Listed here are News Releases and articles about the project to rebuild I-95 in Philadelphia between the Girard Avenue and I-676 Interchanges and to rebuild the Girard Avenue Interchange.
GIRARD AVENUE INTERCHANGE IMPROVEMENT PROJECT BEGINS
Sept. 25, 2009 - The Girard Avenue ramp to northbound Interstate 95 and northbound Aramingo Avenue in Philadelphia will close Monday (Sept. 28) for the start of an $8.8 million project to improve travel through the I-95/Girard Avenue Interchange, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) announced today.
Crews will work over the next 10 months to improve the interchange by building a temporary off-ramp from southbound I-95 to southbound Aramingo Avenue and by realigning northbound Aramingo Avenue between Delaware Avenue and York Street.
A posted detour will direct eastbound Girard Avenue drivers onto Richmond Street, from where they will reach the ramp to I-95 North or access northbound Aramingo Avenue.
This project is the first of six separate contracts to start construction for PennDOT’s $900 million program to improve the I-95/Girard Avenue Interchange, which includes the reconstruction of the adjacent section of I-95 between
Interstate 676 and Allegheny Avenue. The remaining five construction contracts will start at various times over the next seven years.
Under this first project, which is designed to move traffic more efficiently through the interchange area throughout the multi-phase, multi-year interchange improvement plan, crews will build a ramp off of the existing southbound I-95 off-ramp at the Girard Avenue Interchange. This spur ramp will provide direct access to southbound Aramingo Avenue and the waterfront area along Delaware Avenue. A traffic signal will be installed to control left turns from the spur ramp onto southbound Aramingo Avenue.
In addition, northbound Aramingo Avenue traffic will be re-routed through the interchange area from its intersection with Delaware Avenue. The re-routed northbound Aramingo Avenue will merge with the existing connector ramp that runs from eastbound Girard Avenue to Aramingo Avenue north near Norris Street. A short spur also will be built to allow northbound Aramingo Avenue traffic to turn left at a traffic signal onto southbound Aramingo Avenue.
Crews also will improve storm water drainage at the interchange and relocate various utility lines.
A ramp from eastbound Girard Avenue to northbound I-95 will be restored at the interchange during a later construction contract.
James J. Anderson Construction Co., Philadelphia is the general contractor on the $8,811,613 project that is financed with 90 percent federal and 10 percent state funds.
OTHER UTILITY WORK PLANNED AT I-95/GIRARD AVENUE INTERCHANGE AREA
September 2009 - As PennDOT works to improve the I-95/Girard Avenue Interchange (GIR) in 2009, 2010 and 2011, motorists and residents may encounter and be impacted by utility construction on Delaware Avenue and other surface roads in the project area. Most of these activities are not part of PennDOT’s GIR project.
These separate utility projects are proceeding on their own schedules and hours of operation. However, PennDOT has met with the agencies involved in the utility work to establish an information-sharing process. The parties also are coordinating the work whenever possible to minimize the impact on local traffic and surrounding neighborhoods.
Following is a summary of each of the utility projects. Questions about the individual projects should be directed to the agency noted. Click here for a PDF showing the affected locations and the agency completing the work.
PECO Transmission Line Relocation
PECO will relocate an underground transmission line from 2nd Street and Spring Garden Streets, along Delaware Avenue to the PECO sub-station near Columbia Avenue. Most of the construction activity will occur in the median lane of southbound Delaware Avenue and is expected to cause significant disruption to traffic flow.
PECO also will be relocating a distribution line along southbound Delaware Avenue in the vicinity of the Sugarhouse Casino.
Schedule: March 2010 through May 2010
Contact: PECO
SEPTA Trolley Line Relocation
Construction at the I-95 Girard Avenue Interchange requires that SEPTA’s Route 15 Trolley line be relocated outside the interchange area. SEPTA will build a new loop terminus for the trolley at Frankford Avenue and Delaware Avenue. The relocation will impact traffic on Delaware and Frankford avenues. SEPTA will utilize busses to shuttle passengers during construction.
Also, trolley service north of Frankford Avenue will be shut down temporarily during construction at the interchange in 2010 while the new tracks for the Route 15 line are reconstructed along Girard Avenue and Richmond Street.
Schedule: 2010
Contact: SEPTA
PWD Culvert Construction
The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) will construct a box culvert from Germantown Avenue, down Laurel Street and under Delaware Avenue to the Delaware River. The culvert will be constructed in phases and in coordination with construction activities at the Sugarhouse Casino on Delaware Avenue. Excavation for the culvert will be between 20’ and 30’ deep. A section of Laurel Street may be closed during this construction. Significant traffic impacts are expected on Delaware Avenue when work progresses to that location.
Schedule: January 2010 through January 2012
Contact: Philadelphia Water Department
PGW Gas Main
Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW) will relocate a 6” gas main along Delaware Avenue near Shackamaxon Street. Traffic on Delaware Avenue may be impacted.
Schedule: Summer 2009
Contact: PGW
Sugarhouse Casino
A number of utility and intersection construction activities will affect traffic on Delaware Avenue in the vicinity of the planned casino.
Schedule: August 2009 through 2011
Contact: Sugarhouse Casino
PENNDOT AWARDS CONTRACT FOR FIRST STAGE OF GIRARD AVENUE INTERCHANGE
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has awarded an $8.8 million contract to James J. Anderson Construction Co., Philadelphia and will begin construction in August on the first stage of improvements to I-95/Girard Avenue Interchange. more
The following article appeared in the June 16, 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer
I-95 dig offers a peek into 18th-century life
By Jennifer Lin
Inquirer Staff Writer
Rich Remer mined his family's Kensington past for a quarter-century.
He found deeds, wills, letters, newspaper clippings, maps, diaries. The material took him to the first Remer in the colonies, a German butcher who lived on Shackamaxon Street by the Delaware River in the mid-1700s.
A decade ago, he thought he had exhausted all leads.
Then came unexpected news two weeks ago: Archaeologists for the state had unearthed 25,000 artifacts from a Fishtown property once owned by his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the butcher Godfrey Remer.
In six pits used as 18th-century Dumpsters, they found such household items as a painted pearlware bowl from England, a chamber pot, a fractured teapot. They dug up a bone button, a domino, a piece of a flute-like recorder.
They unearthed scraps from colonial meals: apple seeds, a peach pit, fish bones. And in undisturbed layers of earth, they chanced upon stone points from spears and arrows, probably wielded by Native American hunters 1,000 years ago.
"I couldn't believe it," said Remer, of Williamstown, Gloucester County. "About 10 years ago, I ran out of discoveries. Any new information now is a breakthrough. . . . That's what delights me."
Remer has PennDot - and, more specifically, the I-95 upgrade - to thank.
All federal construction requires historical review of affected areas. In 1959, when work began on the Pennsylvania stretch of I-95, the mandate didn't exist. Now, with the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, it does.
The improvement project should start later this year on a three-mile stretch of I-95 heading north from Race Street.
By happenstance, archaeologists picked for their investigation a sliver of land - 10 feet wide and more than 100 feet long - by a highway retaining wall on Shackamaxon Street. They had no clue beforehand that the plot was part of the backyard of a home that Godfrey Remer bought for his shipwright son, Matthew, in 1778 in what was then called Kensington and now Fishtown.
"This whole thing has been serendipity from beginning to end," Remer said.
His interest in the discovery extends beyond his own family history. For more than a decade, he has worked with two Kensington residents, Torben Jenk and Kenneth Milano, to research their neighborhood's history.
Through the years, Milano said, archaeologists have overlooked areas north of Vine Street and south of South Street, preferring to focus on the colonial epicenter around Independence Hall.
Now the whole area is abuzz with activity.
Under their federal permit application, the SugarHouse Casino developers have had to chronicle the historical assets in their 22-acre Northern Liberties/Fishtown parcel.
As part of the I-95 review, the archaeologists for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation last winter unearthed part of the Aramingo Canal, a wood-sided waterway built in 1847.
They will continue working at other scattered sites along the three-mile section of I-95 until the end of the year, said Douglas Mooney, a senior archaeologist for the engineering firm URS Corp., who is overseeing the project.
A month ago, Mooney mentioned the Shackamaxon dig to Jenk, who told Milano and Remer. They pulled out a tape measure and their files - stuffed with deeds and maps - and concluded that the excavation site was a former Remer home that had been razed when I-95 was built.
The patriarch, Godfrey, most likely came to America as an indentured servant, eventually buying side-by-side houses for himself and his son, Matthew. During the Revolutionary War, Matthew joined the Kensington Artillery and helped repair the fleet of Durham boats before Gen. George Washington led troops across the Delaware River on Christmas Day 1776.
Later ancestors on Shackamaxon - an Algonquin word for "meeting place of great people" - were potters and peddlers, or "hucksters."
Mooney called the trio's contribution invaluable.
"For 10 years, they've been intensely investigating the history of not only this one site, but the whole length of the area," he said. "They've done a lot of the legwork."
Of the three, only Remer, 60, retired from the Social Security Administration in Philadelphia, has an advanced degree, a master's in early American history from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
Jenk, 48, who restores old buildings, is the group's map expert and surveyor. Milano, 50, a genealogist, works for a rare-book dealer and is expert at deciphering old handwritten documents.
Among them, they have written five books and five scholarly articles on Kensington-Fishtown history and created two Web sites, including an online encyclopedia of all things Kensington.
But Jenk and his colleagues have become more widely known for clashing with SugarHouse and challenging key historical conclusions.
Two points of contention: whether the casino property once housed a British fort from the Revolutionary War and a men's social club called Batchelor's Hall. The casino's experts say no. The three local historians say yes, and have provided more than 60 maps, 40 pages of deeds, and about 30 diaries.
Their relations with PennDot have been more collaborative. At the dig along I-95 last week, Kimberly Morrell, site manager for URS, gave Remer, Jenk, and Milano an inside-the-pit tour. Crews excavated an area only about four feet wide, but more than 100 feet long.
Morrell pointed out the different layers of earth, where shards of pottery, oyster shells, even a broken cow bone were sticking out.
Soon the excavation will be filled in and the contents - now PennDot property - will be shipped off to the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.
But the site, Remer said, already has shown what his documents could not. Bowls the family might have used for dinner. A creamer that perhaps sat on their table. Bones from a meal, maybe. A peek inside their lives.
"This completes the record," he said. "I'm touching my ancestors."
The following article appeared in the dec. 22, 2008 Philadelphia Inquirer
Wall provides link to canal's past
By Jennifer Lin
Inquirer Staff Writer
December 22, 2008 -- The watery tomb held its secret for more than a century.
And it would have stayed that way if not for plans to build a new Girard Avenue ramp off I-95 in Kensington.
Archaeologists working for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation have uncovered a relic from Philadelphia's commercial past that one historian called fantastic.
In a muddy pit under a lattice of elevated I-95 lanes, next to the Port Richmond Village shopping center, they have excavated a 50-foot stretch of wooden wall from the Aramingo Canal.
Built in 1847, the canal was a footnote in the evolution of Kensington as a commercial hub. With trains eventually eclipsing barges for hauling materials, the canal became an obsolete, polluted nuisance. It was completely covered over by 1902, becoming Aramingo Avenue.
Archaeologists knew where to look for the canal. But what they didn't realize was that they would find a section so perfectly preserved that they could still see the ax marks in logs.
Douglas Mooney, a senior archaeologist for URS Corp. Inc., said an underground stream - the long-forgotten Gunnar's Run - has kept the wooden wall waterlogged, sparing it from microbes that could have destroyed it.
"It's rock solid," Mooney said. "Sometimes you just get lucky."
Neighborhood historians are cheered by the discovery. They hope it will spur more interest in the waterfront's 19th-century industrial legacy, which tends to be overshadowed by the city's marquee colonial past.
Mooney, who also serves as president of the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum, said the riverfront had languished as a "historical backwater."
"It's just never had the same panache as Center City Philadelphia," said Mooney, who also worked on the excavation of George Washington's house and the Constitution Center site.
But that is changing, Mooney said. "There is an eagerness in neighborhoods to tell their individual histories," he said.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the lower river wards of Kensington, Fishtown and Port Richmond.
"It's an exciting time for our community," said Ken Milano, a historian who has written several books about Kensington.
Less than a mile from the I-95 project is another active archaeological site at the proposed SugarHouse casino location in Northern Liberties and Fishtown.
Archaeologists found hundreds of Native American relics on the SugarHouse property, and neighborhood historians have uncovered maps showing that the site had a British fort in 1777. Prodded by local interest, SugarHouse has agreed to look for evidence of the British redoubt.
Cathy Spohn, an archaeologist for PennDot, said the Aramingo Canal was unusual for two reasons. "Most canals were stone-lined and this one is wood," she said. "And it's so well-preserved."
The slow-moving stream that protected the canal wall underground also has created challenging conditions for archaeologists. Every day, the crew has to pump several feet of water from the site, Mooney said.
"Most of the time we're battling water and mud," he said.
Milano said that when the Aramingo Canal was built, the Delaware River waterfront was "an incubator for the Industrial Revolution."
There were shipbuilders, sawmills, lumber yards, rolling mills, lead works, glassworks, coal yards, and steam-engine shops.
"You had everything you needed to build iron ships right there," Milano said. "And if you wanted to learn the trade of steam-engine building, you started here."
The Aramingo Canal flowed into the Delaware River near where the current Beach Street merges into Richmond Street.
In 1847, investors paid $100 a share to join the company building the five-mile canal. But the backers had only enough money to finish one mile.
The canal became a money pit for its owners. It lacked a natural water source and was heavily polluted. A slaughterhouse at the far end of the canal dumped carcasses into the water.
"Within 20 years, this was little more than an open sewer," Mooney said. "The water was inky black and there was two feet of black mud at the bottom."
Doctors blamed the foul waterway for outbreaks of malaria and typhoid. "This became a health nightmare," Mooney said. The city began filling in the canal in 1896.
The excavation began six weeks ago but is now winding down. Archaeologists have been measuring and photographing the canal wall. PennDot may publish an account of the project for the public.
In the days ahead, Mooney said, the crew will bury the wall again to prevent damaging the logs by exposing them too long to air.
"We don't want to lose it," he said.
And so it's back to a muddy crypt for the Aramingo Canal.