The Delaware, from Glen Foerd to Pier 68…
Day 4 begins where we’d left off, at the Torresdale regional rail station, with a train that was scheduled to get in at 7:09am.
There’s more folks joining the walk today, and I’d told those who were intercepting us at Glen Foerd to get there earlier if they could, as there’s potential for a spectacular sunrise (6:58am) over the river.
We’re already running a little bit “late”, as the train was delayed, and then another walker joining us at the rail station needed time to pay for parking, etc…
One of our crew that’s doing the entire circumnavigation is antsy, expressing frustration that we were missing the sunrise. I understand this, but remind them that:
a) We’ve already missed the sunrise
b) There’s still plenty of gorgeous morning light and
c) Somewhere later in the day, when we encounter some really special magical moment that is timing-specific as we inevitably will, it will be precisely thanks to this delayed start.
The walk is all about the process, not the destination, and every single detour or setback is simply a setup for the next moment of discovery and beauty. There’s a life lesson in this that I keep trying to learn over and over again…
Glen Foerd is a spectacular property on a unique location: the only corner in the city’s perimeter that is formed by two water borders (where the Poquessing Creek flows into the Delaware River.)
As we approach from this angle, I catch a glimpse of this little sign that resolves a mystery that I’ve wondered about for a few years:
“What on earth is that large rectangular plot with the low brick structure around it?”
A tennis lawn, apparently.
But we don’t walk by it, as we’re on our way to the actual house to meet our friends.
And there are Sam & Siobhán – both residents of South Philly who’ve traveled up together.
They’d met on Day 5 of the fourth annual walk back in 2019, walking the lower segment of the Delaware together. And here they were ready to now tackle the upper end together. With Sam sporting a stylish Walk Around Philadelphia t-shirt, of course.
Note: the door behind Sam is open, which is unusual for the Glen Foerd mansion at 7am…
We’re super fortunate to be welcomed by Glen Foerd’s program manager Dianne, who’s going to be joining us for the beginning of the day.
They’ve prepared coffee for us, and made bathrooms accessible. Thanks Dianne!
We could spend a bunch of time discovering this historic property…
… but I’m conscious that we’ve other friends waiting for us…
… including those two off by the river’s edge.
I feel a pang of guilt for keeping them waiting so long, but it’s clear from a distance that they’ve struck up a rapport and are already deep into conversation, so I accept it as just part of the process – every delay providing a window for something else special.
(Before it’s over, this day will prove this lesson over and over.)
Gathering with friends old and new and our largest group so far, we take a moment to review our goals & Walk Around Philadelphia‘s basic guidelines:
- Pick a starting point and plan your adventure.
- Start wherever you’d like, go in whatever direction, walk as long as you’d like.
- The perimeter can be completed in non-contiguous chunks over months or years.
- Find around the city that suits you, knowing that it may differ from the paths taken by others.
- Stay as close to the border as possible, within reason.
- Prioritize your safety & obey the law at all times.
- Treat everything that you encounter with respect.
- If you encounter an obstacle, simply walk around it.
- Be open to finding beauty in unexpected places.
- Be open to fatigue, discomfort, pain & frustration too.
- Disconnect from tech & communication devices as much as possible. You can tell people about it later.
- There is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.
- Enjoy the walk!
By way of introduction, we all share our names & pronouns, how our bodies are feeling, and an association with the perimeter or the city.
It turns out that Ken has a bunch of childhood memories of this area, and I again love how the framework of this walk allows each of us to be both expert / authority and also learner / discoverer.
And so we set out!
“It’s just straight down the river all the way, right?” – someone asks this and, without wanting to give too much away from my own previous experience, I allude to the fact that there may be some interesting zigzags and obstacles as we try to follow the river…
… just a few blocks downstream we’re forced to detour back out to State Road…
… and then a few blocks later start to find our way back closer to the water.
Bill & Siobhán take the lead, encountering the first of several cat colonies alongside the river…
… and soon we come to some spectacular ice structures where the water level’s clearly dropped significantly.
There’s a fence, but can we find our way around it?
My general approach is: so long as you’re on the outside of the “no-trespassing” signs and the barbed wire is pointing out at you, you’re good, right?
But up here, it becomes clear that we can’t make it past this part of the water treatment plant without canoes…
… and so we turn back…
… and so we venture back towards State Road…
… where already it’s time for Dianne to part ways with us.
Coming this way allows us to pass by some giant pipe segments relating to other water treatment plant renovation work.
(This is one of the many glimpses into the city’s infrastructure that I appreciate during the walk. Later Greg will reference the potential to create curriculum for teachers leading students in this experience… there’s so many lenses to see the perimeter through that the educational potential is enormous.)
For right now, the giant blue tubes make for a fun photo-op…
… and the construction site’s porta-potties provide a welcome relief!
(Thank you construction crew!)
Up ahead is the Fire Department’s training facility…
… where empty buildings provide grounds for practicing life-saving skills…
… and burnt out cars provide another photo-op.
(Bumper sticker idea: “My other car is still functional”)
We can’t resist these fascinating sights…
… but soon continue onto the trail.
These sections of the Delaware River Trail are actually quite confusing, as some segments are accessible via some approaches and locked in the winter time from some other.
Why lock a public park / trail in the winter? I’m not sure.
Someone speculates that maybe the boat launches are closed in order to discourage boating when the cold water might pose a hypothermia risk, which makes sense. But surely we can’t be the only ones who enjoy walking in the wintertime…
Sure enough, up ahead there’s a locked gate at there end of the bridge over the Pennypack Creek.
(There’s a whole spectacular story about this bridge from the first walk, but I’m slightly ashamed that I’d never finished the narratives of that amazing experience in 2016. There’s a writeup of Day 1, and then I just stopped. Maybe I’ll revisit it later this spring, as I’m clearly continuing to invest in this project.)
As it would happen, one of our group might have a key that would allow us to continue along the river here…
… but the lock in question is filled solid with ice!
We decide to take a 15 min break, wrapping some hand warmers around the lock inside of a fleece mitten, in the hopes of thawing it through and being able to continue along this beautiful river trail…
The minutes pass, the birds fly over, and while we’ve enjoyed snacks and conversation, we’re still no closer to thawing the lock and continuing along the trail, so we decide to turn back.
(Remember: every detour & setback is a setup for something else special further down the road…)
Doubling back, I notice this “Embrace the grand” sign at the firefighter training grounds… it’s easy to miss little details like this and so every time you have to backtrack you have an opportunity to spot new things…
… like these containers of “de-icer” at the water plant construction site… They would have been super helpful with that lock! Already, our setback is providing some humor…
Since we’re walking by the construction site again, I pop in to use the porta-potties, and come out to this sight:
This isn’t my finest photograph, but I love what’s happening here: each of these pairs engaged in conversation, bonded in the cameraderie of this adventure.
None of these folks talking to each other knew each other at the start of this day, but now they’ve been walking together for nearly three hours and it’s easy to connect.
In future, post-pandemic iterations of the walk, my plan is to do more of this kind of group curation. What happens when you get a high school student and a pastor and a plumber and a city council person and someone just returning from incarceration and a historian and a botanist and you send them off to discover the city together? What new unlikely bonds might be formed? What new insights might come of such conversations?
Speaking of the formerly (and currently) incarcerated, this is the part of the walk where we go by all of the prisons on State Road. I’ve been here before not just on the walk, but to visit neighbors caught up in the cycles of our prison system….
Every time I walk the perimeter, this is an opportunity to reflect on the many privileges that have made it possible for me to make my way on foot from southwest Philly to these facilities in the northeast by a circuitous adventure path of my own choosing, when so many of my neighbors have made this journey by the far more common and direct route that some call the school-to-prison pipeline.
With the right resources, the walk could be a powerful experience as part of a reentry program. It could also be part of a diversion program that helps people avoid landing here in the first place. I have a lot of dreams for this project, and these are among them. Having seen both 12 yr olds and retirees complete the perimeter through this past fall’s iteration of the walk, I know that dreams for this project can come true, and so will keep working on making this experience accessible to all sorts of Philadelphians.
In the meanwhile, I might point you to the work of Decarcerate PA.
On this ‘dreaming for justice’ front, I also wish I could eavesdrop on the conversation happening here between my friends Bill & Chaz after we pass the prisons.
Chaz was a classmate of mine in 1997, and he’s become Penn’s chaplain and vice president for social equity and community. I recently just finished his beautiful new book The Bottom: a theopoetic of the streets – it’s a powerful reflection on the life of our most marginalized neighbors and weaves together poetry, prose and memoir from his time working at Project Home.
I first met Bill through his work as founder / convener of the amazing social service / radical hospitality operation that is Broad Street Ministry, and now his mission as president of the regional United Way is focused on ending poverty.
Somehow these two kindred spirits had not yet met in the course of their work, and so I’m delighted to facilitate this connection. I also feel kind of funny leading these two pastor / chaplain spiritual leader types on this strange pilgrimage of mine… but then again, I’m just the facilitator here: it’s the city itself that invites us.
Soon enough Chaz has to leave us due to work obligations, and Kathy will also depart at the upcoming regional rail stop, but not before one more photo op…
… at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Maybe you’ve heard of them?
(It’s true, we could have taken Bleigh Ave to Milnor Street & been technically closer to the perimeter… but the group was excited about this little brush with history…)
Since their recent fifteen minutes of fame, the folks at Four Seasons are apparently used to all sorts of random visitors coming by for photo ops and sight-seeing. I’d actually reached out and been in touch with their director of sales about coming by for a visit, and here we run into a dilemma:
Trying to cover ~20 miles a day doesn’t actually leave a ton of time for guided tours of spots along the way. For future iterations of the walk, working with local partners along the perimeter for site visits & specifically themed tours will probably reserved for itineraries where we’re just doing 4 – 7 miles at a time.
From here we continue down State Road, with its stacked concrete barriers…
… and blocks of ‘regular old rowhouses…’
(The experience of walking all the way around Philadelphia has led me to reconsider a lot of what I consider to be “regular”)
And then Siobhán and Bill see a path that looks like it could get us back closer to the river (and thus closer to the actual perimeter) … “We can go down this way, right?”
I love that they seem to have just found an access to the perimeter that I’ve missed in my six previous passes.
Of course, who knows if this will be one of those places where we can walk along the river, or another dead end where we’ll find ourselves backtracking… but they’ve caught the spirit of exploration, there aren’t any signs telling us not to, and so on we go…
We’re definitely back in the industrial lands, with some abandonned seeming vehicles and buildings… and around this corner…
… scrapped vehicles piled on top of each other…
… including a lot of ambulances and what look like postal service trucks with the markings painted over…
We continue on past more graffiti…
… and more scrap metal…
… and a *lot* more mail trucks missing both their wheels and their logos…
No wait, there’s one!
Definitely USPS trucks… not clear why the logos painted over, nor why that one pretty obvious one was left out…
Past piles of smashed cars…
… we continue out of the scrapyard that we’ve inadvertently found ourselves in.
(Funny thing, I also accidentally wandered into a scrapyard up this way during the Feb 2020walk, although that one was further upstream – a sight we’ve missed due to other choices that we made… which in turn led us here.)
Ahead’s a locked gate, but it’s one of those funny gates that if you just Roomba around it…
… you find yourself on the other side…
We see signs for Philly Reclaim, another perimeter-adjacent business that we had an invite to visit, but we press on because we’re still quite a ways up the Delaware and have a lot of ground to cover.
Just beyond this broken fence is…
… a beautiful section of the newly completed Delaware River Trail!
We continue out onto the pier at Lardner’s Point Park…
… a good spot for a little break…
… and a sociably distanced lunch.
Note: I’m intentionally using the term “sociably distanced” rather than “socially distanced” here – we are being mindful of physical distancing for public health concerns in a pandemic, but there’s plenty of room for socializing safely here…
The term “social distancing’ has long felt alienating to me as the covid-19 pandemic has brought with it a pandemic of isolation. I’ve tried to rephrase to “physical distancing” on plenty of occasions, but I thank some neighbors’ sign on 44th St in W. Philly for planting the friendlier compromise term “sociable distancing” in my vocabulary.
Speaking of wordplay and warmth and community, maybe now’s a time to give a shoutout to Bear Hebert’s sweet Social disDancing twice-weekly online dance party, which has been a highlight of my pandemic winter – you can bet I attended at the end of both days 3 and 5.
Resuming our trek along the river’s edge…
… we come across an unusual memorial…
I don’t know what I was expecting…
… but it certainly wasn’t this.
Passing by someone else’s spot by the river’s edge, I could glamorize winter river camping… but life at the margins of our society isn’t an easy thing.
Hugging the river’s edge…
… we come across another spot where someone’s tending to the feral cats, and I can’t help but thinking that more food is delivered to and shelters are built for the cats on the perimeter than for our brothers and sisters who live on the margins of our society.
(Seriously: I’d highly recommend Chaz’s book.)
Up ahead: an impassable barrier – this is one of those places where we have to double back quite a ways to get back on the paved trail.
(Again, while this kind of detour can seem frustrating, we take it in stride. It’s a ‘trust the process’ kind of thing, and it’s setting us up for something special later.)
As we approach the Frankford Boat Launch, we’re coming up on another one of those tricky spots where the trail is sometimes blocked by a locked gate, but only from some access points. Since we’re coming from the north, we’re essentially locked in.
But before we get to that point, we’re accosted by a fellow driving a trash truck who lets us know that the gate is supposed to be closed and we’re not going to be able to get out after he locks it again on his way out.
“Well can you let us out right now?” we ask?
And so he does, and so we carry on smoothly, as the gate is locked behind us. First bit of impeccable timing.
Now here’s where I abandon the group for a little bit and send them off to discover Bridesburg on their own, as I have to take a little detour from the perimeter to get to the convention center for my second dose of the covid-19 vaccine.
As a fairly healthy and privileged individual, I have some qualms about being one of the earlier vaccine recipients. But now that I’m starting to work as a massage therapist, it felt important to get vaccinated in order help minimize risk to folks that I’m in contact with.
I’d gotten my first dose in late January via the Philly Fighting Covid mass vaccination clinic, just days before that thing imploded. I can attest that they never even bothered verifying my qualifications or license (it’s #MSG013959 if you want to check) – I’d simply checked the boxes saying ‘healthcare / direct patient contact’ and been offered appointment slots two days later. This felt like a system that could be too easily abused.
I’d turned down the first round of appointments, feeling that I wasn’t that much of a priority (I’d expected that they would follow up with more triage / vetting of some sort) – but then when a second round of appointments was offered, I decided to sign on up, particularly as some members of my little pandemic pod had some concerns about my potential exposure risks.
Which brings us to now… I hadn’t quite done the math that dose #2 would fall mid-walk, and with the City’s public health dept swooping in to provide second doses to the folks that PFC had vaccinated, this was my only available time slot.
And here’s the worry:
I’d just heard about a neighbor friend having a strong reaction to the 2nd dose and having to stay bed-bound with fever chills & exhaustion the following day, and here I am planning to walk another 5 or so miles today, ~twenty more miles the next day, and ~10 more the following!
At any rate, it all goes smoothly.
The City’s health dept ran a super smooth operation, I was in and out swiftly and rejoined the group at General Pulaski Park.
They’d made smoothly through Bridesburg, and while I was disappointed to have missed this segment with them, I was also happy to give them an opportunity to navigate and discover without any biases of my prior experiences influencing their choices.
From here, we continued into an industrial site…
… sporting our stylish lanyards…
Note: the lanyards, perimeter passports and t-shirts were all important additions to the project this September, as I invited participants to form groups and set out to explore the city’s edge on their own.
As humans walking in public spaces, no one should have to justify their presence, or fear being received in unwelcoming ways – but as we’ve tragically seen in the news, not everyone is always received in the same that I might be with all of the privileges that I carry around.
While I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety and the walk is very much an “at your own risk” kind of adventure, the merch / swag was offered to help participants signal their participation in this project of civic exploration & goodwill.
Again to be clear: one shouldn’t have to be “participating in a project” in order to be received gracefully anywhere in the world. But we do the best we can with what we’ve got, and it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to signal our good intentions, particularly when wandering in the rarely visited margins of the city.
From here the road follows some rail tracks past a giant mountain of gravel…
… and I love the stark contrasts created by rail, stone and snow.
Continuing on into barren tree-covered lands that were probably once industrial sites and before that original forests…
(nature has a way of coming back, always…)
… we come across another one of those inexplicable sites of the perimeter:
How did this lone vehicle get here?
And how did it get flipped upside down?
Some questions may never be answered…
Further ahead, after walking up a gradual slope, we come to a steep drop on the other end. It’s icy, and our safest way down is on our butts…
There is this sudden simple delight in this moment, as we take turns with our improvised sledding runs down the hill…
There is this simple joy in this moment that is fantastic.
We’ve been having all sorts of adventure all day, but this is a simple moment of play.
Could it be that we could all benefit from a little bit more play in our lives?
We continue on onto flatter terrain…
… and start to see painted markings…
(Despite my best intentions of staying unplugged during this journey, I can’t resist the temptation to immediately send this image to my former housemate whose name is blazed across this concrete block.)
There’s more paint here, and looming structures ahead.
We’ve arrived at Graffiti Pier.
As we get closer, we realize that we’re not the only ones here…
There’s someone with a guitar filming a music video or some social media content down there…
(When I was here for the September walk, it was a warm sunny day and the place was packed with folks enjoying the scene.)
From here, we can see the familiar landmark of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge off in the distance… and some new condos spring up closer by.
The colorful graffiti really pops against the contrast of the snowy ground…
… and we wander on through, taking our time to explore…
… enjoying the swings…
… and sharing in more conversation.
We’re finally ready to move on, when all of a sudden…
… this fellow pops up out of nowhere and introduces himself.
Ed is a charming outgoing character, and passionate advocate and protector of the pier. He tells us that he’s the one who’s installed the trash cans, and comes by to pick up all the litter left behind by less conscientious visitors.
After so much time in quiet, isolated spaces devoid of other humans, this interaction with Ed feels somewhat otherworldly. It’s like we just ran into Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream or some such…
For all his exuberance, Ed is also pretty serious and committed to the community. He’s lived in Kensington his whole life, and runs a space called “Last Stop” that is an Alcoholics Anonymous / Narcotics Anonymous clubhouse with meetings 7 days a week.
(I’m curious about it, because this is the kind of place where I might like to take my pro-bono chair massage operation further on down the line…)
We pause for a picture with Ed & his helper Kevin, and on our way out, we’re totally delighted by this sudden surprise interaction.
For all of the spectacle of Graffiti Pier, it was this one human interaction in it that felt truly magical.
As we continue on, more than one walker can be heard saying “That was amazing…” and I make my point:
“Remember how I said that our late start this morning was going to set us up for something else magical later on the day? How every delay and setback was going to lead us to just the right place at just the right time to witness something unique that we would have otherwise missed? Well there it was!”
Second bit of impeccable timing.
Making our way out from Graffiti Pier…
… it’s back to the land of warehouses and industry…
Soon we’ll be getting to the more downtown / residential areas of Old City that most of us are more familiar with…
… and soon enough this very neighborhood will be residential, as condos continue to be built.
One of our walkers makes a cynical joke about how once the neighborhood is populated, Graffiti Pier will be converted to a fancy park, and developers will paint over all of the current graffiti and then hire some swank artists from New York to come down and re-graffiti it.
We laugh, but there’s a knowing sadness that all too often, that kind of thing happens where new development ruins things for communities that have already been long invested in a space.
I keep hope for Graffiti Pier, for I know that there are already plans for the Delaware River Waterfront Corp to buy the pier and convert it to a park, and that the good folks at Amber Art & Design whom I trust a great deal are involved with the community process around this project. Fingers crossed that it is developed in a way that feels authentic and is of service to *all* of the neighboring communities.
Development will keep on marching on, and so do we…
… passing by the defunct power generating plant just north of Penn Treaty Park, which is in the process of getting a major renovation. The contrast of the old dirty walls and the newly powerwashed or painted sections is striking.
I remember when a neighborhood activist had been advocating for turning this massive structure into a museum for Alexander Calder’s sculptures, which would have been pretty cool – but it seems like it’s destined to be more residential / office / retail. Whatever it is, something’s happening here.
I also take a moment at Penn Treaty Park to remember how I’d been here in 2019 for Indigenous People’s Day and what a beautiful gathering it had been.
As we walk the city’s border and see all these changes / developments unfolding along it, it feels important to remember that the border itself is a relatively recent development: this city that we now call Philadelphia lies squarely in Lenapehoking, the land of Leni Lenape peoples.
If you’re interested in these issues & supporting our indigenous brothers & sisters in the area, I might also point you to the Indigenous215 collective.
From Penn Treaty Park onwards it’s the regular old trail through the more frequently traveled part of the city, so I’m not really expecting any surprises from here on out…
… except for that bundled and masked person up ahead on the trail looks awfully familiar and is stopping and giving our crew a look like she knows exactly who we are and what we’re up to…
It’s my friend Kate!
Kate and I have known each other since, well, forever, or at least since I started photographing the CIW‘s farmworker justice protests while she was involved with the Student Farmworker Alliance. And she’d actually walked this very segment of the walk back in 2018.
Kate is a dear heart friend who I rarely get to see… I knew that she was in Austin visiting family and didn’t think that she was back yet – and even then we only see each other once every year and a half of or so.
Running into her spontaneously is a real birthday treat (oh yes, did I mention that today was my birthday?) – and again, one of those moments of synchronicity that wouldn’t have been possible without the earlier delays and setbacks.
Yet again: impeccable timing!
Onwards still – our goal for today isn’t just to get to Old City, but past it, all the way down to Pier 68 / the S. Philly Wal-Mart.
And so we pass the bridge and Race Street Pier…
… taking advantage of restrooms at the Cherry Street Pier…
(This one of the few stretches of the perimeter that has several publicly accessible restrooms. It’s a rarity, even in non-pandemic times. There’s a whole other rant that I could go on about public access to clean drinking water and restroom facilities, but maybe that’s for another day…)
We make our way past the winter attractions at Penn’s Landing…
… and it’s always a bit surreal to be in this more familiar part of town where tourists and neighbors about (even in pandemic-limited capacity) having walked the whole length of the Delaware River through industry and vacant land to get here…
It’s getting dark, but we’re almost there…
… following a brand new bit of sidewalk …
(This was all a not-yet-paved construction site back in September when I last did the walk…)
… One last bit of the trail by the Washington Avenue Pier …
(some of these open plots of land will soon be developed as well…)
… and one last bit behind the Wal-Mart and we’re there!
Our group has shrunken as some of the 10 that started the day with us had to peel off at various points.
This is fine, and it’s much easier to start the day from the rendezvous point and leave early than it is to try to intercept us midway amidst our many zigzags and impeccably timed delays…
Day 4 is done! We’re nearly 80 miles in, which means that this perimeter pass is likely going to be closer to ~110 miles than 100.
(The first year was ~103 miles, but my most recent pass in September took ~120. The route changes every time depending on the choices that you make along the way…)
No more rest days – despite the threat of an incoming ice storm, we’re pushing on for another ~20 miles tomorrow, and ~10 more the next day.
Next segment:
