Major Schuylkill River Trail Extension Will Be Ready By Year’s End
The first link in the chain connecting the Schuylkill River Trail to Bartram's Garden is a cable-stayed bridge in Grays Ferry that will open around the end of spring.
Rendering of the Christian-to-Crescent Bridge on the Schuylkill River Trail, slated to open around two months from now.
The project to extend the Schuylkill River Trail all the way to Bartram’s Garden is about to take a big step forward.
That step is the completion of the “Christian-to-Crescent Bridge.” As its name says, this cable-stayed span will connect the current southern end of the Schuylkill River Trail at Christian Street to the Grays Ferry Crescent segment at 34th Street.
Joseph Syrnick, president of the Schuylkill River Development Corporation, says work is all but complete on the span. The SRDC hasn’t yet set a firm opening date for the bridge, but Syrnick says, “We are focusing in on the latter part of May or the very early part of June.” The main work remaining to be done is getting all the official signoffs needed to permit the span to open.
The $48 million span, built and designed by AECOM, has cables whose lattice patterns recall those of one of the nation’s most iconic suspension bridges, the Brooklyn Bridge.
Syrnick says that, once the bridge opens, traffic on the two trail segments should even out.
“The Center City section of the trail is very busy, but the section of the trail below that, the Grays Ferry Crescent, has been open for 10 years but is not connected either to the north or the south. This is going to connect it to the north, which will greatly increase the number of people on that section.
“Which we think is a good thing, because the more people you have on the trail, the more active it becomes and the safer it becomes.”
After the C-to-C span opens, only one completed section of the trail in the city will remain isolated: the stretch on the west bank of the Schuylkill known as “Bartram’s Mile.” This segment leads to Bartram’s Garden, the first botanical garden in America.
Work is also underway on a bridge that will connect it to the Grays Ferry Crescent. The city of Philadelphia is spearheading work on this bridge, which sits between a disused freight railroad bridge and the bridge carrying Grays Ferry Avenue across the river.
“Once that gets done and open, which will hopefully be by the end of the calendar year, that’ll get you all the way down to 61st Street” in Southwest Philadelphia, says Smyrnick.
“The section of the trail on the west side of the river by Bartram’s Garden has been open since 2017, but that also is not connected to the north or the south. So it ends up being sort of a neighborhood park that does not get as much use as we would hope to get. Once these things all connect, it’s going to increase the amount of volume” on the southern end of the trail.
It will also bring the route of the East Coast Greenway through Philadelphia one big step closer to completion. The ECG, a 3,000-mile bicycle and walking trail, will extend from Maine to Florida when complete, much as the Appalachian Trail does for hikers.
The path’s route through Philadephia will enter the city from the northeast, following the Delaware River, then crosses the city via a connector to be built along Spring Garden Street to reach the existing SRT. From 61st Street, the Greenway will follow local roads including Cobbs Creek Parkway to an unpaved trail through the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum before heading southwest through Chester and Marcus Hook into Delaware.
The two bridges will also tie the isolated trail segments into the Circuit Trails, a more-than-400-miles-and-counting network of hiking and biking trails located throughout the Greater Philadelphia area.
