Will Caverly was one of the thousands of people who flocked to the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum during the COVID-19 pandemic. And like most of those people, he didn’t know much about Eastwick, the neighborhood next door. He wasn’t aware how, during the mid-20th century, it was the site of the largest urban redevelopment project in U.S. history as city planners imposed their vision on thousands of residents, displacing them from homes and neighborhoods they had loved for generations. But a conversation Caverly had with Lamar Gore, manager of the refuge, got him started on the journey that led to his 2024 book, “Tinicum and Eastwick: Environmental Justice and Racial Injustice in Southwest Philadelphia.” Grid talked with Caverly about the book and the history it tells. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I bet a lot of people who visit the wildlife refuge don’t think much about the neighborhood next door. What drew you to writing a book about the two together? Lamar and I talked about this documentary film “A Field of Weeds,” made about the redevelopment project, which was conducted at the same time Heinz was created. Soon after, a publisher reached out asking about book ideas, and I said I have these two threads: one about homes for birds and another about homes for people. They are geographically adjacent to each other and wrapped up in the same ecosystem, what this land is going to look like in this low-lying place in Philadelphia. It was serendipitous, but that’s where the best books come from.
Aside from being marshy and flood-prone, what did Eastwick look like before the redevelopment project? There were multiple neighborhoods — including Clearview and Elmwood — in the area referred to in the redevelopment project and now as Eastwick. This area of Philadelphia was semirural. There were freestanding homes, unlike the row homes of most Philadelphia streets. It was an affordable place to live for working-class families. People used the marsh [what would become the wildlife refuge] as a source of sustenance: fishing, hunting, collecting berries to make jam. It was almost a different world, next to the airport and 15 minutes from Center City. It was a redlined area, and the racial makeup was fascinating. There was a slight majority white, about 40% Black, a Chinese contingent and Jewish merchants. There were stories of a neighborhood doctor, Dr. George Marshall, treating white and Black patients, doing that kind of work in that time period, something you didn’t see in the 1940s and ’50s, but people didn’t think anything of it. Dr. Marshall was the doctor you went to. The flip side of this was that it was a place of heavy pollution. There was heavy industry ringing the entire area. There was the Hog Island shipyard. Who knows what was dumped over there. There was the Fels-Naptha plant dropping pollution into Cobbs Creek. It was a place people loved to live in and a precarious place.
What was the Redevelopment Authority? It’s an entity that a lot of people have never heard of, but it wielded a lot of power. Essentially it was a quasi-public entity that could receive funds and was given legal powers of eminent domain over areas that they saw as problematic. The strategy in other parts of the city was to use it as a scalpel to carve out small parts and replace individual buildings using Redevelopment Authority power. In the Eastwick project, instead of the scalpel it was vivisection, a complete carve-out with bulldozers. It was special because it was the largest parcel, geographically, redeveloped using these powers anywhere in the country.
I could be sympathetic to the City. After centuries of growth it was looking at running out of space. There was white flight. Leaders were asking, “How can we create an integrated city while also balancing economic priorities?” It was an extremely complicated question and at its heart political, but they decided to carve out part of the city.
Do you think they succeeded? I would call it a partial failure. The wounds it left are still raw, but people now have more homes. People now like living in that part of the city.
You have to be conscious of ideologies that change over time. Sixty years ago they had very different ideas of how to use this land, and 60 years from now they might have different thoughts than we do now.”
— Will Caverly, author and historian
Something that struck me was how explicitly City leaders talked about race, about wanting no more than a specific percentage of Black families in order to avoid triggering white flight. It was frightening to read the philosophies and thoughts of people 60 to 80 years ago. It seems totally alien to how we think today. Part of my book was trying to wrap my mind about how people thought.
A constant throughout the book is that the southwest tip of the city has always been a trash magnet, both for illegal dumping and for shady landfills, which have left the refuge and Eastwick with two Superfund sites. First, it was a rural area, an open space that’s dark at night. There was some of that. And it’s a marsh. You could just dump it in the water. There’s an element of that.
The turning point for the landfills was when Mayor Dilworth, thinking he was doing the right thing, banned open-air landfills in the city. It seemed to me that this is what precipitated dumps opening at the edge. You put the dump in Delaware County, that had its own political machine, which gets into the 1970s advocacy to get the marsh turned into a refuge and not just a municipal park.
You describe the original, successful push by the Philadelphia Conservationists, the group that later became Natural Lands, to have the Tinicum marsh preserved as a City refuge. What led to the push to make it a national wildlife refuge? There were a couple pressures there: the City stopped taking care of the municipal bird sanctuary. It was trashy. Someone burned down the headquarters a couple times. People from the Philadelphia Conservationists were like, “This is ridiculous. We worked so hard to get this done.” Fired-up citizens on the Delaware County side were watching developers come in and try to put in a road through the marsh and later I-95. Concerned Area Residents for Protection (CARP) had their canoe cavalcade, taking people out on canoes to tour the marsh. It was about as grassroots as you can get. They were able to harness the environmental movement of the 1960s. Also at the same time there was a weakening of the Delaware County Republican machine. Between activists like CARP and the Philadelphia Conservationists — the Sierra Club got involved — they were able to get federal attention drawn to it.
The action in the book took place decades ago. How do we see similar issues play out today? Obviously this isn’t all in the past. Eastwick still floods. The trash battles continue, and the Redevelopment Authority still owns a lot of land around Eastwick.
The big scandal a decade ago was that land next to the refuge was going to be developed into hundreds of units by the developer Korman Communities. The neighbors got together to shut it down because it would have been a flooding nightmare. There’s a reason they didn’t build on it during redevelopment. That 128-acre parcel, if you go to leaveittonature.org, the Friends of Heinz Refuge are now advocating to have that piece flipped over to the refuge.
You have to be conscious of ideologies that change over time. Sixty years ago they had very different ideas of how to use this land, and 60 years from now they might have different thoughts than we do now.
