Gravity sewer

This old gravity sewer runs parallel to the east side of the Wissahickon for much of the length of the park.

Ten Box Shelter

It's known as Ten Box Shelter. Built by the WPA in 1940, it served as the location of the last of a line of ten locked phone boxes used by park guards.

In August of 1986, two of my best friends from high school, Chris Brown and Brian Bowers, visited me in Philadelphia. I was living in the Art Museum area then, but had already fallen in love with the Wissahickon. I thought it would be a great idea for us to take the R8 train line all the way out to Chestnut Hill, hike the mile or so to the northern most entrance to the park, and then walk the ten or twelve miles back to my apartment.

It was a typical day in August for Pennsylvania, hot and humid, cranking up to the inevitable climax, a horrendous thunderstorm, which hit us exactly as we rounded the bend toward Ten Box Shelter. We dove inside to wait it out. As soon as we got inside the rain came down in torrents. Gusts of wind bent the surrounding trees. At the height of it all we couldn't see more than fifteen or twenty feet beyond the shelter. Then it all broke as suddenly as it had started. The sun was out. Birds sang. We kept going.

Up and down

These are known as the One Hundred Steps, built in the early 1900s, and they will take you from the Wissahickon neighborhood of Roxborough down to the bicycle path that parallels the lower portion of the Wissahickon Creek; or vice versa.

Out of season

This photo was taken in the middle of the afternoon on Monday, February 19. That the temperature was around 65 degrees Fahrenheit made this forgotten Christmas wreath on the door of a WPA constructed guardhouse at the intersection of Bell's Mill Road and Forbidden Drive seem all the more out of season.

Face the face

Detail from an old water trough along Forbidden Drive between mile posts 4 and 4 and 1/2.

One of the delights of driving on the Wissahickon was the stops at watering troughs. Young bodies develop growing pains if too long subjected to the decorous sitting-still proper to a Germantown wagon. We always climbed down while father allowed Don or Nellie to have a drink at any of the watering places along the drive.
-- The Wissahickon Hills, Cornelius Weygandt, 1930.