Adams wrote in his diary of climbing the tower’s ladders to gaze upon the new nation in 1776.
Christ Church and its steeple in 1939. The church looks the same today. Library of Congress (HABS).
The “Philadelphia Steeple,” as it was commonly called, could be seen from miles away by seafarers sailing up the Delaware toward Philadelphia and was a beacon that guided ship captains. Even now, Christ Church steeple is a prominent landmark on the Philadelphia skyline.
Christ Church could no longer be an Anglican church due to the American Revolution. An agreement was reached between English officials of church and state and the U.S. Congress and American Anglicans to establish the Episcopal Church in America. As a result, this church is the birthplace of the Episcopal Church in the United States.
The baptismal font at Christ Church is the very one in which William Penn was baptized in 1644. It was sent to Philadelphia in 1697 from All Hallow’s Church in London.
OLD CITY PHILADELPHIA
Second and Market is still the heart of Old City Philadelphia, one of the most historic neighborhoods in the United States. Besides being among the first areas settled by Europeans in the mid-1600s and later the core of William Penn’s town on the Delaware, this was undoubtedly the nation’s first great crucible of commerce, finance, culture, religion and government.
The original part of Philadelphia became a temporary home to the new federal government in the eighteenth century, as well as the home and workplace of historical figures like Franklin, Washington, Adams and Girard. Both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were drafted and approved in this neighborhood. And Bank Row on lower Chestnut Street became the nation’s primary financial district—the first Wall Street, as it were.
The old part of town lost its standing as the city expanded in the 1800s. It became the commercial center of Philadelphia, filled with stores, hotels and light manufacturing. Well-heeled Quakers moved out and immigrants moved in. Many Old City residents left the area in the twentieth century as it evolved into a wholesale distribution center (focusing primarily on restaurant kitchen supply). By the 1960s, the worn-out district had completely outlived its usefulness for commercial/maritime activity, much like the bordering waterfront.
In 1971, the Philadelphia Planning Commission surveyed eight hundred warehouses and other structures and found that over half were decayed, vandalized or unoccupied. Following some favorable zoning changes, most of Old City’s vacant and dilapidated nineteenth-century buildings were rehabilitated. Residents, retail and restaurants moved in where they had not been for a long time.
Today, Old City Philadelphia has over fifty restaurants serving every possible cuisine. Boutique stores provide shoppers with a wide range of choices, including the largest concentration of art galleries on the East Coast. All this is set in one of the country’s greatest collections of cast-iron industrial loft buildings. The neighborhood’s historical allure and its contemporary flair make Old City the place to see what’s new in Philadelphia. A sometimes-boisterous crowd usually does so on Friday and Saturday nights.
A good example of this change is the 100 block of Chestnut Street. It retains much of its commercial look from one hundred years ago, including the Belgian-blocked surface. But the street’s structures used to house mercantile establishments and the like, not ritzy nightclubs and Turkish restaurants (with belly dancing).
Note that there’s no e in Old City. “Olde City” is an affectation that started accidentally in the 1970s.
FERRIES CROSSING THE DELAWARE (II OF II)
Several railroads ran through New Jersey to coastal towns on the Atlantic Ocean, taking passengers to seaside resorts for a day, weekend or week of leisure. The railroads operated ferry routes plying from Philadelphia to Camden and other Jersey towns on the Delaware River. The ferry terminals of these railroads were concentrated near the Market Street Wharf.
The Pennsylvania Railroad’s ferry unit was the Philadelphia and Camden Ferry Company, known far and wide for its fleet of eight steam ferries that transported passengers and vehicles to Camden’s Federal Street Terminal. Walt Whitman, the Good Gray Poet, was a frequent user of this ferry, visiting from Camden to stroll around Philadelphia or to merely sit at the docks and watch people come and go.
The West Jersey Railroad, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, gained control of the Camden and Atlantic Railroad in 1883. Thirteen years later, the Pennsylvania consolidated its southern New Jersey lines into the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad. This is how the Pennsylvania Railroad wound up owning most of the ferry landings near the Market Street Wharf by the 1900s.
A ferry of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Philadelphia–Camden line. Author’s collection.
Delaware River ferries carried people, cars, trucks and busses well into the twentiet
h century. Over 100,000 passengers were transported daily at the height of ferry business in 1925. There was a departure from each side of the river every three minutes during peak periods. Over five million vehicles were carried at the apex of ferry activity.
The Benjamin Franklin Bridge and the assent of the automobile supplanted all the ferries that had crossed the Delaware since before the arrival of William Penn. This happened fairly quickly after the Second World War. The last regular Philadelphia–Camden ferry to operate was the Pennsylvania Railroad’s, which held out until 1952—after 114 years of nonstop operation.
The bridge and the automobile also diminished railroad traffic between Camden and Atlantic City. The Depression did not help matters. So, in 1932, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Reading Railroad joined their southern Jersey operations into one company, the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines. Service lingered on until the 1970s.
The Philadelphia and Camden Ferry’s four-slip terminal’s head house at the base of Market Street was built in the 1890s by the Pennsylvania Railroad. This elaborate Victorian structure with a four-sided, clock-equipped cupola appears in many old photographs of Philadelphia’s waterfront. It became a food market in the 1950s and was ultimately removed for the construction of Penn’s Landing.
The Pennsylvania Railroad’s Philadelphia–Camden Ferry Terminal about 1910. Picture taken from the Delaware Avenue El. Library of Congress.
A lone tourist-oriented ferryboat between Penn’s Landing and the Camden waterfront is a small connection to the past. This is the RiverLink Ferry, operated since the 1990s by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation.
THE POLLUTED DELAWARE
In the heyday of ferry service, as many as 200,000 people would begin their annual trip to New Jersey’s shore towns from the ferries on the central Delaware riverfront. Some would wait hours for the fifteen-minute ride across the channel. The trip was often unpleasant, as the Delaware had earned a reputation by the mid-twentieth century for being dirty and smelling bad.
Upstream industries had polluted the water to the point that longshoremen became ill from the smell of hydrogen sulfide. The shad that the Lenni-Lenape and others once harvested died in scores as the oxygen-depleted river itself died. Saturated with chemicals and other pollutants, the Delaware had not frozen over in a long time, let alone two feet thick as in the days when ice skaters and sleighs had a field day. It was so bad that paint would peel off the hulls of ships. People avoided being on or near the river unless they absolutely had to.
The Delaware River’s industrial saga was much the same as that of Pegg’s Run or Dock Creek (discussed later). Yet unlike those polluted local streams, the river was a beneficiary of the Environmental Revolution of the 1970s, becoming cleaner after federal and state environmental regulations took effect. Philadelphia’s de-industrialization, for good or bad, also helped reduce water pollution in the Delaware. Shad and other fish have returned, and it’s not unusual these days to see people fishing along the water’s edge.
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MARKET TO CHESTNUT
OF ANCIENT TAVERNS AND FRANKLIN’S FRIENDS ON THE CENTRAL RIVERFRONT
Interspersed among the major streets of Old City are a number of charming alleys and courtyards with handsome commercial and residential structures from the nineteenth century. It’s well worth wandering down Bank, Bread, Church, Cuthbert, Ionic, Quarry or Strawberry, all narrow and quaint in the Old Philadelphia way.
THE BLACK HORSE—TAVERN AND STEPS
Black Horse Alley, an extremely narrow passageway a bit south of Market between Front and Second Streets, is an unnoticed alley of special interest. Originally called Ewer’s Alley, it was renamed from the sign of a tavern later in the middle of that city block.
There were two Penn stairways between Chestnut and Market Streets. The northernmost one was the Black Horse Alley Steps, a continuation of Black Horse Alley. It’s likely that these bank steps survived until the building of I-95, for they do appear on a 1962 Philadelphia Land Use map.
Also within the block is Letitia Street, once at the center of Letitia Court. This courtyard was intimately connected to the lore of William Penn. He reserved the whole city block for his personal use and then gave it to his daughter, Letitia, who later sold it off piecemeal. One parcel became home to the London Coffee House. The full story of Letitia Court is part of a larger tale too involved to convey here.
THE CROOKED BILLET—TAVERN AND STEPS
The other embankment staircase on this block was the Crooked Billet Steps, as it led to a tavern by that name on the Crooked Billet Wharf. This pier extended from Water Street onto the Delaware River roughly one hundred feet north of the bottom of Chestnut Street. The narrow space behind the tavern coupled with the wharf’s irregular shape caused many people—maybe some inebriated—to fall into the river and drown.
Alice Guest arrived in Philadelphia in 1683 and began keeping a saloon in a cave on her bank lot facing the Delaware. Within ten years, she had built a wharf, warehouses and an inn: the Crooked Billet. This place was where Benjamin Franklin had his first hot meal and spent his first night in Philadelphia.
Watson reported that “[i]n 1721, the Grand Jury present, as out of repair and dangerous the Crooked Billet steps, above Chestnut street.” What finally happened to these stairs is unknown, but they seem to have been closed in the mid-nineteenth century, whereupon the ground was likely taken over by neighboring property owners. These environs are all topped by Highway 95 today.
PHILIP SYNG JR. AND BEN FRANKLIN’S JUNTO
Like carver William Rush, silversmith Philip Syng Jr. (1703–1789) was one of countless craftsmen who lived and worked along Front Street. He came to America in 1714 and later moved to this vicinity, where he obviously saw Benjamin Franklin around town. The two became friends. Syng helped Franklin with his electrical research and even made the static electricity machine with which the great scientist experimented in 1747.
Syng joined the Junto, the club of tradesman that Franklin organized in 1727 and which became the first discussion and intellectual club in America. The men of the Junto founded many of Philadelphia’s longstanding public and private associations and organizations. They were familiar with the Delaware waterfront, as most lived and earned their livelihoods not far from the river.
Philip Syng designed and crafted an ornate silver inkstand for the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1752. It was this inkstand that members of the Second Continental Congress used to sign the Declaration of Independence and delegates to the Constitutional Convention used to sign the United States Constitution. Now part of the collection at Independence Hall, the Syng inkstand is surely (for what it’s worth) the most important inkstand in the world.
Plans for Chestnut Street Pier, with an inset showing the interior of the pavilion. Philadelphia City Archives.
THE CHESTNUT STREET PIER AND ITS NEIGHBORS
New finger piers were constructed between Market and Chestnut Streets after Delaware Avenue was enlarged to its current width by 1900. Pier 1 South was a covered timber-crib, earth-filled structure that was leased to a contractor for use in moving street dirt and ashes via barges. Pier 3 South processed fruit, grain and general freight for steamship lines trading to foreign and domestic ports.
Pier 5 South at Chestnut Street was owned by the city, which leased it to steamboat companies that handled food and wares. Built in 1899, Chestnut Street Pier had a steel superstructure and, like Race Street Pier, an ornate Victorian pavilion on its upper deck where people could relax by the Delaware. These public places were intended to act as parks alongside the river’s edge.
A footbridge over Delaware Avenue provided quick access to the pavilion from the Market-Chestnut station of the Delaware Avenue El. The pavilion was removed in 1922 when Pier 5 South was modernized to become headquarters for the Department of Wharves, Docks and Ferries. Next to Pier 5 were ferry slips of the Delaware River Ferry Company of New Jersey, a service owned by the Reading Railroad.
Alon
g with nearby warehouses, all the piers from Market to South Streets were removed in the 1960s to make way for Penn’s Landing and Interstate 95 on this stretch of the river. The Philadelphia waterfront had become moribund by then, long past its prime as a commercial shipping district.
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CHESTNUT TO WALNUT
A WELCOMING MANSION (AND PARK) FOR WILLIAM PENN NEAR THE BIRTH OF THE MARINES
Wynne Street, the first name of Chestnut Street, was taken from Thomas Wynne, William Penn’s personal physician and a first purchaser of Philadelphia. Wynne’s lot was at Front and Chestnut.
SAMUEL CARPENTER’S WHARF
Samuel Carpenter (1649–1714) was an English Quaker from Barbados, a friend of William Penn and a first purchaser. He had bought a small lot along the Delaware between Chestnut and Walnut Streets before coming to Penn’s settlement. After his arrival in 1683, he constructed Philadelphia’s first wharf there, along with a cottage overlooking the river.
Carpenter’s Wharf was a notable landmark in the city’s earliest days. William Penn wrote in 1683, “There is a fair key [dock] of about 300 foot square built by Samuel Carpenter to which a ship of five hundred tuns [tons] may lay her broadside.” Gabriel Thomas states in his chronicle An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and Country of Pennsylvania (1698), “There is also a very convenient Wharf called Carpenter’s Wharf which hath a fine necessary Crane belonging to it.” This cargo crane was widely praised in writings of the day.
The wharf was expanded over the years with numerous storehouses and other commercial structures, some of which stood for over a century.
Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront Page 8
