How America’s Greatest Working Waterfront Became a 60-Year Wasteland!

Discover why Philadelphia's Penn's Landing, the spot where William Penn arrived in 1682, sat mostly empty and undeveloped for nearly 60 years. Penn's Landing was once Philadelphia's working waterfront — ferries, cotton, sugar, and produce moving through its piers. This episode of Old Waterfront America traces how containerization emptied the docks by the 1960s, why decades of grand redevelopment plans collapsed one after another, and how the waterfront finally became a real public park in the 2010s. Subscribe to Old Waterfront America for more true stories of the old docks, ports, and waterfronts that built the country before they became parks, condos, and tourist attractions. city waterfront Philadelphia port industrial history shipping container.