Manayunk: The Manchester of America

The neighborhood climbing the steep ridge above the Schuylkill River in northwestern Philadelphia was once called, without exaggeration, the Manchester of America. Manayunk, whose name comes from a Lenape word meaning "place to drink," built its industrial identity almost entirely on water: first the river itself, then a canal alongside it.

The Schuylkill Navigation Company completed its canal locks through Manayunk between eighteen nineteen and eighteen twenty-four, as part of a one hundred eight mile canal and slackwater system designed to move Schuylkill County anthracite coal down to Philadelphia. The canal did something else as well: it provided water power. Mill operators saw the falls and the controlled flow from the locks and began buying land along the bank. Textile mills went up fast. By eighteen fifty, twenty-four factories operated in Manayunk. By eighteen sixty, the eve of the Civil War, thirty-eight mills were running along a stretch of riverbank barely two miles long.

The workforce was largely immigrant. Welsh, Irish, and later Eastern European workers crowded into the narrow rowhouses that climbed the hillside above the mills, building a community stratified by elevation: the mill owners at the top of the ridge with views over the river, the workers packed into the lower streets where the noise of the looms and the smell of the dye works were constant. The area incorporated into Philadelphia in eighteen fifty-four but retained a distinct identity, a mill town swallowed by but not dissolved into the larger city.

The mills closed through the twentieth century as textile manufacturing moved south and overseas. Manayunk declined and then, like many American industrial neighborhoods, reinvented itself. The Main Street along the canal became a strip of restaurants and boutiques. The Manayunk Wall, a brutally steep climb on the bicycle racing circuit, made the neighborhood a fixture on the professional cycling calendar.

The canal locks are still there, the stonework of the eighteen twenties visible below the Main Street bridges, a remnant of the industrial ambition that once made this ridge worth climbing.