The 1.75-acre memorial grounds are on top of one of the covers above Interstate 95. This high vantage point overlooks the Delaware River and is a fitting location for the monument because countless Irish disembarked ships and entered Philadelphia (and the nation) along the riverfront on either side of that location. Unfortunately, as with Foglietta Plaza and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the ever-present sound of vehicles on I-95 ruins what is meant to be a contemplative place.
The Irish Memorial, installed in 2003 at Front and Chestnut Streets on one of the two covers atop I-95. Photo by the author.
INDEPENDENCE SEAPORT MUSEUM
Independence Seaport Museum (ISP) at Penn’s Landing explores the role that the Port of Philadelphia has played regionally and nationally in trade, immigration, defense and recreation. It features interactive exhibits and over ten thousand maritime artifacts, including navigational instruments, naval uniforms and model ships.
State-of-the-art exhibits make this museum the preeminent facility for preserving and sharing the maritime tradition of the Delaware River and Bay. The centerpiece attraction, Home Port: Philadelphia, explores the city’s waterfront activities over time. Immigrant stories are shared at a re-creation of the Washington Avenue Immigration Station. A Navy Yard exhibit highlights the life of a longshoreman. The Workshop on the Water shows the skills and heritage of wooden boat building and sailing on the Delaware.
The Historic Ship Zone includes the USS Becuna (SS-319), a World War II submarine that gives visitors the chance to glimpse the lives of members of the nation’s “silent service.” Few World War II subs are on display in America, and this is one of them. The Balao-cless vessel was commissioned in May 1944 as the submarine flagship of the Southwest Pacific Fleet under General Douglas MacArthur. Very active during the war, the Becuna was awarded four Battle Stars and a Presidential Unit Citation for its efforts.
ISP’s true star, however, is—or was—the naval cruiser USS Olympia. A National Historic Landmark, the Olympia was Admiral George Dewey’s flagship in the Spanish-American War and is the sole surviving ship from that contest. After decommissioning in the early 1920s, the Olympia went to the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where it stayed for over thirty years before the Cruiser Olympia Association moved it to the foot of Race Street in 1958. It opened there as a museum before being moved to Penn’s Landing. As of 2011, the vessel’s fate is in jeopardy: the Olympia is set to be disposed of because its hull is rusting badly.
It’s too bad that Philadelphia has lost its shipbuilding and repair expertise. Any one of several regional shipyards in operation decades ago could have restored the Olympia, the Philadelphia Navy Yard being the likeliest. But sadly, even that facility closed in 1996. (A small commercial shipyard is, however, now operating at the Navy Yard site.)
Independence Seaport Museum is housed in the old Port of History Museum building, built by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for the U.S. Bicentennial. Finished a bit late in 1977, the edifice had a rocky financial and political start and sat empty for years. The “white elephant” on the riverbank was taken over by the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, which changed its name when the place reopened in 1995.
GAZELA AND JUPITER
Penn’s Landing is homeport to the Gazela, the world’s oldest and largest wooden square-rigged barkentine still sailing. Dating back to 1883, the vessel is owned and operated by the Philadelphia Ship Preservation Guild. The Philadelphia Maritime Museum brought it to Philadelphia in 1971 to represent the city in the U.S. Bicentennial’s Tall Ships Parade in New York Harbor. The Gazela has been promoting the City of Brotherly Love ever since, sailing to ports around the nation and the world. In this way, the ship acts as Philadelphia’s goodwill ambassador and carries on the city’s long maritime tradition.
The Gazela and Philadelphia Belle docked at Penn’s Landing, an area once filled with piers. Right: One of the Society Hill Towers. Distant left: the Dockside condominium. Center: The Independence Seaport Museum and the Skylink Aerial Tram’s tower support (behind the Gazela).
The Ship Preservation Guild also owns and operates the tugboat Jupiter. Built in 1902 at the Philadelphia shipyard of Neafie & Levy, this is the oldest continually operating tug on the Delaware River. The tug was bought by the Independent Pier Company of Philadelphia in 1939 after having worked in New York Harbor as the Sacony #14. Renamed Jupiter, it helped launch naval vessels from shipyards on the Delaware during the Second World War and continued working commercially until the Guild acquired it in 1989.
The Jupiter is still a functioning tug but it also participates in educational programs, festivals and even boat parades. The occasional flotillas on the Delaware are not all that different from the procession of bedecked barges that transported guests to the Mischianza in 1778.
MOSHULU
Another exceptional ship at Penn’s Landing is the Moshulu, a 394-foot steel clipper that is the world’s oldest and largest four-masted sailing ship. This vessel’s story is too convoluted to summarize here, but a short account of its tumultuous time in Philadelphia is in order.
The Moshulu was purchased for use as a floating restaurant in the 1970s. It was towed across the Atlantic first to New York City and then to Philadelphia. While serving as an exotic eatery at Penn’s Landing, a four-alarm fire broke out in the galley in 1989. Fire and smoke/water damage closed the restaurant for years. While the Moshulu languished, it was vandalized and stripped of much of its gear. But in 1995, the ship was purchased by H.M.S. Ventures and underwent an $11 million restoration.
Misfortune struck again in 2000 when Pier 34 South—where the Moshulu was then docked—collapsed into the Delaware River. The ship closed at that point. Two years later, it was moved to the Penn’s Landing Marina and shortly reopened as a South Seas restaurant.
TRAGEDY ON THE WATER: PIER 34 SOUTH, RIDE THE DUCKS AND THE FERRYBOAT NEW JERSEY
The collapse of Pier 34 occurred in the evening of May 18, 2000. The far section of the pier suddenly fell into the Delaware, killing three women and injuring dozens others. They were all partying at Club Heat, an outdoor nightclub at the end of the dock, then called Eli’s Pier 34. Darkness, debris and river currents hampered rescue efforts, as did the threat of the rest of the pier’s collapse.
The owner of Pier 34 and the manager of the club were ultimately charged for failure to maintain and repair the wharf’s foundation, even after weeks of visible warnings that the deck was shifting. They both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to community service and a year of house arrest. The Reading Railroad had built the pier in 1909 for use in loading coal onto ships.
A more recent calamity on the Delaware River occurred on July 7, 2010, when a disabled Ride the Ducks sightseeing boat was run over by a sludge barge pushed by a tugboat with an inattentive crew. About forty tourists went into the river when the amphibious vehicle sank. Many of these people, including two who died, were Hungarians visiting the United States as part of a missionary exchange program.
First responders included men and equipment from the Coast Guard Station at Washington Avenue. The accident’s location was at the foot of Chestnut Street, a stone’s throw from the Great Plaza at Penn’s Landing and at a spot once occupied by Smith’s Island. The Georgia-based Ducks company had operated on the Delaware without incident since 2003.
The Delaware has always been a working river, as this early to mid-twentieth-century photo indicates. Piers 3 and 5 North are at the center of a line of a dozen or so finger piers. Penn’s Landing was later built in place of most of these piers. Philadelphia City Archives.
Another exciting print: “Terrible Conflagration and Destruction of the Steam-Boat ferry New Jersey.” The Library Company of Philadelphia.
Both of these tragedies underscore the growing tension between various activities on the river. The Delaware is a working waterway. Its use as such has diminished since the 1950s, but there’s no question that sizable ships and barges still ply the waterway daily. On the other hand, its use for recreational
purposes has grown dramatically in recent times, with a huge increase of sailboats, speedboats, jet skis and tourist crafts since the 1980s, as well as dockside clubs and the like.
Then again, any activity on the water is inherently dangerous. Take, for instance, the disaster of March 15, 1856, when the steam ferry New Jersey caught fire in the middle of the ice-filled Delaware. Operated by the Philadelphia and Camden Ferry Company, the ferryboat was carrying almost one hundred passengers, mostly New Jerseyans. It left the Walnut Street Wharf at 8:00 p.m. and was headed for Camden via the canal between Smith’s and Windmill Islands.
Approaching the canal, the boat’s smokestack was discovered to be on fire. The captain turned the boat around and steamed north with the tide toward the Arch Street Wharf. But before the New Jersey could be made fast, the engine room and pilothouse burst into flames. Now without power and out of control, the ferry was pushed by ice floes to the middle of the river. Passengers tried to save themselves by jumping onto icebergs or into the frigid water. The New Jersey finally went under just off the Camden shore. Sixty-one men and women drowned or burned to death on the icy Delaware.
THE RESIDENCES AT DOCKSIDE AND WATERFRONT SQUARE
Immediately north of Pier 34 is a condominium complex called the Residences at Dockside. This sixteen-story edifice was constructed atop the remains of Pier 30 South, once known as the Kenilworth Street Pier. The high-rise broke ground in 2000 and later opened as a rental community with 242 apartments. It went condo in 2006. As with Piers 3 and 5, the Delaware River flows underneath the ocean liner–shaped structure. Dockside is just one indication of the renewed appeal of living on Philadelphia’s riverfront.
The most conspicuous indication is Waterfront Square Condominium, a three-tower multiplex just north of Spring Garden Street. This development is slated to have five buildings ranging from twenty-two to thirty-five stories with a total of 780 condominiums. That such a large, towering housing development should occupy this site would have dumbfounded Philadelphians a half century ago. The Waterfront Square compound totals ten acres, all of it made-earth.
GAMBLING ON THE DELAWARE
SugarHouse Casino is directly north of Waterfront Square. Philadelphia became the largest city in the United States to host a gambling casino when this venue opened for business on September 23, 2010. Lawsuits filed by neighborhood protesters and others delayed the opening for years. This was the strongest and most recent instance of conflict on the Delaware—other than the ongoing debate about river dredging.
SugarHouse gets its name from the Pennsylvania Sugar Refinery Company, situated on that property from 1881 to 1984 and employing over fifteen hundred men and women during World War II. The $355 million casino has brought attention to the potential of other development along Delaware Avenue in that section of town. Another casino was planned for the river’s edge in South Philadelphia, but that project ran into difficulties.
The public clamor concerning SugarHouse disregarded the long history of gambling on the west bank of the Delaware going back to William Penn’s era. When Quakers dwelled in riverbank caves, gambling went hand in hand with prostitution along the waterway. Betting occurred wherever sailors and pirates gathered to eat and drink, and tavern owners operated games of chance in their back rooms to meet the demand. This was happening well into the twentieth century.
Riverboat gambling had been proposed for the Delaware in the 1990s before standalone casinos were considered. But there was surely much gambling on the river for centuries.
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THE DELAWARE EXPRESSWAY (I-95)
VOILÀ—A SUPERHIGHWAY IN THE MIDST
[The] deviation from [William Penn’s] original plan [for the Philadelphia waterfront] is much to be regretted, as had that been adhered to, a pleasing view of the Delaware from Front street would have been obtained, and thus have not only added greatly to the beauty of the city, but have admitted a refreshing body of air from the river, and prevented the accumulation of filth, which, to the great injury of the inhabitants, has, and ever will be the consequence of the erection of dwellings in such confined situations.
These words appear in The Picture of Philadelphia (1811) by Dr. James Mease (1771–1846). A local historian of the early 1800s, he lived and worked on the west side of Front Street next to Pine, so he must have known the story of William Penn’s plans for the Delaware waterfront.
Maybe Dr. Mease wrote the anonymous piece about the embankment steps that appeared in the June 24, 1824 issue of the Aesculapian Register:
We are requested to ask whoever it may concern, by what authority the public stairs, running from Front to Water Street, are in several places shut up—and have been so for a great length of time. It was very proper during the yellow fever; but what has called for its continuance? If this is not soon obviated, what is public property will probably soon be claimed as private. It is highly probable that by some entering wedge like the present, the citizens have been deprived of that beautiful esplanade and fine prospect, which William Penn contemplated in the original plan of Philadelphia.
A few of Penn’s stairwells were thus blocked off during the Philadelphia’s yellow fever contagions of the 1790s. They apparently remained closed for some time after, and this became a matter of public alarm. Some of the stairs were annexed by adjacent property owners, as the writer had foreseen.
But what the writer could not have foreseen was the heavy-handed threading of Interstate 95 through the city’s waterfront. The Delaware Expressway has forever deprived citizens of the “beautiful esplanade and fine prospect, which William Penn contemplated in the original plan of Philadelphia”—more than the construction of wharves and whatnot on the east side of Front Street ever did, let alone the closing or elimination of a few public stairways.
ORIGINS OF I-95
An elevated thoroughfare through Philadelphia’s river district had been planned since 1932, when the Regional Planning Federation—predecessor agency to the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission—proposed a limited-access highway along the Delaware as part of a citywide parkway system. Plans languished until 1937, when a new proposal was issued, this time for an industrial highway dubbed the “Delaware Skyway” that would be built on top of Delaware Avenue.
Nothing happened until after World War II when engineers of the Pennsylvania Department of Highways reexamined the old plans and approved a route for the Delaware Expressway as part of the anticipated Interstate highway network. By 1955, a new plan called for a six-lane elevated artery through downtown Philadelphia alongside the Delaware River. It was revised again as an eight-lane arterial Interstate in 1959.
The Department of Highways started construction of the Philadelphia stretch that year under the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, but it was not until the late 1960s that the highway started to tear a path through the city’s central waterfront. The recently established Independence National Historic Park fixed the roadway’s location on the west and Delaware Avenue set its location on the east.
The Delaware Expressway was pursued with urban renewal in mind, too. Deserted and expendable warehouses and industrial sites were to be removed for both the highway and Penn’s Landing.
WHAT’S THIS ABOUT A HIGHWAY ALONG THE DELAWARE?
Citizens and members of the Philadelphia City Council raised concerns with state and federal officials about the highway’s location in the early 1960s. To assuage growing unease, the Department of Highways displayed a scale model of the road’s downtown portion at Wanamaker’s Department Store in 1963–64. The mock-up depicted an elevated expressway hugging the west bank of the Delaware and supported mostly with earth fill.
Upon seeing the model, architect Frank Weise (1918–2003) confronted Edmund Bacon. He warned the city planner that the freeway would cut off Center City from its historic waterfront and would doom the city’s goal of populating the river’s edge with housing, parks and shops.
Bacon was unwilling to intercede, telling Weise that he was not “living i
n the age of the automobile.” So the architect-turned-civic-activist organized a team of independent designers to develop an alternative scheme. This group, the Philadelphia Architects Committee, proposed an expressway that was both depressed and covered.
Meanwhile, increased public distress helped form the Committee to Preserve Philadelphia’s Historic Gateway, chaired by attorney Stanhope Browne. This group looked to waterfront sites throughout the world for inspiration.
The two committees hired an engineering firm to evaluate the feasibility and cost of the substitute design. The resulting report was published as The Proposal for a Covered Below-Grade Expressway Through Philadelphia’s Historic Riverfront (1965). This study reveals a colossal problem that engineers had to resolve in building the highway so close to the Delaware:
Because the Expressway is to be built near the Delaware River, water from that river would exert an upward thrust on the Expressway, which would in effect be floating in silt. To counteract this hydrostatic pressure, the [Pennsylvania] Department [of Highways] proposes to place the highway upon a concrete mat which in some places would be about 14 feet thick; the weight of the mat would be used to hold down the Expressway. The maximum depth of construction would be 37 feet below the 100-year high water level of the Delaware River.
Builders of the Delaware Avenue Elevated had avoided this problem by constructing an elevated line rather than continuing the Market Street Subway through a city block of somewhat unstable made-earth to Delaware Avenue, which itself rests on made-earth.
Furthermore, the report considered and foretold the issues that became so clear after Highway 95 was completed:
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