Dwayne Wharton was tasked with helping to solve one health care crisis affecting kids when he discovered another. Wharton was working for The Food Trust in the mid-2010s, and that organization’s goal was to reduce the number of sugary beverages, especially soda, kids were drinking. They encouraged students to drink more water from the ubiquitous
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At its height, it reached three feet. The color of chocolate milk, the water flooded The Tricycle Shop’s first-floor retail and café space, submerging bistro tables and balance bikes, buoying trash cans and stacks of paper cups, lapping at the midsections of mannequins sporting branded jerseys. Hurricane Ida’s September 2021 rampage through the Philadelphia region
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Acloudy pool of water marks the spot where, every minute, about 1,200 gallons of toxic mine drainage, contaminated with sulfuric acid and iron, flows out of the ground in the hills above New Philadelphia, in Schuylkill County. Below lies a flooded mine void, the space where miners extracted tons of anthracite coal from the ground
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Traffic streams over the Adams Avenue Bridge in the video on the Tacony Creek Suite website. To the motorists, the creek and the park around it are simply something to cross, but the camera, as well as the music, focus on Tacony Creek Park, the corridor of flowing water and forest in the middle. “Each
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Like many American cities, Philadelphia is built on land that wants to be wet. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) Park sits in a particularly soggy corner, right at the junction where the Schuylkill River rushes into the Delaware. The park is perforated by several lakes and water channels, and flooding regularly renders pedestrian walkways impassible. Over
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Flooding is the reason for the FDR Park master plan. It also could be its undoing. No one denies that FDR Park has been growing soggier over the years. Paths that once led walkers around the “lakes” now run through marshy ground at the edge of the water. Stormwater flows off of I-95 and the
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Ted pickett counts himself lucky. He and his wife were home when the flooding started. As Hurricane Isaias dumped rain over the Delaware Valley and Darby Creek crested its banks on August 4, 2020, he and his wife got to work. “We were able to mitigate a real nasty thing,” Pickett says. For five hours
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Water flows from North Philadelphia’s Juniata Park neighborhood into Tacony Creek Park. It joins the wooded creek corridor to the rowhouse and asphalt streetscape above, but the connection can be hard to notice. This summer the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership — TTF for short — will work with partners to transform East Cayuga Street near the
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Water quality has been a hot topic in Philadelphia from the beginning. Early promotional materials for William Penn’s new city hyped the many streams that would carry away waste, and in the 1730s the likes of Benjamin Franklin tried to regulate industry to clean up the horribly polluted Dock Creek. (These efforts failed, and later
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The Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership (TTF) has launched a master planning process for North Philadelphia’s Tacony Creek Park. The 300-acre park, one of Philadelphia’s five watershed parks, directly serves the Olney, Lawncrest, Feltonville, Juniata Park, and Frankford neighborhoods. The last master plan, dating back to 1997, focused on the park’s ecological assets. The current process will
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On April 20 local artist Meg Lemieur released an illustrated map of the Lenapewihittuk (Delaware River) watershed, complete with plants and wildlife found in the region. “I’ve been illustrating flora and fauna from the region for 15 years, and most of these animals are some of my favorites,” Lemieur says. Lemieur worked with cultural consultant
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