Today, Philadelphia’s public swimming pools dominate the water recreation space. But for centuries, it was the city’s rivers, lakes, and creeks that residents flocked to in the summertime.
According to “Benjamin Franklin, Swimmer,” a 2021 book chronicling this lesser-known passion of Philadelphia’s favorite founding father, historical records suggest Franklin first learned to swim in the Schuylkill River, well before a modern-day prohibition went into effect. A century later came poet Walt Whitman’s numerous musings on the Delaware River and its natural beauty. And while Thomas Eakins’ famous paintings of rowers in Philadelphia’s waterways from the same era would look familiar to anyone passing by Boathouse Row today, other historical depictions would not.
For example, a colorful account of an impromptu swimming race held in 1875 by the “Schuylkill Navy” in the river near Manayunk’s Flat Rock Dam, tells the story of the winner receiving a gold medal and the loser getting one made out of cowhide.
Newspaper photos from 1947 show two boys near a waterfall in Pennypack Creek, with a caption noting “several supervised swimming holes” dotted its course through Northeast Philadelphia — an amenity also available at Cobbs Creek into the 1950s.
Two years after that, a photograph was taken of four rowboats, one helmed by a quartet of women in white dresses and hair ribbons, making their way up a flat stretch of the Wissahickon Creek.
And then there’s this, perhaps the grandest account of the relationship that once existed between Philadelphians and their waterways: a Philadelphia Inquirer snippet from July 1927 noting, in the midst of a heat wave that had killed at least nine across the city, an estimated 6,000 people descended on what is now FDR Park’s lake on a single day for a refreshing dip.
“It was a great day for the one-piece bathing suit,” the notice quipped.
Other records from that era tell of a love affair between the city’s elected officials and its major waterways. A 1920 Inquirer article announced passage of a City Council ordinance providing $48,000 ($772,000 in today’s dollars) to dredge the Schuylkill and establish a “public bathing beach,” located between the Fairmount Dam and a public boathouse. The same edition quotes Mayor J. Hampton Moore envisioning such public amenities stretching from FDR to the Upper Schuylkill, over the objections of councilmembers who found the prospect too expensive.
“It is my expectation to continue the bathing beach agitation until we have facilities uptown, downtown, and on the Schuylkill to give the children and adults who wish to wade and bathe a chance to do so,” Moore told reporters. “They do it in Boston, in Chicago, Washington and other large cities and we ought to do it here.”
But this sentiment gave way by the mid-20th century, coinciding with an increase in the pollution of urban waterways. News reports in 1963 announced a proposed City Council ordinance to ban swimming in the city’s rivers and their tributaries, citing Health Department measurements of harmful levels of bacteria and other pollutants.
“In addition, strong currents, deep holes, and other hazards make most of the old riverfront ‘swimming holes’ undesirable for public use,” read an editorial in The Inquirer supporting the proposed ban. The next year, a story in the same paper reported that City Council opted to instead place signage along the waterways warning of their contamination, as a subcommittee determined a ban and any subsequent arrests were “of doubtful constitutionality.”
Indeed, navigable waterways such as the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers are technically under federal jurisdiction. Nevertheless, current regulations of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, which manages the city-owned land through which the vast majority of the city’s waterways can be accessed, contain an explicit policy that “no individual may bathe, swim, or wade in any waterway or body of water in or at any Parks and Recreation Facility.”
Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, a nonprofit focused on cleaning up waterways, believes Philadelphia, “always … a river city,” took a wrong turn when creeks began to be paved over and industrial pollution was allowed to fester.
“It was only when we polluted it in the name of commerce that we lost that relationship,” he said.
But not everyone is staying out of the water.
This is the second installment in a multi-part story collaboration between the Chestnut Hill Local, GRID Magazine, and the Delaware River Currents, produced with the support of the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative, a coalition of more than 30 local newsrooms doing solutions reporting on things that affect daily life. Follow the Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative at @PHLJournoCollab.
