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The history of the Frankford Creek watershed is sadly typical for urban and
suburban streams: a history of gross sewage and industrial pollution; of channelization
and culvertization; and of flood plain encroachment. While it may difficult
for an observer with a modern "post-Earth Day" environmentalist mindset to
understand how such changes were wrought in good conscience, it is important
to understand that such "creek-abuse," for lack of a better term, was simply
standard practice for the times.
Factories located along creeks for the water power they supplied. Even after
the advent of steam power for industry in the mid-19th century, many industrial
concerns, such as the textile and dyeing houses that proliferated in the watershed,
needed the water of the creeks for their processes. Dams were erected, backing
up the creeks into long mill ponds. Mill races were dug from the ponds to
carry water through the mills, and after the water was used the so-called
"tail race" carried it back into the creek. Pity the poor paper maker, who
needed clean water for his product, if he happened to be located downstream
from a fabric dyeing establishment whose waste made the creek run black, or
green, or blue. Disputes over water-rights often ended up in the courts, with
the winner sometimes simply the factory that got to the water first.
As these factories were located in the flood plain or, in some extreme cases,
almost in the creek itself, damage from sudden floods were a common occurrence.
The watershed was probably prone to sudden floods even before it was developed,
as the upper part of the stream runs in a steep valley, dropping about 400
feet in its run to the Delaware River. But these floods certainly became more
frequent, and more sudden, in the 20th century, as the upstream areas began
to be built up, the percentage of impervious surfaces greatly increased, and
sewers were built that captured the stormwater and carried it quickly to the
creeks. Flooding was also exacerbated by the deposition of sewage and industrial
wastes, and by numerous narrow, low-slung bridges, which constricted the flow
of the creek in flood stage; and by the "tortuous" route of the stream's lower
reaches, with its wide meanders typical of a creek in the flatlands of the
coastal plain.
Use of city creeks for sewage disposal--and, for many of them, ultimately,
as the beds of actual sewers--was also standard practice for 19th and 20th
century urban engineers. Earlier in the city's history, several creeks had
been covered over--"culverted," in the language of the day--simply because
they had become so polluted that they posed a perceived health risk to the
crowded neighborhoods they flowed through. By the mid-19th century, as epidemic
diseases spread and providing proper sewerage and drainage became a subject
of great concern, city engineers began planning the culverting of creeks in
advance of development.
As early as 1853, Philadelphia's City Surveyor, Samuel Kneass, acknowledged
that natural watersheds would have to be utilized to provide proper drainage
for the city. In the 1880s, when the City engineers drew up their preliminary
drainage maps for Philadelphia's 129 square miles, converting many of the
city's smaller streams into sewers was an integral part of the plan.
By doing this work in advance of development, they hoped to solve several
problems with a single large project. First, they hoped to avoid the nuisance--to
both health and aesthetics--of having a polluted creek flowing through a populated
district. They knew these creeks would become polluted once the areas around
them were developed, as standard practice was to have branch sewers flow downhill
into the nearest stream.
Second, they hoped to save money, in a number of ways. Sewage, being mostly
liquid, flows most cheaply by gravity. Pumping sewage uphill is expensive
(in terms of fuel costs) and (if the pump breaks down) unreliable. Creeks
naturally followed the lowest point of the surrounding terrain, and by placing
sewers in creek valleys the engineers automatically got the gravity flow they
needed. This placement also meant that the cost of excavation was, for the
most part, avoided. And once the valleys were filled in--in some areas of
the Wingohocking valley, more than 40 feet of fill was used above the pipe--they
avoided the cost of building a bridge each time a main street crossed the
creek.
Finally, building sewers in advance of development meant that the engineers
had more freedom in their designs, and since most of the land the sewers were
traversing was undeveloped, the cost of paying out land damages would be less.
Often, building a sewer in a creek bed was to the advantage of private property
owners, especially in areas of the City where the grid system prevailed. A
piece of land with a creek cutting through it was difficult to subdivide into
regular slices. With the creek in a sewer, and the rectangular grid laid over
the valley, real estate speculators could divide their property into the tightly-fitted
rectangular lots so common throughout Philadelphia. Since the streets were
built and graded on top of the sewers, and often water and gas lines were
put in as well, the developers had a ready-made infrastructure that tended
to speed up the sales of their lots. The City, in return, could count on a
quick return on its investment in infrastructure from the resulting increase
in tax revenues from the new buildings.
But something is missing from the above picture: Sewage treatment. All of
the sewers built in creeks simply emptied into larger streams, which eventually
emptied into either the Delaware or Schuylkill rivers. This lack of sewage
treatment was not because of lack of knowledge, but more a matter of lack
of money, or the political will to spend the huge amount that would have been
needed to accomplish it. As early as 1866 Strickland Kneass, the City's Chief
Engineer & Surveyor (and a younger brother of the aforementioned Samuel H.
Kneass), wrote in his annual report that dumping of raw sewage could not continue
indefinitely, and that some method of purification would have to eventually
be implemented. An interceptor sewer was built in the Schuylkill Watershed
above the Fairmount Water Works in the late 1800s, collecting the sewage that
would have flowed into the water supply from Manayunk and other northwestern
city areas. But this sewage was not treated: instead, it was simply dumped
into the Schuylkill below the Fairmount Dam.
The State forced the City's hand in 1905 with the passage of a law protecting
the waters of the Commonwealth from pollution. The City worked for the next
nine years, researching various methods of sewage treatment, and published
its Report on the Collection and Treatment of the Sewage of the City
of Philadelphia in 1914. Work on the system of collectors and the first
treatment plant, in Northeast Philadelphia near the mouth of Frankford Creek,
had just begun when the U.S. entered World War I and all labor and material
were diverted into the war effort. The Northeast Plant opened in 1923, treating
about 25 million gallons per day from an interceptor that kept the flow of
the Wingohocking out of Frankford Creek. Various interceptor extensions in
the Tacony Frankford watershed were undertaken throughout the 1920s, but the
onset of the Great Depression put an end to most public works for most of
the 1930s. From the Depression, the City and country went straight into war
production. With the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941, labor and material
were again strictly regulated, and little work on the sewerage infrastructure
was accomplished during the war years. By then the lower Schuylkill had become
nothing more than an open cesspool which, if the wind was right (or wrong),
could be smelled at City Hall. The water in the Delaware, a major port during
the war, was so rife with hydrogen sulfide gas that it sickened seasoned sailors,
discolored the paint on ships, and corroded any metal along the waterfront--buildings,
the brass on ships, even silver coins in a longshoreman's pocket.
Several times during World War II, the City applied for Federal aid to complete
the sewage treatment project and to aid with flood control in the Tacony-Frankford
watershed, but to no avail. A charge for use of the sewers, called a sewer
rent, was twice struck down as unconstitutional before finally being
declared valid by the State Supreme Court in 1945. The income from this rent
allowed the City to borrow the needed money to finally complete the long-delayed
sewage disposal and flood control projects. The Northeast Plant was completely
revamped, and the Southeast and Southwest Plants quickly followed, all of
them opened in the early 1950s. The completion of the collector, or interceptor
sewers, took another dozen years to complete, with the last link in place
by 1966.
In the post-war years, the City finally dealt with the problem of flooding
along Frankford Creek. Following the recommendations in a 1947 report
from Knappen Engineering Co., the creek was diverted into a concrete
channel south of Juniata Park, where a cut off was made across a constricting
oxbow. The creek was covered over in one stretch near Leiper Street. In
the final phase, completed in 1956, the flow was diverted into a channel
that went straight to the Delaware, bypassing the long bend in the natural
course that had carried the creek through Bridesburg and past the Frankford
Arsenal. In part of the original creek bed a new sewer was built, and
then most of the channel above Bridge Street was filled in. Considering
the history of creeks and sewers in Philadelphia, this was a most fitting
ending.
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