Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront by Harry Kyriakodis

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.
    F ERRIES C ROSSING THE D ELAWARE (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 twentieth 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