For the first time in 85 years, Manayunk’s historic canal is on the move — like the neighborhood

Early in Lance Butler’s days at the Philadelphia Water Department, his boss pulled him aside and took him to the Manayunk Canal.

Once a key player in America’s industrial might, the canal had been closed for nearly 60 years. Its stagnant waters were full of mud, weeds, and algae. And the gatehouse had become a run-down graffiti canvas.

“I feel sorry for whoever has to take this project on,” Butler, now a senior scientist at PWD, remembered saying.

Turning to look at him, the boss replied: “Congratulations.”

That was in 1998. At an event last month, Butler recounted that first visit, and what a different place the area around the canal had become.

That was evident in the venue for his remarks: the stage of the Venice Beach Performing Arts and Recreation Center, which opened in 2014 as a theater and outdoor playground with athletic courts bathed in floodlights.

Now, PWD is hoping the canal itself can have a revival.

In mid-April, PWD and Pennsylvania’s infrastructure fund, PENNVEST, reopened the Manayunk Canal to the Schuylkill for the first time since 1940. Officials hoped the transformation would make the canal area more pleasant hiking and recreational space and help purify the nearby waters.

Growth is everywhere in Manayunk — not just in public works projects like the canal, but in the new homes and businesses springing up around, atop, and even within a cityscape whose architecture dates to the 18th century.

The Lenape dubbed the river “Manaiung,” meaning “where we go to drink.” Settlers called the area Flat Rock for more than a century after William Penn acquired it in 1682.

The dam and canal gave the community its identity: The first textile mill opened near the Schuylkill in 1819; factories and working-class homes soon dominated the neighborhood. Locals officially took the name Manayunk in 1824.

The mills boomed during the reign of “king cotton,” fueled by the enslavement of Black Americans in the South. Nineteenth-century newspapers described the neighborhood as rife with poverty and filth. And workers in the mills toiled for long hours and low pay — including dozens of children, as historian Adam Levine noted in his remarks at Venice Island.

Manayunk’s mills remained strong after the Civil War. And the neighborhood kept producing long after the rise of railroads turned the canal into a novelty of sorts. But the textile mills began to close, and the streets emptied out, in the mid-20th century.

Main Street joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, coinciding with a neighborhood renaissance as popular restaurants began setting up shop in its once-dormant storefronts. And a generation of creative and young educated residents converged on Manayunk, with many staying to raise families.

“You want people to move in, and stay, and, like, eat brunch,” firefighter Michelle Bailey said in an interview of the neighborhood’s evolution. “The apartments and condos and whatnot are plentiful in this area — and expensive.”

As the neighborhood has changed, so has the waterfront. At first, PWD staffers worked on smaller solutions to try to raise the canal’s water quality — like aerating the waters to get more oxygen flowing to Manayunk’s fish. Then came the rec center and a grant-funded effort to upgrade the Schuylkill River Trail.

In 2021, PENNVEST approved a roughly $16 million loan to kick-start an initiative called the Flat Rock Dam Improvement Project. The canal and the river would be reconnected and the gatehouse remade as an outdoor mini-museum, all while the quality of local drinking water rose to the federal government’s standards of consistency and cleanliness.

When the effort’s stakeholders gathered on Venice Island last month, Butler said the project was already paying dividends: The reopening had largely cleansed the canal of excess weeds and algae, he explained, while bringing the water’s chemical makeup up to federal standards.

“Three months before, if I’d been standing in that same spot, I’d be chest-deep in mud,” Butler said, pointing to a projector-screen photo of himself and a colleague. Indeed, he was chest-deep in water.

At the end of his remarks on Venice Island, Butler and his fellow scientists led spectators to the Cotton Street Bridge to showcase another element of the department’s strategy: mussels — those ornate, shelly, stationary creatures whose presence in the water often filters out metals and waste.

As late as the 19th century, freshwater mussels were abundant in and around the Schuylkill, featuring prominently in famed biologist Arnold Ortmann‘s survey of the wildlife, Butler later explained in an interview. But they are now among the most endangered animals in the United States. By housing thousands of mussels in floating steel cages in the canal, Butler hoped to raise the water quality even more and replenish at least five species.

“It’s dam safety,” Butler, who cultivates upward of 50,000 mussels a year further down the river, said of the project. “It’s water quality. It’s aesthetics. It’s addressing local communities’ needs.”