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 Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The highest form of development is to govern one’s self.”
—Zerelda G. Wallace (1817–1901)