East Falls Waterworks

Storm water will be tamed to mimic ancient creeks.

by Bruce Schimmel

But on stormy days, you'd better stay inside. Rainwater rushes down Midvale in a filthy stream. "People get swept into the river," wisecracks one regular, demonstrating the crawl as he waits for his slice.

Actually, it's no joke. A couple years ago, during one deluge, a woman lost her footing while waiting for a bus, got swept under some cars and drowned.

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Fortunately, the killer in this case, storm-water runoff, rarely turns deadly. Still, it's dangerous and always dirty. Raging rains have been known to geyser up from sewers, before sluicing down to the Schuylkill with a load of pet droppings, car drippings and other sludge.

Think of it as Mother Nature's revenge. Streams once flowed down these hills. Mifflin Creek ran under the current Midvale Avenue. But eventually their rushing waters were replaced by buried sewers.

One solution might be to build more sewers. But to Gina Snyder (right), who heads the East Falls Development Corp. (EFDC), it'd be a waste to bury all that water. Besides, sewers cost big bucks.

Snyder says that torrents could be tamed to mimic the original functions of creeks now underground. East Falls' concrete causeways could become hanging gardens. A waterworld, if you will, that Snyder believes will bring another sort of green to a retail district now awash in red.

Three years ago, Snyder confesses, "I had no idea what storm-water runoff meant." She got into storm-water harvesting while building one of the worst things for an urban ecology: a parking lot.

Armed with half a million dollars from the city, Snyder's parking lot was built with a vegetative swale to purify its toxic runoff.

Snyder's swale, under the Route 1 overpass, between Ridge and Kelly Drive, isn't much to look at right now — just a broad ditch garnished with stones and shrubs. But as it gently filters the water through the soil this spring, this swale should soon sprout up like another nearby PWD project, Saylor Grove on Lincoln Drive.

But one swale does not an ecosystem make. So with the help of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and $200,000 from the William Penn Foundation, Snyder has organized a broad and unprecedented coalition to green up more of Midvale Avenue.

Later this month, some 40 urban planners and engineers from many city departments will gather to plan East Falls' new waterworld. After getting city departments to collaborate, the biggest challenge, says Snyder, is skeptical homeowners. "People don't believe they can make a difference with a barrel or a rain garden."

Evelyn, one longtime homeowner I spoke with, sounded doubtful. Evelyn lives across Midvale from EFDC, and after 30 years of weathering storms, their dirty deluges have been a fact of her life.

But after seeing an artist's sketch of container gardens on an invitation for a recent EFDC workshop, Evelyn's eyes lit up. "Oh, I remember this," she said. "We used to have rain barrels growing up in West Virginia."

So while the creeks of East Falls may still remain buried, there could soon be new streams of green cascading down its historic hills.

E-mail bruce@schimmel.com.