page_title: Dock Street Market
section_title: Dock Creek
hierarchical_section_title: Dock Street Market / Dock Creek
caption_attribution_description: English: Map showing the former course of Dock Creek and its tributaries in Philadelphia. Base map is an 1891 USGS map. Course is based on this map and on various other written sources.
context_page_description: The Dock Street Market was Philadelphia's central wholesale produce market from 1870 until its closure in 1959 and relocation to the Food Distribution Center in South Philadelphia. The Dock Street Market was located on Dock Street in Society Hill. Dock Street is three blocks long, and runs from Sansom Street to Spruce Street, and between Third and Front Streets. The market was busiest between midnight and eight in the morning when produce was loaded and offloaded between delivery trucks and warehouses.
context_section_description: The area around Dock Creek was first settled in the seventeenth century.William Penn thought the mouth of the creek a good site to dock ships.
  Leather tanners had used Dock Creek since the city's early days, both as a water source in which to soak animal hides, and for refuse disposal. Benjamin Franklin and others petitioned to remove the tanners to a more remote part of the city in 1739. The city built a covered sewer with a brick arch, in two stages, in 1765 and 1784. In 1763, the creek was used as an open sewer and described as "a Receptacle for the Carcasses of dead Dogs, and other Carrion, and Filth of various kinds, which laying exposed to the Sun and Air putrify and become extremely offensive and injurious to the Health of the Inhabitants." Residents covered the creek above Second Street by 1769 and Dock Creek was completely covered to its outlet at the Delaware by 1784.
  The sewer became inadequate in the 1840s and frequently overflowed to the streets above. The city built a culvert under the streets to carry the stream. During the redevelopment of Dock Street in the 1960s, new sewer lines were constructed in the area and archaeologists investigated the site.
  Dock Street continues to run on top of the old stream bed.
caption: Map showing the former course of Dock Creek and its tributaries in Philadelphia
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