08/28/2025
📝 Editor’s Notes: Unguarded Waters 📝
Longtime readers of Grid might remember that I’m a big fan of swimming in natural bodies of water, as indicated when I wrote back in 2010 about taking a dip in the Schuylkill River. Much more recently, in 2022, I talked with boaters and swimmers at a Northeast Philly boat ramp about water quality in the Delaware River. It was a painfully hot day, and the water was right there. After two of my interview subjects, young men from Brazil who worked in a nearby tire shop, jumped in, I had to follow them. It was magnificently refreshing to plunge into the cool river water, the perfect antidote to the heat.
So I totally get it that on hot summer days plenty of other Philadelphians jump in our creeks and rivers, prohibitions be damned. Devil’s Pool is the most famous swimming hole, but plenty of people wade into the Wissahickon and other creeks at shallower spots that don’t have sexy/scary names that trend on Instagram. And they’re not all thrill seekers drawn in via social media. From what I’ve seen, plenty are families out for a picnic on a hot day doing what comes naturally, and, as Kyle Bagenstose writes in this issue, has been common practice for most of Philadelphia’s history.
Currently swimmers violate park regulations that ban swimming, since virtually all of the accessible Philly waterfront is parkland. Philadelphia Parks & Recreation seems to do little to enforce the swimming ban, though. Plenty of people take the absence of enforcement as tacit permission to get in the water, or at least find themselves faced with no practical disincentive. The City also recognizes no obligation to make the illegal activity safer or cleaner; why would it need to assist people breaking a rule?
➡️ Read the full note from our editor at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2025/08/01/editors-notes-unguarded-waters/
✍️ Bernard Brown
