Free Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront by Harry Kyriakodis

Fitch’s Steam-Boat. Library of Congress .
    Fitch soon inaugurated a ferry business between Philadelphia and Camden, departing regularly from the Arch Street Landing. This was the world’s first steam ferry service. He later began transporting passengers and freight between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey, as well as points south of Philadelphia. The Steam-Boat cruised almost three thousand miles in 1790 alone.
    In all, John Fitch constructed four steamboats that demonstrated the feasibility of using steam for water locomotion. He received a U.S. patent for his invention on August 26, 1791. Yet while his boats were mechanically sound, Fitch was not able to rouse support for his new method of ship propulsion. He never attained riches and was rewarded with only ridicule for his work. Nevertheless, Fitch was the most important of the handful of men who built steam vessels before Robert Fulton introduced his Clermont .
    Other inventors experimented on the Delaware River with applying steam to watercraft in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Oliver Evans (1755–1819) of Philadelphia invented a steam-driven amphibious dredge that he called the Oruktor Amphibolos (amphibious digger). In 1805, Evans floated it down the Schuylkill River, steamed it up the Delaware to the central waterfront and then drove it west on Market Street back to where he started.
    The contraption was intended to clear away river mud that constantly accumulated between the city’s docks, but it turned out to be inefficient for that purpose. Still, this was the first motorized vehicle in America and the world’s second motorized carriage, as well as the first steam-powered land vehicle in the world. General Motors once credited the Oruktor Amphibolos as the forerunner of the modern automobile. It was also a distant ancestor of today’s Ride the Ducks amphibious vehicles that take tourists around Philadelphia and then plunge into the Delaware for a cruise on the river.
    P ATENT N O . 1 AND F IVE -P OINTED S TARS
    Samuel Hopkins (1765–1840) was another local inventor associated with Arch Street near the Delaware. This Philadelphia Quaker was granted the very first patent under the Patent Act of the United States on July 31, 1790. Hopkins lived on the north side of Arch between Front and Second Streets.
    Signed by President Washington and Secretary of State Jefferson, United States Patent No. 1 was for an improvement “in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.” Hopkins’s patent was noteworthy not only because it was the first of its kind but also because it was vitally linked to the fledgling nation’s economy. Potash, America’s first industrial chemical, is an impure form of potassium carbonate.
    One block farther west on Arch Street is the Betsy Ross House, the supposed home of another inventive person. Betsy Ross’s role in sewing the nation’s first flag is subject to dispute, but the skilled upholsterer most certainly contributed to the Stars and Stripes’s design by changing its stars from six to five points—five-pointed stars were easier to cut from cloth. At the very least, Ross represents the many artisan women of Philadelphia who ran businesses and supported their families during the colonial and federal periods.
    F ILBERT S TREET S TEPS (T RESSE ’ S S TAIRS ) AND C LIFFORD ’ S A LLEY
    The steps and lower alley of Old Ferry Alley must have been abandoned in the mid-1800s, as Abraham Ritter notes: “Passing a flight of steps to Water street (now closed), a little below, at No. 53 [North Front].”
    The southernmost stepped alleyway on that block was located at 29 North Water. Initially called Tresse’s Stairs, the stairway was installed by Thomas Tresse, a notable merchant with scores of mercantile enterprises in Philadelphia’s early days.
    These stairs and the alley leading to the river were later named Clifford’s Alley,