This article is part of Archival Storytelling, an ongoing series on WaterHistoryPHL that examines some lesser-known stories from the City’s long and varied history. Watch a video from PWD Historian Adam Levine in which he talks about how he does his research.
That “every picture tells a story” is an old cliché. But for me, after years of examining and cataloging thousands of photos as the archivist for the Philadelphia Water Department, I have found this cliché to be mostly true. Of course, you can make up stories about any picture, but I prefer to do a little research – in PWD records, old maps, old newspapers, and any number of other sources that I think might shed some light on a subject – so I can tell a true story.
I found these photographs recently going through old boxes of construction files in storage at one of the city’s water pollution control plants. It’s one in a series of images; the full gallery can be found here. Part of their story was told in the file folder in which I found them.
On November 20, 1977, a sewer 11 feet high and 9.5 feet wide collapsed at the intersection of Sydenham and Dauphin streets in North Philadelphia, taking the intersection down with it. Starting on November 23 and finishing up on December 2, a large crew from D. & C. Spinosa Company, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania – working for the city under emergency repair contract E-6517 – shored up the hole with wooden sheathing and built barricades at street level which would normally have prevented a scene like the one shown here.
The hole remained open for a couple of months as PWD engineers drafted plans for the sewer’s replacement. But on January 15, 1978, before that rehab project could begin, Sam Oliphant, who lived nearby, managed to drive his 1972 Oldsmobile Toronado right through the barricade.
Unlike pictures I’ve seen of similar incidents, in which the vehicle does a nosedive into the hole, the Toronado had enough speed to jump the gap and suspend itself between two steel H-beams. A story about the incident, by Philadelphia Daily News columnist Pete Dexter, ran, along with a photograph of the car, under the headline, “Nobody Ever Said Parking in the City Was Easy.”
The accident happened on Super Bowl Sunday, just before halftime in the Cowboys-Broncos matchup. Oliphant told Dexter that he had only had one beer, and that someone must have slipped him a mickey, because he had no memory of the accident. “It made kind of a THOMP sound,” George Ray, owner of the funeral home overlooking the intersection, told Dexter. “I looked out and there he was, sitting inside, people were gathering around pointing.”
“Neighbors called the Water Department, who called the police, who called the Fire Department,” Dexter’s story continued. “‘The officer was very nice to me,’ Oliphant said. ‘He put a board across so I could get out. I hate to think of what would have happened if I’d made a mistake and stepped out before he got there. There’s a sewer running through the bottom of that cut. They’d have never found me; I’d be floating out to the Delaware River.”
The bottom of this section of sewer was more than 25 feet below the street, and Oliphant was correct: after many twists and turns, it did lead to the Delaware. The sewer was part of the large system of pipes built to capture Cohocksink Creek and its tributaries, starting in the late 1840s and continuing into the early 20th century. The creek, once a prominent feature of the landscape, can be traced on old maps – one part of the stream ran right under this intersection – but today it only exists on the city’s sewer maps.
Ray, whose funeral home is now run by Nix & Nix Funeral Homes Inc., complained to Dexter that having a car hanging over the chasm was hurting his business. “I will tell you, volume has been slightly off this year, and having the gentleman’s car hanging there over the hole does not increase the dignity of the premises.”