BOOKS & CULTURE // TINICUM & EASTWICK // A TALE OF TWO CITIES

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Tinicum & Eastwick: Environmental Justice and Racial Injustice in Southwest Philadelphia

Will Caverly

Publisher: Brookline Books, Havertown, PA, 2024

Volume 7 // Issue 2 // Fall 2025 // Conservation

In 1950s Philadelphia, city planners designed the nation's largest “urban renewal” project—also described as “slum clearing” by some—targeting the racially integrated, working-class neighborhood of Eastwick in Southwest Philadelphia, as well as the ecologically important Tinicum marshlands for demolition. What would replace it? A “city within a city,” which was lauded at its ribbon-cutting as a triumph by city officials. In the lead-up, two parallel grassroots movements emerged: Eastwick residents—led largely by residents from diverse racial backgrounds—fought eminent domain to save their homes, while wealthy conservationists from Chestnut Hill battled to preserve Pennsylvania’s last freshwater tidal marsh and its threatened wildlife. The question of who deserves a home—people or birds?—animates the book. Through oral history and exhaustive research, Caverly documents “one of the most egregious human rights violations in the city’s history,” but also “one of its greatest environmental triumphs.” It is still, Caverly writes, “an unfulfilled promise to the unborn generations of future city residents.” // HSB

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