Girard Avenue Station
9th and Girard
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| Whaaaaaat? |
Ninth and Girard might be a big steaming pile of mammoth shit now, but in the early 20th Century, it was wicked. You had a huuuuge farmer's market that served the entire area, two nice theatres, lots of fancy housing, a grand hospital nearby, and an ELEVATED FUCKING REGIONAL RAIL STATION!!
Nowadays, its crap. The market is an empty lot, the housing has been replaced with boring suburban-style "affordable housing", and the theatres are shells of their former selves. The hospital is still there, but its new additions look like fracocta baloney. Most disappointing of these losses was the regional rail station-- Girard Avenue Station. That picture up there is pretty much the only visual record of it. Its not clear when it was built or when it was removed.
One thing I have figured out is that the track wasn't always elevated like that. It used to be on the ground. This picture from 1906 proves it:
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| There it is, with the long-lost Swift & Co. HQ. |
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| Across the street, the kick-ass Girard Avenue Farmer's Market. |
At some point, Reading RR turned that track into a causeway/viaduct and created a passenger station at Girard Avenue. While there were other lost passenger stations along this line (the Spring Garden one is sort of still standing, the Columbia Ave [Cecil B. Moore] one is now a baseball field), this was the only one straddling a street. This thing had to have an architect/engineer... it had to be built some time, and it had to be taken down some time as well. Nonetheless, I can't find shit. This thing is LOST AS FUCK.
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| ...but it DID exist. This 1910 map has it, even though a 1909 picture I found has the track on the ground. |
Any of you railroad nerds out there know anything about this? Where the fuck this thing came from? Where it went? What happened to all the other cool buildings that surrounded it? I mean, for fuck's sake, here's a Google Streetview of the same location shown in the photo at the top of the article:
THAT'S THE SAME FUCKING LOCATION? Did the Borg come and wipe the whole place out? Its one thing to have a lost building, its something else entirely to have a lost transit point surrounded by lost buildings! Maybe I'm just over-reacting. Maybe this stuff was demolished in the last 30-40 years and some old heads out there remember them and could tell me what happened. Nonetheless, this is a mysterious fucking loss of mysterious fucking buildings that really pisses me off.
Have any info on this?
