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There’s a lot happening on the long and oft-neglected Delaware River waterfront. This weekend, with the help of the Delaware River Waterfront Corp. (DRWC), the Washington Avenue Green and its close cousin Pier 53 received a “Sneak Peak.” Almost 100 people came to see what ecologists, landscape architects, artists and history buffs had been working on since 2010.
Susan McAninley, a resident of the 100 block of Morris Street, has been active with a small group of folks excited about the prospect of a new park space at Washington Avenue and Columbus Boulevard, who have organized into the loose and casual Friends of Washington Avenue Green. McAninley, however, took an additional interest in the rich history of the pier that sits adjacent to the Green, which housed one of the most vibrant immigration stations on the east coast during America’s immigration boom at the turn of the 20th century.
“I heard that a lot of South Philly and a lot of people in Pennsport have relatives that came in on that pier,” McAninley said.
She started recording neighbors’ accounts of their ancestors’ arrivals and made up T-shirts that she used as incentive.
“I didn’t know what the end result would be, but I just kept doing it for a year,” she said.
McAninley made biographies and passenger tags to hand out on Saturday, not unlike many powerful history museums that create moving experiences for visitors with anecdotal historic perspectives.
At the time of the “Sneak Peak,” by all accounts the Friends and the DRWC had hoped that Pier 53 would be officially open. But due to a rough winter after a Halloween groundbreaking ceremony last fall, the pier is on track for opening in the next couple months.
The DRWC is a non-profit and 501(c)3 status steward of the riverfront from Oregon to Allegheny avenues that aims to transform the Delaware River waterfront into a vibrant mix of commercial, cultural and recreational spaces. A Master Plan was developed for years, released in the fall of 2011, and adopted by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission in March of ’12.
Many of the piers along the Delaware have been neglected for years, which surprisingly, is not a bad thing. Specifically for Pier 53, Mother Nature had come in to keep the pier propped up after a century’s worth of fires and destruction resulted in rubble that fostered growth.
“It was unsafe to walk out on the pier, but the thing that had been keeping the pier together were invasive mulberry trees that had put their roots down in the rubble,” McAninley reported. “And also there were all these snails, mussels and fish, which they never knew.”
After initial investigations prompted through the DRWC by ecologists and the Coast Guard revealed that great things were happening at these piers to improve the ecology of the coast, it became obvious that the life thriving around and underneath them should be protected.
“These piers, about 10 or 11 of them, had been returning to nature,” Lizzie Woods, a planner and project manager for the DRWC who’s worked on Pier 53 for years, said.
She explained the three-pronged plan for the pier.
“One was to continue to improve access to the river, to allow people to get all the way out to the tip and to the water. The second was to celebrate the site’s history, which in this case was an immigration station,” Woods detailed. “The third thing was to really focus on improving the ecological health of this area.”
With Pier 53 as a northern bookend and the Walmart-adjacent Pier 68 as a southern bookend (the design plans for the latter get revealed today), the DRWC plans to turn a nearly six-mile strip of riverfront into a wetland park.
“This area was identified as one that would really benefit from focusing on ecology and doing wetlands restoration, habitat restoration, aquatic plants and that kind of thing to really encourage that process from happening,” Woods said of the way DRWC is facilitating the piers’ “going back to nature.”
Of the many piers that are essentially obsolete since shipping needs have steadily dwindled over time, seven of them are not yet property of the DRWC. Four are Bart Blatstein’s (thanks to his successful purchase of the derailed Foxwoods Casino site) and three belong to the Sheet Metal Worker’s Union. But the DRWC has a temporary easement, defined by DRWC’s Mike Greenle as “an agreement between two parties for some sort of movement across space,” to maintain a future bike and pedestrian trail that will run up and down the waterfront.
The pier projects are also meant to draw commercial development nearby, above and below the DRWC’s six-mile zone. With “public spaces that are well-designed and inviting, and that would promote private development to the north and south,” Greenle said.
One such project that’s been proposed is One Water Street, proposed to be a 250-unit apartment complex immediately north of the Ben Franklin Bridge on the west side of Columbus Boulevard.
The coolest way that the environmentally conscious landscape architects at Applied Ecological Services, Inc. are tying together nature and immigration is with the help of artist Jody Pinto. Pinto, who is responsible for the beloved “Fingerspan” bridge in Fairmount Park, was asked to be a part of what would inevitably be the winning design, led by AES’s Tracey Cohen.
In the course of researching and visiting the site, Pinto discovered that her parents’ parents found their way to America through this exact pier.
“I was standing there thunderstruck, and immediately I thought this pier deserves to have something that involves the great history of the pier,” Pinto explained. “I thought about how immigrants arriving coming down the river must have just been anticipating with every bone in their body, and so I thought there should be a land buoy – a land buoy that marks the end of the journey and at the same time it should be interactive.”
A solar-powered light will shine blue at night 55 feet above ground.
“You ascend the spiral stair and there’s a viewing platform that’s 16 feet above ground,” Pinto said, creating a vision for the future visitors who will be able to feel nature and history’s power simultaneously.
Pinto, like the mulberry trees that grew wild for years, sees this project as a way to stabilize the pier for the foreseeable future.
“Our project almost seemed to be waiting for us: to come and stabilize the pier, and in a way, stabilize the history of the pier for the communities of South Philadelphia and for future communities,” she said.
Staff Writer Bill Chenevert at bchenevert@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.
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