Pegg’s Run, Northern Liberties (Watson’s Annals)
Much like Dock Creek, Pegg's Run (or Cohoquinoque Creek) was a repository for huge quantities of runoff from tanneries, slaughterhouses, and other industries located along its banks, rendering it more or less unpalatable to the general public by the early 19th Century and leading to its coverage for use as a sewer.
Some sense of the state of the creek can be seen in this excerpt from a letter of August 29, 1820, written by several "neighbors of the area" and published in the Philadelphia Journal of the Medical and Physical Science:
"...The present [letter] is to lodge information with you of the greatest nuisance in Philadelphia, we mean Pegg's Run, that putrid deposit of human excrements, corruptible matters of every kind, and every species of dead creatures. This, in time, will be the origin of serious consequences. Now we wish you to take into consideration that a bridge has been built in New Market Street over Pegg's Run. Whether it is owing to an error in leveling the bed of the creek, or to the non-removal of the dirt with which a bank was made to turn the waters, we cannot pretend to say; but what we can ascertain as fact is, that there is a pond of stagnated putrid water, a corruption to the air we breathe, a nursery for vermin, mosquitoes, gnats, &c. so as to make our houses nearly uninhabitable and unsafe for our health."
By 1829, the sewer was complete and stable enough to support construction of Willow Street, which is unique in being one of the few streets constructed in Philadelphia's early history that does not run in a straight line, since it was laid to follow the contours of the old creek.