This bottled water advertisement was printed in the 1906 edition of Boyd’s Co-Partnership and Residence Business Directory of Philadelphia City, a predecessor of the modern phone book.
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This is a remarkable photograph for the wealth of information it depicts, of the work scene and the surrounding area, and of the manner of dress of the workmen.
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This has become an iconic photograph, used in books, articles and other publications to illustrate both 19th-century sewer building and, more specifically, the process of building a combined sewer in a stream bed.
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This group of workmen filling a crack in the Torresdale Conduit. They are using slurry of concrete, sometimes called grout, which is being pumped into a crack from the metal basin in the foreground through the nozzle held by the man in the background.
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The Philly Watersheds Blog would like to take a siesta from the incessant posting of spokesdog photos to direct your attention toward a recent post on City Paper’s Naked City blog. Writer Isaiah Thompson asks PWD’s Chris Crockett and Adam Levine: What’s the story behind the little island in the middle of the Schuylkill?
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As you walk on many of Philadelphia’s sidewalks, beneath your feet is a hidden world of streams that once crisscrossed the city.
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2012 marks the bicentennial of the opening of the Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia’s claim to fame as the first large American city to provide safe water to its residents.
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In case you missed last week’s presentation at the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center (From Turbines To Tanks, a history of the Fairmount Aquarium by guest speaker Samantha Muka), here’s hard evidence that seals were once among the residents of the Water Works.
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Most people don’t realize that much of the lower part of South Philadelphia was once covered by tidal marshes.
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Our post from earlier this month about American shad ascending the Schuylkill above Norristown for the first time in nearly 200 years contained a fish story of a different sort, as we mentioned that George Washington (pictured above, on the banks of some other river besides the Schuylkill) may have fed his troops Schuylkill shad during trying Revolutionary times.
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