Washington Avenue Green

July 19, 2025. Ah summer! It's been hot and humid recently, but it's always cooler and breezier by the river. The recent rains have made everything super green.

There are the joggers and the bicyclists and the photographers, and the birdwatchers, and even some tourists who have come to see what is left of the original immigration piers from a century ago. Possibly their ancestors first set foot in America at this very place.

And there are people who come here just to hang out. A six foot tide occurs twice a day. The Coast Guard Station next door has recorded some very high tides recently due to storms and global warming, but nothing much to worry about right now.

The small beach on the south side changes with the tide. Large storms leave deposits from upstream. Our cleanup crew in May found bottles and pieces of clothing mixed with the usual debris of dead trees and brush. But they may all disappear with the next tide.

parent with childrfen on beach at low tide

Two genera of bees are being studied at Pier 53 and in the surrounding area.

Ongoing is a study of bees. They 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.

For further information, here's the link to our page on this site. Ecology

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.

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.

The bee photo in the middle column is from a frame of observational footage shot by Joe Showalter for the documentary "Pier 53: They Came, They Stayed".
All other photos by Susan McAninley.