Washington Avenue Green

Washington Avenue Green is starting to come alive. with Since the official opening of Pier 53 as a passive park along the Delaware River in 2014, neighbors have found it to be a beautiful oasis of calm at the edge of a bustling city. But much of what makes this site so distinctive is mostly invisible. So...How many visitors to the Park have noticed the bees?

Bees make their homes in non-urban areas as well as in formerly urban and abandoned areas, such as Pier 53. Where did the bees originally come from, and how had they evolved to fit into a changed habitat? Matthew Donahue, a scientist at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut wants to find out.

Donahue has made trips to abandoned places in the Philadelphia area, some of which are Pier 53 and the nearby greenway. There are traps set in trees around the Park.

pollination study notice on tree

The results so far have been incomplete, although he has noticed that one of the species collected at the Pier is Anthidiellum Notatum— the Northern Rotund Resin Bee.

photo of Resin Bee

The sun rises more to the north each day and sets further to the south every evening. The migrating birds are making their annual journey up the Delaware Bay. The Park is starting to get noisy.

Greetings. Friends of the Park and those of you who use, enjoy and like the pier and greenway. We are celebrating Earth Day this year a few days earlier by having another community clean up. We will provide gloves and bags. Come and meet up or make some local friends and help beautify the pier and trail. Work for a few minutes or 2 hours.

poster for April 19 cleanup

In the Works. A unit of the Pittsburgh-based Railroad Development Corporation (RDC), has proposed a ‘Pop-Up Metro’ which would begin at Race Street Pier just below the Ben Franklin Bridge and run south from there to a point somewhere between Queen and Reed Streets, allowing easy access along the river to several popular waterfront attractions, including Race and Cherry Street piers, Penn’s Landing, Spruce Street Harbor Park, and Pier 53.

The pilot project, which takes advantage of improvements in battery technology and refurbished, battery-powered rail transit cars enables transit operators to adapt existing but unused railroad lines such as the abandoned tracks along Delaware Avenue.

Watch this space.

historical marker at intersection of Washington Avneue and Columbus Boulevard

The Pier 53 Project—a historical study of the immigrants who arrived at the Pier from 1876 to the 1920s, their stories, and the stories of their descendants. Each story is part of a mosaic that contributes to the history of Philadelphia and its waterfront, and ultimately to the history of immigration in the United States.

Over the past twenty years the Pier 53 Project has been collecting stories of some of these immigrants using independent sources and from personal memoirs of the descendants—accounts of families fleeing persecutions and famines, of people seeking a better life in America. In 2022, an eight-minute-long documentary entitled "Pier 53: They Came, They Stayed" was aired on Channel 12, and is shown intermittenly through the station's "Independent Lens' series.

Here's the link to the Pier 53 Project page on this site. Pier 53 Project.

Top photo and poster by Loren Thomas. Resin Bee photo in column 1 from Wikipedia. All other photos by Susan McAninley.