Development
The creek, called Nanganesey by the Lenape Indians in their patent to white settlers, was renamed Quarn Creek by the Swedish settlers. It later took the names Monson's Great Mill Fall, Mill Creek and Little Mill Creek after the factories it powered at Grays Ferry.
Originally, Mill Creek was fast-flowing (10 miles per hour) and could discharge 300,000 cubic feet per minute into the Schuylkill. It was known to flood, destroying crops and creating seas of mud.
As urban development began in West Philadelphia, the city covered several stream beds with cisterns and a layer of fill deep enough to level the land so that it could be platted into a regular street grid.
In 1866, a land survey determined that Mill Creek should be drained. The covering of Mill Creek began in 1869, encapsulating the watercourse in a 20-foot (6.1 m)-diameter drainpipe said to be the largest sewer pipe in the world at the time. By 1872, the creek was buried south to Baltimore Avenue. Its burial was completed around 1895, allowed the grid of rowhouse development to continue toward the city's western edge at Cobbs Creek.
Spotty maintenance of the cistern and natural erosion has caused occasional collapses of the buildings above. In the 1930s, several homes collapsed on Walnut Street between 43rd and 44th Streets were undermined by the creek. There have been road collapses on 43rd Street, south of Walnut. In 1955, the block of Sansom Street between 43rd and 44th Streets collapsed and was condemned. The creek undermines the roadbed where the Route 34 and Route 13 trolleys cross 43rd Street.
A prominent feature of Clark Park is its "bowl," once a mill pond fed by the creek.
Montgomery County has begun an effort to restore the creek's watershed through its Mill Creek Stream Restoration.
Read more about this topic: Mill Creek (Philadelphia)
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“To be sure, we have inherited abilities, but our development we owe to thousands of influences coming from the world around us from which we appropriate what we can and what is suitable to us.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women ... [they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not “need” the power to limit the development of others.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)