the jerry built dock: or new functionality of our piers

Complicating the definition of homeless, a man inhabiting a Delaware river pier washing a floating dock he’s built.  Once built for massive material transfers, Philadelphia’s pier infrastructure is allowing for individual and secluded points of access to the Delaware River.

 

Gotta be freshet: on floods and the evolving high water mark

[THE FRESHET MARK]

Etchings and markings of nature’s force on the built form are not new.  Markings of river heights are equal parts hydrology, memorial and admonition.  Above is an etching on the south side of the westernmost pier of an ignored railroad truss bridge over the Schuylkill known at one time as the Arsenal Bridge.  The “freshet line” marks the highest the Schuylkill River has ever crested–17 feet–some 3.5 feet higher than the floods of Irene. The United States Geological Survey and FEMA still consider Oct. 4, 1869 a 100 year flood of record.  After this late sodden summer of swollen creeks and rivers, of hunkering down, of anxious portents of meteorological doom, formal etchings like these resonate even more.

“It’s good for the city…”

[DeANGELO BROTHERS CONTRACTORS BEGINNING FOUNDATION WORK FOR NEW FAMILY COURT BUILDING, AUGUST 2011]

“It’s good for the city. It’s good for all the women and children and juvenile delinquents who are going to appear in that building in 2.5 years.” –Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, January 2011

Ruins by a River

Harrisville Paper Mill, a photo by theanthracite on Flickr.

“Because most people are incurably romantic about ruins, Harrisville is the glamor exhibit of the Wharton tract. Nowhere have the Pine Barrens demonstrated more clearly their capacity to obliterate man’s handiwork than at this ghost town. Egypt’s pyramids have survived pitiless exposure to the elements through four thousand years. Many other monuments to ancient civilizations remain intact. But in less than a century Harrisville, New Jersey has been reduced from a prosperous, stoutly built industrial community to a cluster of fast-vanishing ruins and scattered piles of rubble.”

–Arthur Pierce, Iron in the Pines: the story of New Jersey’s ghost towns and bog iron

The Desire Lines of Atlantic City

What follows are a series of photos of desire lines taken from the Absecon Lighthouse, New Jersey’s tallest lighthouse located the northern end of Atlantic City overlooking the once-treacherous Absecon Inlet.  Desire lines are popular paths of least resistance often connecting activity nodes.  In urban places like A.C. with yawning absences, desire lines are often supersede gridded streets as the primary means of communication.  Desire lines figure prominently in the photography of Camilo Jose Vergara’s documentation of Camden, another beleaguered New Jersey city.

[LOOKING SOUTH-RHODE ISLAND AVE. IN FOREGROUND]

 

[LOOKING NE ALONG VERMONT]

 

 

Erie Avenue and Pink Elephants

I caught a replay of American Routes’s Philly show while rolling down Erie Avenue this Saturday.  The Philly-born jazz duo Eddie Lang and Joey Venuto’s 1927 recording of “Pink Elephants” became the appropriate soundtrack to my tour down an enduring landscape of the Roaring 1920s.   The residential, commercial and industrial development patterns along Erie were a product of that bubbly time of easy money: for investments into new broad factories and thousands of quickly built rowhomes.  The street that may have once bounded with the jaunty strains of “Pink Elephants” still hums with a new vitality.

Race Street Pier Noir

Race Street Pier on a misty Sunday morning presiding over a seemingly empty river.  In minutes, though, the High Speed Line clatters across the Bridge with a staccato roar.  We are reminded that this is a place of equal parts quietude and energy.  Almost instinctively, you follow the strong thrust of its ramp leading you into the innards of Cret/Modjeski’s Benjamin Franklin Bridge.  Race Street Pier enables a close read of the Bridge.   The piers and substructure revealing details once only known to stevedores, ferry captains, wharf rats and Wobblies. Try and find the anchor, the great seals of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and other hidden filigrees. Clearly, the park enables a new kind of sight.  This is a hallmark of Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm behind Race Street and its esteemed cousin, the High Line in New York.  Field Operations engenders a way of seeing horizontally, vertically and through the physical forms–the finger piers, the bridge elements, the ships, barges and, yes, the Duck Boats that move people and commodities near and far.  Seemingly empty.  But as the morning mists burn off the river, visitors’ eyes flicker over the endless variety of movement.

The Launch of the S.S Cantigny, U.S. Army Troopship, October 27, 1919, Hog Island Shipyard, Philadelphia PA

The Launch of the S.S Cantigny, U.S. Army Troopship, October 27, 1919, Hog Island Shipyard, Philadelphia PA, a set on Flickr.

Float On: Baltimore and Ohio Car Float Pier on the Delaware

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Above is a brief exploration of the remains of the car floats on Pier 63. This specialized pier built by the B&O Railroad once accommodated two car floats–basically large barges with tracks on their decks. These should be integrated into a pier park coming off of the Delaware River Trail. Like many of the timber crib piers filled with rock, Pier 63 has gradually subsided into the shifting banks of the Delaware. The track of the float pier are only about 2′ above the waterline at high tide.  Birch trees already pierce through the railroad ties.  How about grafting a series of hydroponic gardens in, around and through the structure? The plants could act as phytoremediative agents, purifying the shallow waters and riverbed laden with heavy metals.

[MORE VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP]

Abra Cadaster: Ancient Roads and Property Lines in South Philadelphia

[AN AKWARD POSE. CURBS FOLLOWING OLD PROPERTY CADASTERS OFF OF OLD STONE HOUSE LANE]

In the great marginal fringes of the city, some buildings sit in strange poses. Some are canted awkwardly across parking lots, others seem to straddle ancient fault lines. Silently, they defy the unrelenting rigor of the grid.  They are silent adherents to the old laws of property.

Like any built environment, Philadelphia’s physical world is composite of building culture and legal arrangements governing private property.  In some cases the property in the city is still governed by the legal strictures brought over by William Penn brought the Welcome.  Certainly, the geometry and dimensions of some parcels have origins in the 17th century.   The English legal tradition of metes and bounds to determine property still prevails in law and, eerily, in the built form of the city.

Metes and bounds describes the definition of a piece of property by identifying a series of bounds, or distinct features in the landscape (a tree, a crook in a creek, a stone, a man made reference or a road) and linking these features by metes or set distances.  Starting a point of beginning, a written survey would specify a compass direction and length of run to the next feature and so on until returning to the point of beginning.  For the purpose of legal deeds, a graphic survey would accompany the written description.

Because of the inherent fluidity of the metes and bounds system, roads were often preferred referents for property surveys.  Thus property was organized around the ancient road system of the city much like the French in Louisiana set long property lots in great arcing fans against the sinuous bends of the Mississippi.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, architects of the grid began erasing the old thoroughfares with vigor.  These roads and lanes linked small industrial hamlets to the larger market towns out in Philadelphia County and to the City itself.  They were well descendants of indian paths which dutifully adhered to those high, dry ridges that afforded little topographic variation.  Soon after the city and county were fused in 1854, mapmakers began devising elaborate promotional fictions that showed the grid stretching across the whole expanse of the combined city.  These maps, like R.L. Barnes 1855 citywide atlas and Smedley’s imaginative 1862 atlas showed the neat orthogonal grid extending undaunted through rural regions, what would become Fairmount Park, and down to the marshy banks of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers.

Despite cartographers ambitious revisions, property boundaries still cleaved to the skeleton of the colonial and early nineteenth century road system.  Because most thoroughfares were still “legally open” until they were stricken by Council ordinance, property lines remained fixed to the ancient referents as the grid closed in upon them.  Numerous property transfers over time concreted these old cadasters.

Today, South Philadelphia appears unrelentingly orthogonal.  Only Point Breeze Avenue, Passyunk, Penrose and Moyamensing cut defiantly against the right angles, their names and courses indicating that they were means of crossing the Schuylkill and entering the old colonial core of the city.  But in what was once known as “The Neck”, other roads and lanes spanned the marshy fastland, canals, and high dikes linking numerous small self-contained villages like Martinsville (just behind Ikea) and Frogtown.  Roads like Stone House Lane, Old Second Street, League Island Road and Buck Road meandered through the sparslely populated almost coastal neighborhood of truck farms, sportsmens’ hotels and colonial farmhouses down in “the Ma’sh”.

By the 1880s and 1890s, cheap land and river frontage drew industrial firms to the Neck.   To the east, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Greenwich Point terminal emerged as a coal, grain and lumber entrepot in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  At the very southern tip of Broad Street stood the solemn Navy Yard and to the west along the Schuylkill, the Gas Works and new petroleum refining and storage facilities.  League Island (FDR) Park followed in the 1910s and 1920s, and began beckoning the intrepid residential developer.  Despite its moderate success as a national fair, the Sesquicentennial Exhibition left “improvements” in its wake and did much to induce Philadelphians further south.  But most of the residential infill development occurred between 1930-1950, the relentless grid creating the framework for growth.

If you look hard enough, you can still find vestiges of the old property boundaries set against the long lost road system.

At 3rd and Oregon, the Oregon Diner’s is pared into a pie shaped wedge because the property it sits on was defined by old Stone House Lane.  To the east of the Diner, the CVS and the McDonald’s parking lot further east is angled according to old property lines coming off of Stone House Lane.

[LOOKING SOUTH ALONG THE FORMER BED OF OLD STONE HOUSE LANE. NOTE THE ANGLE IN THE WESTERN WALL OF THE OREGON DINER.]

At the northeast corner of 6th and Vollmer Sts. a series of houses sit desolately amid a school parking lot, their eastern boundary angled in precise 45 degree angles off of the former bed of Old Second Street.

[OLD SECOND STREET IN BROMLEY'S 1895 ATLAS WITH CURRENT AERIAL]

[PROPERTY ANGLED OFF OF OLD 2ND STREET]

And an apartment building at the corner of Bigler Street and S. Darien St. is canted because of the former bed of League Island Road.

[ART. BLDG. CANTED BECAUSE OF OLD CADASTERS COMING OFF OF LEAGUE ISLAND ROAD]

By layering Bromley’s 1895 Philadelphia atlas with current Google streets you can analyze the old property cadasters.  To do your own analysis, check out phillygeohistory.org.