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Mill Creek

Image shows the Stormwater Best Management Practice Site, at 712 N. 48th Street. Development of this site was a summer project of Sulzberger Middle School students and Water Department staff (including a former WPLP research assistant).

Contemporary photo of the former Sulzberger Middle School, where the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, in the early 2000s, developed a curriculum and after-school component for middle-schoolers' study of urban watersheds and the Mill Creek buried floodplain. Today the Sulzberger building is home to two schools: Parkway West High School and Middle Years Alternative for the Humanities.

Frances Walker and Anne Whiston Spirn at a meeting of MCC/WPLP partners

Community gardening at Aspen Farms

Aspen Farms landscape

Hayward Ford, the organizing spirit behind Aspen Farms

In the 20th century, with the development of one suburb after another, the “built landscape” of West Philadelphia deposited unmanageable amounts of wastewater in the Mill Creek sewer, which, under severe pressure, periodically overflowed and, more disastrously, collapsed.

University City Garden Club garden, on the south side of Locust at 44th Street, covers a formal residential site undermined by abrasion of the Mill Creek sewer pipe

Contemporary photo of the footprint of Mill Creek's buried floodplain, following 47th Street, between Fairmount Avenue and Aspen Street, below the embankment of the former Sulzberger Middle School. The 1927 Atlas of West Philadelphia (G.W. and W.S. Bromley), plate 6, shows numerous rows in this swath. 

Rescue operations in the 5000 block of Funston Street, where four row homes collapsed into the abyss of the Mill Creek sewer, burying seven persons, three of whom were killed

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