Thom Nickels: From hidden river to historic hills, Manayunk through the years

My father’s family, originally from Dusseldorf, Germany, settled in Manayunk before the Civil War, so I grew up hearing about this town of hills and mills.

Manayunk’s story really begins in 1683, when the area was nothing but wilderness and Native American trails. One of these well traveled trails went from Philadelphia to present-day Norristown. When the Dutch arrived, they were struck by the region’s beauty even if the area didn’t have a name. That soon changed when they began calling the river “Schuylkill,” or “hidden river.” 

When the English came, a man named Philip Lehman bought some land from William Penn.

Other English families arrived; after that there was a religious interlude of sorts with the arrival of a German mystic. He was a star-gazing fellow with an entourage of male followers who studied alchemy, philosophy, astrology, scripture, all of this a precursor to today’s New Age.

These celibate men even built their version of a monastery along the banks and rocks of the Wissahickon, and formed the Tabernacle of the Mystic Brotherhood. The group, having no sustainable theology, soon fell apart. John Kelpius, the head mystic, died at the tender age of 35. The year was 1708.

There was also Chief Teedyuscung, last of the Lenni Lenape chiefs, who took over Kelpius’s cave although not in a reverent way at all. The chief turned it into his personal saloon despite the fact that settlers called him “Honest John.” He was known as a compulsively litigious man, and historians describe him as “artful,” meaning perhaps that he manipulated people to do his will with grace. The poor Chief let his passion for drink get the best of him, and one day he disappeared in a puff of smoke: his house burned down.

Enter George Washington and his wooden false teeth, chased by the British. The two warring factions passed through Manayunk and many residents were interrogated, but there were no battles as there were in Germantown.

The year 1769 saw a change: it was the era of the long boats — 601 feet long and eight feet wide — and pointed at both ends like a Venice canal gondola. The area was beginning to develop a character and a personality all its own, and yet it was still as nameless as an abandoned baby left on the steps of an orphanage.

Some began calling the area Flat Rock. Residents were content with this name until 1824, when a Captain John Towers, builder of Manayunk’s first mill, decided that Flat Rock was too flat-sounding.

“We need something more formidable,” one can imagine him saying. “There are 800 residents, after all, and we’ll never make an impact with the name Flat Rock.”

Like almost everything formed by a committee, there were suggestions and counter suggestions, arguments and grandstanding. “Bridgewater” seemed too obvious a name, but Udoravia called to mind the glories of ancient Greece, even if it sounded odd and twisted the tongue in perverse directions. The stuffy scholar squirrels of Academia loved the name, but soon at another town meeting the Native American word for river was suggested as a replacement. 

That name was ‘Manaiung,’ though somebody changed the letter ‘I’ to a ‘y’ and the ‘g’ to a ‘k’ and Manayunk was born.

Let’s jump to the 1980s: My great aunt Dorothy is in her room at Cathedral Village in Roxborough going through her Manayunk scrapbook. The scrapbook is already showing signs of wear. 

She talks about Seville Schofield, who arrived with his family in Manayunk in 1846. The Schofields were a mill family, and Sevill acquired a small yarn-producing mill, Mill Creek. 

There’s nothing like a good war to get the economy going. The Civil War turned Seville into Manayunk’s leading industrialist although he died at the height of his success in 1900. 

Aunt Dorothy was too young to remember the legacy of Ariel Cooley, a Philadelphia architect who proposed the idea of a Manayunk canal to regulate the turbulent waters of the Schuylkill. Cooley proposed building a canal as well as a dam. What better people to do this than bands of outcast Irish who wound up digging the canal by hand.

Digging anything by hand is no pleasure at all, but in the end these immigrants from County Tyrone or Dublin did the job.

In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe rafted on the Wissahickon Creek and called the area “one of the real Edens of the land.” Although the Valley Green Inn wouldn’t be built until 1850, before that time Poe almost certainly availed himself of the Inn’s predecessor, a rundown hotel for wayfarers, vagabonds and professional loafers.

Aunt Dorothy’s scrapbook passed from hand to hand in Cathedral Village, very often with the photographs and one ribbon falling out. The ribbon was a snippet of the ribbon she snapped with scissors on December 17, 1928, at the dedication of the new Green Lane Bridge. The dedication was a mammoth event, complete with Mayor Harry Mackey, a Catholic Monsignor, the singing of patriotic songs and (for the kiddies) what they called “a moving picture show.”

Aunt Dorothy was not one to mince words when it came to telling “the truth,” so that’s why when she talked about Nickels Hall — a building my great grandfather built in 1906 at 4233 Main Street — she had no trouble touching on our family’s conflicts with neighbors. 

The big conflict was the dance hall controversy that pitted Catholics against Methodists. The Catholics (my family) held popular Saturday night dances in Nickels Hall (sometimes with libations) that attracted the ire of teetotaler Methodists. Proper Methodists in those days were forbidden to dance — even the fox trot and the waltz were off limits — so a kind of neighborhood social war ensued, despite the fact that Nickels Hall was also the town’s main gathering place for serious political meetings, banquets, wedding receptions and gatherings of the Italian Social Club.

Nickels Hall was also where Charles Schofield made his dire speech announcing the closing of most of Manayunk’s mills to a stunned audience at the start of the Great Depression. In a Philadelphia Inquirer article published in 1969, it was reported that a former mill hand (Joseph Mandarano) asked for a show of hands in Nickels Hall regarding the closure of the mills. The people voted to close the mills rather than work for two dollars a week. Mandarano blamed the closure on greed.

Many of Aunt Dorothy’s Manayunk stories concerned the trials and tribulations of growing up in a family of greengrocers. The American Stores Company at Baker and Green Lane was my great grandfather’s business. At the crack of dawn he would take his four sons to Dock Street in the family horse-drawn wagon to pick up produce for the store. One day on the return trip to Manayunk, one of his sons, John Edward, fell from the wagon head first onto the cobblestone street. The head injury was so severe that John later became an epileptic. John’s epilepsy was so bad it forced him to withdraw from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. John’s travels into Center City were often accompanied by seizures on Chestnut Street. To this day I cannot walk along Chestnut Street without thinking of my great uncle falling down in the street and then returning to Manayunk, a bloody mess. 

Aunt Dorothy took care of Uncle John until his death sometime in 1948.

Sometime in the late 1970s she took me on a tour of Nickels Hall. In prior years she had only shown me the outside of the building, but this time we went inside where I saw stacks of old wooden folding chairs, the same ones used during town meetings and on Saturday nights when the dance hall was open. Somewhere among them, of course, was Charles Schofield’s chair.

In 1972, Manayunk was a ghost town. Businesses along Main Street were boarded up. And the businesses that were open didn’t fix up their properties. In the 1980s things improved somewhat although Manayunk shops still had problems attracting customers.

When Mayor Frank Rizzo broke ground for the 1.4 million rehabilitation of the canal, he said, “The restoration will enable Manayunk to prosper.” Twenty-one cubic yards of silt and debris was dredged from the canal, which had become a liquid dumpster.

The canal was once part of the much larger 100-mile Schuylkill Canal built in 1825 and used principally to transport barges of anthracite coal to Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, Mayor Rizzo’s request to install gondolas in the canal went nowhere.

The original canal had been abandoned in 1928, and had been allowed to rot to such a degree that many groups wanted to fill it in for use as a parking lot. In the 1980s another group wanted it to be used as the roadbed for a new expressway on the east side of the Schuylkill. The city was able to acquire federal help in the canal’s reconstruction. One million dollars came from the Economic Development Act of 1965, inspired by the programs of FDR’s New Deal.

James Michener, at one time the most famous writer in the United States, wrote in a Holiday magazine feature in 1950 that West Manayunk, just across the river from Manayunk proper, was “Lower Merion Township’s dark closet.” A “dark closet” of course conjured up a leper colony, an undesirable place and a shanty town. Given Michener’s international reputation, West Manayunk schoolchildren were soon seen as social outcasts. In his article, Michener wrote that along the Lower Merion Schuylkill waterfront, a “somewhat impoverished citizenry lives clinging to the river’s edge….the Cliffside town of West Manayunk perches Pittsburgh-like in the gloom,” he wrote. 

Outraged by the insult, West Manayunkers met in town meetings and even arranged a debate between Michener and Dr. Albert C. Barnes of the Barnes Foundation. 

The cantankerous Dr. Barnes, himself an outcast from Philadelphia society, was the first to put Michener in his place. It didn’t help that Barnes, who hated self-styled intellectuals, was still annoyed that Michener had once impersonated a steelworker in order to be admitted to his museum, since he did not allow anyone he thought an intellectual to be admitted to his gallery.

But the dye had been cast. In October 1953, the West Manayunk Civic Association asked residents to vote on the existing name or one of four alternatives. Of the total 896 votes, 475 chose Belmont Hills while 269 favored the old name of West Manayunk.

During one of our last through old Manayunk, Aunt Dorothy suddenly pulled over to the side of the road and parked the car.

 “What is she going to show me this time?” I wondered, standing in front of what looked like an open woodshed or garage, empty except for a few tools, a can of gasoline and an old bicycle crammed into a corner.

She stood there looking intently at the walls of the shed as if peeling off layers of history. I could not see what she was “seeing” although I very much wanted to.  “This is our old family stable,” she finally said, “Where our horse Bess lived.”

She’d never spoken about Bess before, so this was a first.

She became very quiet after that, as if we had entered the sanctuary of a church.

She repeated the name “Bess” one more time, and then we left.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.