The most recent October issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) has a great story on hidden hydrology inspiration Anne Whiston Spirn, FASLA, titled Where the Water Was, which highlights the “long arc” her work in West Philadelphia, namely the “water that flows beneath it.”
The aha moment is recounted in the article, the inspiration for the poem linked above “The Yellowwood and the Forgotten Creek“, as recounted in the article, she “was on her way to the supermarket, when she was stopped at a gaping hole where the street had caved in over the Mill Creek sewer. “I looked down and saw this big, brown rushing river, and all this masonry that had fallen in. I thought, ‘My God, there are rivers underground. We’re walking on a river.'” (122) Sprin’s work spans decades since that story in 1971, predominately around Mill Creek which was “buried in the brick sewer pipe in the 1880s”, morphing into the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) [covered in brief on our post on Philadelphia here]. While I was inspired as a student and professional by her work on books like The Landscape of Landscape and The Granite Garden, her work on hidden streams was perhaps the most powerful for me, both as an object of study but more broadly to leverage this research into a vehicle for positive change. As mentioned, the WPLP website “contains maps, historical documents, reports and studies.” including an updated interactive timeline, and some newer updated interactive mapping which is good to see, as much of the interface until late was a bit dated.
A long way from the preliminary maps in CAD as part of the early mapping in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The sophistication and breadth of this work at the time is telling thought, and I remember seeing these for the first time in college and being amazed. The article shows what many of us know, which is how much of what we take for granted in technology of mapping that’s available to us today, and how hard it was, physically and sometimes politically to get good information. As Spirn mentions “You had to literally go out and field check.” (134)
The takeaways of this early work was to both connect the above ground with what was underground, both historically in predevelopment hydrology but also with sewer routing and burial of waterways. As mentioned, the idea that is a constant with Spirn of “reading the landscape” was instilled as a way to understand the full picture of a site or district. The connection of the physical features with the social is also evident as Spirn is quoted: “It’s a pattern of eastern old cities and across the U.S., where lower-income folks are living in the bottomlands… Many are literally called the Black Bottom.” (126) From this analysis, the idea of mapping and using vacant lands was a way to solve the hydrological problems of flooding or sinkholes, but also to revitalize communities.
The Buried River from Anne Whiston Spirn on Vimeo.
How to do it was an issue, as recounted in the article, ideas where one thing, but changing minds into action was another. McHarg’s Design With Nature inspired her writing The Granite Garden, not as an academic treatise, but rather “…to fill a void. Scientific journals, historical documents, topographic maps, all sorts of materials contained a wealth of information for ecological designers, but no one had pulled it together in a comprehensive, understandable book that could guide designers as well as the public.” (127) This book influences generations of landscape architects in many ways beyond merely historical ecology, but in how we think and communicate. For the project itself, Adam Levine (who is the mind behind the PhillyH20 project which i documented previously) found the 19th Century maps “that showed Mill Creek and its tributaries before the land was developed. Spirn’s students digitized those surveys and overlaid them on the city’s topographic maps, finally getting an accurate depth of fill along the floodplain. “We found it’s buried up to 40 feet in some areas…”” (134)
The actions were part of this research as well, and many interesting strategies came from the Vacant Lands report (see here), as well as a number of other projects, many of which took a long time to become reality, or came with ups and downs of poor implementation or. The successes came, owing to the persistence of Spirn and her local compatriots in West Philadelphia, summed up in the article simply:
“Change is a bit like a buried creek. It’s hard to remember its origins. Its many branchings are invisible.” (137)
The legacy locally is a series of activists still working on landscape and community building. Beyond that, there’s an army of landscape architects inspired by this project and her writings, and her life-long spirit of advocacy. A great homage to a wonderful teacher and landscape hero. Lots of great info in the article – which unfortunately isn’t available digitally at this time.
