Drawing Dock Creek

by Adam Levine on

This post first appeared on PhillyH2o in 2010.

An Art Installation by Winifred Lutz
in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia

Winifred Lutz’s installation, more fully explained and illustrated in the slideshow PDF linked below, was one of several water-related projects commissioned by the American Philosophical Society Museum in 2008, culminating in a “Water Walk Weekend” on September 20 and 21.

Black-and-white image showing white text on a black background
Click the image for a PDF of the artist’s statement, a description, and photographs of the Winifred Lutz installation
Color image showing lines drawn on grass, a road, a small underpass, trees and some caption text
Click above to view the APS brochure for the event, which includes a map of historic Dock Creek

To accompany Winifred’s work, the APS created a brochure that has an excellent historic map of Dock Creek and vicinity. Performance artist Brett Keyser created a fascinating piece, TANN, HORNS, & DEAD DOGS: Tales of Civic Effluvia, related to Dock Creek, which used Winifred’s installation as his outdoor stage and set. And even I got into the act, developing a 20 minute version of my Creek to Sewer lecture and presenting it seven times to more than 150 people over the weekend.

Color reproduction of a photo of a man's head with the mouth open with colorful effluvia surrounding it
Poster for Brett Keyser’s performance piece, Tann, Horns & Dead Dogs

The week before, I also got to take a walk in a sewer with a newspaper reporter and photographer to help publicize the weekend, an underground tour that is the subject of this piece about my second trek Down Under, into the sewers of Philadelphia.

Finally, this is as good a place as any to post this drawing of what is mislabeled the Dock Street Sewer, as it looked when a section was unearthed in 1962.

This 1962 drawing, by John D. Milner, shows a section of the Dock Creek Sewer that was excavated as part of an urban renewal project Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood. Milner has since become one of the region’s outstanding architects specializing in historic preservation. (Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress)

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