Essays
Careful! No Diving
11 July 2007
Midsummer began last night when the bark of the Plane trees began to detach and fall to the ground. Now on our quieting streets there is a brittle crunch underfoot; and the air, singed and water-logged, burns the eyes. At this time of year you can smell the buried creeks.
I told Adam Levine, the city’s resident stream and sewer expert, that this is the smell of Philadelphia. He laughed. “Creeks everywhere smell this way.”
Creeks buried in culverts and combined with sewage?
Yes, that’s Philadelphia. Well now you can almost taste it.
Midsummer can be cruel, certainly. Edgar Allan Poe, returning to Philadelphia in the summer of 1849, met stifling heat and cholera. Drunk, he was thrown in Moyamensing Prison, where he was left shoeless, filthy, and suicidal. On July 12, he begged his car fare to Richmond. A couple of months later he was dead.
I had come to Levine at the Water Department archive to find out about the death of another Philadelphian, the painter John Lewis Krimmel. But we soon got to talking about the forty-odd creeks that — filled with sewage, industrial pollution, and disease (cholera and typhoid, among others) — Philadelphia long ago buried in pipes underground.
I asked him the usual question, if hoping to reverse the near-complete destruction of our watershed we couldn’t unearth some of these creeks. “On a hot day like today you could swim,” I imagined.
He laughed again. “Impossible,” he said – the culverts bear sanitary and storm water, so an entirely new sanitary sewer would be needed; anyway thousands of people would have to be displaced just to renovate a small section of creek.
This is certainly the case along the Wingohocking, where Krimmel had come on July 15, 1821, a Sunday as this year, after a relaxing day visiting friends. Krimmel dove in, belly-flopped in the shallow water, came up gurgling, and died. At 35, he had just then been elected president of the Association of American Artists and given the prize commission of Philadelphia: to paint William Penn landing on the shore of the Delaware. The tragedy of 186 years ago not only marked the end of promising life but also of the green and pluralistic city. The conditions that eventually plagued Poe’s Philadelphia – rioting, disease, pollution, poverty – almost immediately ensued.
When I posed the question of Krimmel’s death to Dave Schaaf, a senior designer at the Planning Commission, he perceptively noted that “Not only Krimmel [was lost], but the entire landscape that he once understood. Multiple deaths.” In fact, city engineers buried the two branches of the Wingohocking – and the mill pond at 19th and Chew where Krimmel died. Today in place of the pond there are blue and purple hydrangea blossoms bigger than softballs decorating English cottage row houses from the 1920s. LaSalle University is just across Olney Avenue; Kemble Park and the slight glade of maple, oak, and elm at Harper’s Hollow are all that’s left of Krimmel’s playground.
What we really have in place of the pond today are eighty swimming pools citywide and several hundred lifeguards to make sure your swim doesn’t end like Krimmel’s. I make this point because Monday the New York Times reported that New York City has drastically shrunk its active recreation program, including pools, in favor of membership health clubs and environmental education. This infuriates community activists who see a link between childhood obesity and the cutback in sports. New York, with its eight million people, has only 28 recreation centers (and spends only $15.5 million), while we enjoy 54 centers with a depth of programming to make a country club blush.
“The pool is everyone’s,” declares Theresa Williams, who runs the Hawthorne Cultural Center and Ridgeway Pool, where I swim. “It’s public space. No one owns it.” Last year, the pool was the first in the city to close – this because the staff had logged too many complaints of abusive behavior by members of the community. This spring Williams had hoped for better, painting a beach-scene mural on the mechanicals shed. The pool itself glistens sapphire beneath the high sun. But yesterday, with the bark and the horse chestnuts falling, tempers were rising. Five hours of afternoon swim wasn’t enough for one woman, who, for the trash coming out of her mouth, ought to have been sent to the Human Relations Commission. She didn’t want to wait for the lifeguards to hold a short meeting. A police car idled a short distance away.
Only moments later the pool was full – some seventy kids and adults filled the air with the sounds of a joyful midsummer swim. With a single splash the oppressive air was gone. Krimmel should have been so fortunate.
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