My wife and I had lived in a small house in Olde Kensington for a number of years. During the last five of those years our neighborhood was under constant construction with a daily cacophony of heavy machinery. This inspired me to start a musical project called Earth Mover and The Back-Up Beep. I would walk around making field recordings of the gentrification construction and using those samples I would create a hyper pop soundtrack to the photos I was making of the neighborhood. We moved from that house and I quickly abandoned such a ridiculous idea.
Somethings just don’t work out. To rid myself of these sounds, I found myself walking along the Delaware River. The route was typically from Penn’s Treaty park north through Conrail to General Pulaski park in Port Richmond. During the pandemic I would frequent the river spending hours walking in circles through the trails. I dubbed them my nature walks as this area was the closest to wilderness I can get in the Riverwards. It was also an excuse to engage in the age old practice of smoking weed in the woods. Classic.
The area north of the famed graffiti pier is littered with century old port debris. Cables, ropes, pylons for long lost piers and processing waste. The hills dropping into the river made for a perfect place to ride dirt bikes carving winding trails into the woods. I was always excited to see how people used this place from jogging to getting fucked up around a trash fire. People burning out cars or simply living in them. One summer some kids built a wildly dangerous skate park on one of the still standing piers.
New condominium construction along the river really began to flourish and infringe on the main entrance to the graffiti pier. The last I saw the entrance was walled off and the area’s revitalization lost funding. These photos feel very unfinished to me but time and construction has put me off from a once fun place.
