Petty’s Island Cleanup

Petty’s Island: https://nj.gov/dep/njnlt/pettysisland.htm

Camden County Historical Society: https://www.cchsnj.org/

A well spent Saturday morning was recently dedicated to joining a clean up effort on Petty’s Island with a studio friend Miriam. This island is located between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Pennsauken, New Jersey. It is also positioned just across from our most recent studio design site.

The cleanup lasted 2 hours with a team of roughly 20 volunteers. We cleared a small portion of the Eastern shoreline and filled an entire dumpster in that time. The amount of debris that washed up from the river was just shocking! Plastic bottles, lighters, caps, car tires, rope, hair clips, plastic forks, fluid containers of all kinds, plastic and paper bags, kids toys, you name it and it was probably there. Of all the debris that we picked up it still didn’t completley clean the area. We were able to remove the first larger layer of debris. Beneath that layer was a smaller scattered layer of caps and odd bits. Under this there was another layer of teeny tiny bits of broken down plastic which had mostly sowed itself into the soil and roots only showing when a plastic bag pulled up enough dirt to look below.

After the clean up several of us went on a short historical tour of the island, giving Miriam and I a wonderful chance to see the studio site from the island. Unfortunately neither of us had brought a camera so the tiny iPhone pictures we captured will have to do as baselines to remake renders.

This history of the island was quite fascinating. I hope that if I am in Philly this summer I can go on the actual tour to get the full story of this key piece of Philadelphia and New Jersey’s development history. If you are interested in the full tour of the island I suggest going to the Camden County Historical Society facebook page and clicking on their sign up link. It is certainly worth the walk!