Visions of the Schuylkill, 1884 and Now

by Adam Levine on
Proposed Schuylkill River Parkway. This 1884 view, looking upstream from abou Chestnut Street toward the Fairmount Water Works and Lemon Hill, was drawn by Benjamin Ridgway Evans. If the original watercolor (shown here in a 1930 black and white photograph) still exists, I would love to see it. (City Archives of Philadelphia)

“Is that Paris?” asked a co-worker, looking over my shoulder at the picture above.

No, I told him, that’s Philadelphia. Or at least one vision of how the east bank of the Schuylkill River, from about Chestnut Street to Fairmount in the distance, could have turned out.

This 1884 photograph of a watercolor by Benjamin R. Evans, which I found in the files of City Archives of Philadelphia, shows a parkway along the east bank, a promenade at the river’s edge, and a solid line of what I assume are apartment buildings, all situated to take in the river view. Steamboats, barges, and rowers all share the water, and no riverside railroad tracks mar the scene.

For a century or so after this picture was painted, the city turned its back on the lower, tidal portion of the Schuylkill River, below the Fairmount Dam. The riverfront was given up to railroads and industry, with a wharf for loading barges with the city’s garbage added into the mix. Until 1956, the Schuylkill River intercepting sewer spewed raw sewage, day and night, into the river at about Callowhill Street, and other sewers further downstream added their contributions to the “Schuylkill cesspool.” 

The gradual removal of industry, and sewage collection and treatment both in Philadelphia and upstream communities, helped bring the river back to life, and people back to the river. Today the Schuylkill Banks is a 21st century version of Evan’s parkway and promenade, and a host of new residential and office buildings now face the water, and celebrate the river that the city once shunned. 

Kayaking, biking, running, walking, fishing, picnicking, and just plain hanging out along the lower Schuylkill River today. (schuylkillbanks.org)
This aerial view from 1926 clearly illustrates how the banks of the Schuylkill looked back then. Zoom in to see the many details. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is under construction. The old wooden Fairmount Dam, more than 100 years old, is being replaced with a concrete structure. The intercepting sewer mentioned above is spewing somewhere beneath the garbage plant (with its smokestack) just downstream of the old Callowhill Street Bridge. Below that solid walls of industry line both river banks. On the east bank today, the only remaining evidence of all that hustle and bustle on the east bank is the railroad that once serviced those factories that made Philadelphia The Workshop of the World. Now, instead of a crucial piece of the city’s economy, the railraod’s fenced in right-of-way is an impediment to pleasure-seekers drawn to the riverside, . (Library Company of Philadelphia)

MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST “It is unlikely that Benjamin Ridgway Evans gave much thought to posterity when he made the sketches shown on these pages,” read an article that accompanied a October 4, 1959 Philadelphia Inquirer article that featured a selection of his artwork. “He was an architect, designer and draftsman by profession, and a self-styled ‘Saturday afternoon artist’ by hobby. From about 1845 to 1890, he roamed Philadelphia in his free time, making drawings of scenes throughout the city. Whenever Evans was asked why he devoted so much time and energy to this pursuit, he would reply: ‘For my own amusement.’ ”

You can find more of Evans’s sketches, in pen and ink and in watercolor, at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel University, and the Free Library of Philadelphia Print & Picture Collection, and other places as well. And if anyone knows the whereabouts of the original of the Schuylkill River Parkway fantasy pictured at the top of the page, I’d love to know about it.

MORE ABOUT THE SCHUYLKILL BANKS This blog post from John Randolph, who pushed for the Schuylkill Banks project for more than 30 years, includes before and after photos that confirm how drramatic this riverfront transformation has been.

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