Philadelphia, a city wedged between two rivers, has a long history of getting swamped by dangerous floods. Its future, which is forecast to bring increasingly climate-fueled deluges, doesn’t appear any brighter. That leaves a pertinent question for the present day: What are city officials going to do about it? As chronicled previously in Grid, the
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On an April morning, Nick Macelko was scouring the Assunpink Creek in Lawrence Township, New Jersey. It was a successful search. He found an acuminate crayfish (Cambarus acuminatus) on the creek bottom. “You can tell because he has that rostrum [part of the head that projects forward] that doesn’t have little spines on it. Cool.”
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I parked my bike at nine in the morning on a heat-dome summer day and walked down the path into the University of Pennsylvania’s James G. Kaskey Memorial Park (better known as the BioPond). Under the tree canopy I immediately felt cooler after my sweaty bike ride. I paused to admire a stately American elm
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In the nine years Julia Jackson lived in Manayunk, just a few streets from the Leverington Avenue bridge, she witnessed her fair share of flooding — and Venice Island residents using the bridge to evacuate from their homes during floods. When she saw that the paper mill site at the island’s northern tip had been
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Ever since Elizabeth Luce began training to become a yoga teacher, she wanted to teach classes outside. Now, every Tuesday evening, she leads a class right on the Delaware riverfront. “The best part about being in this location is it’s so active,” says Luce. “Everyone is out. If they’re not here doing yoga, they’re out
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Lately, as I’ve walked through the city, I’ve found myself crisscrossing from one side of the street to the other based on the angle of the sun and how much shade the street trees offer. We’ve had a hot, humid stretch here in July, recalling the fierce heat wave in June. It did occur to
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It’s a Wednesday afternoon in late June, and Philadelphia is on its fifth day of the first heat wave of the summer. As temperatures climb to 95 degrees, residents of Mill Creek flock to the best place in the neighborhood to cool down: Fletcher Pool. Public spaces like Fletcher Pool are essential in a city
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On an unseasonably cool Saturday during one of this spring’s stretches of wet weather, Yazmine Acosta, a 14-year-old from South Philadelphia, greeted visitors at a lakeside dock at Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, just across Broad Street from the Wells Fargo Center. Her slender arms outstretched, she demonstrated how to swoop a paddle’s ends in and
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The morning after Hurricane Ida devastated Manayunk in September 2021, John Hunter stood looking over the intersection of Main Street and Shurs Lane, watching floodwaters carry away the back deck of the former Mad River building. “As the waters were flying by, it got to the point where this bar became detached from its foundations
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A version of this story originally appeared in Hidden City in 2024 and is shared courtesy of that publication. For nearly two centuries, humans and Mother Nature have tangoed on League Island, the most southeasterly expanse of land in Philadelphia, known today as the Navy Yard. For the most part, humans have gotten the better
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Have you ever looked down into the depths of the Delaware River and thought, “It could be deeper”? The likely answer is no. Just last fall, however, The Port of Philadelphia released part of a 15-year plan to expand the port that includes dredging and deepening the Delaware River an additional five feet to a
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