Buried Beneath Philadelphia
The Archaeology of Seventh and Arch Streets
Take a stroll down any city street in America and your experience will be similar. As you walk along the sidewalk, you pass stores, offices, some homes, street vendors, and perhaps a parking lot. Cars, trucks, buses, and bicycles travel down the city streets. People can be seen walking to their destinations, waiting for a bus, or engaging in conversation. Occasionally, you may notice a building that has undergone renovation. You stop and take a look at the front of the building. If you look up, you can see some of the original detail of the building, and perhaps get a sense of what the street must have looked like years ago. But who were the people walking down the street then, just as you are now? Why were they walking along this street? Did they live here? Shop here? Work here? Then you realize, what if you could go back and travel through time to get a glimpse of what this building, this street, this area of your city looked like at some point in the past? You look down and wonder if it could be possible to see through the city street to see what was there before the modern city you know.
Between 1995 and 1998, the Louis Berger Group, Inc. conducted a large urban archaeology project at North 7th and Arch streets in Philadelphia for the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons in advance of planned construction of a Metropolitan Detention Center. Archaeological and historical investigations focused on the neighborhood history between 1682 and the present. A popular report on the results of the archaeological and historical investigations at the Philadelphia Metropolitan Detention Center Site (36Ph91) is available for download.
There are a limited number of copies of the full technical report, which was published as Occasional Publication No. 2 by Louis Berger's Cultural Resource Group. If you would like to obtain a complimentary copy, please send your request to crginfo@louisberger.com.
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