Urban Exploration

It’s a shame Google doesn’t update their satellite imagery more often. I live about a block and a half from the Delaware River, which, for those who don’t know Philadelphia, is the city’s (and the state of Pennsylvania’s) eastern border. According to Google Maps, there should be a large tract of undeveloped land along the river about a half mile north of where I live. Today, I set out to find it.

I was expecting the land to be inaccessible - maybe there would be a razor wire fence around it. I wasn’t expecting it to have already been completely churned up by bulldozers. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised, as this supposed green space is directly north of Donald Trump’s waterfront high rise condominium development.

Undaunted, I changed my project to that of finding a place where I could get right next to the Delaware River without the interference of fences or piers or anything else. I walked a few more blocks north to Penn Treaty Park, which is the site of the “Treaty Ground of William Penn and the Indian Natives, 1682”, as the engraved message on the obelisk at the front of the park proclaims. I guess the agreement was that the Indian Natives would piss off and make room for the settlers and their descendents to trash the place. ‘Cuz that’s what they did.



As parks go, Penn Treaty is kind of pathetic. Its northern neighbor is a former Pennsylvania Electric Company plant. Oddly, there are actually benches at the north end of the park that face the power plant. The park does come right up next to the Delaware, but getting to the river takes some work. All along the river are rocks, and in between the rocks are piles of trash – plastic Shoprite bags, broken glass, water bottles, remnants of firecrackers, waterlogged swatches of carpet, and rusted car mufflers. I scrambled over the trash-strewn rocks and hunks of concrete and red brick at the southern end of the park. I walked as far as I could before a high fence stopped me. Then I stopped and sat and listened to the water. The spot I found seemed to be a sort of middle ground, not exactly part of the park, but not exactly part of the industrial zone next to it either.


I sat there and looked around and thought about how sad it is, on the smallest and most personal scale, how disconnected I am from the land around me. I have lived here for over a year and have never before tried to make contact with the river. On a slightly larger scale, only a people who have no recognition of their connection to their environment could so flagrantly fill it with ugly, destructive debris.


I continued to sit, and as I did, I began to notice small elements of beauty – the sound of the water, the small shoots of what looked vaguely like strawberries sneaking out of a water-smoothed log, the cloudy broken glass mixed in with pebbles at my feet. I thought about the amazing capacity of the natural world to create beauty from ugliness, given the space and time. I thought about the ability of living things to heal and about my own ability to change and grow. As I sat there, I felt some of my sadness disappear.