John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge: America's First Urban Refuge

Right alongside Interstate Ninety-Five, tucked between runways and refineries, sits one of the most improbable pieces of protected land in America. The John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum is the largest remaining freshwater tidal marsh in all of Pennsylvania, and it almost disappeared entirely.

Before European settlement, Tinicum Marsh stretched across more than five thousand acres, a vast corridor of cattails and open water where shorebirds rested and fish spawned along the Delaware River. By the middle of the twentieth century, decades of draining, filling, and industrial dumping had reduced that marsh to barely two hundred acres. Then, in nineteen sixty-nine, planners proposed routing Interstate Ninety-Five directly through what remained, while a landfill was slated to swallow the rest.

Residents and conservation groups went to war. They filed legal injunctions, packed public hearings, and kept up the fight for three years. In nineteen seventy-two, Congress passed legislation establishing Tinicum National Environmental Center, authorizing the protection of up to twelve hundred acres. The highway was rerouted. The landfill was stopped. What you see today survived because ordinary Philadelphians refused to let it die.

The refuge was renamed in nineteen ninety-one to honor Senator H. John Heinz the Third of Pennsylvania, who championed its preservation until his death in a plane crash that same year. Today the refuge shelters more than two hundred and eighty species of birds across the seasons, along with otters, foxes, painted turtles, and thousands of migratory waterfowl who find a rest stop here on the Atlantic Flyway.

This is a wildlife refuge with a freeway on one edge, a major international airport on the other, and jets thundering overhead every few minutes. It is America's first designated urban wildlife refuge, a reminder that wildness does not ask for perfection. Sometimes it only asks to be left alone.