An $850,000 grant will help more visitors enjoy the Delaware Riverfront at a historic mansion in NE Philly

An $850,000 William Penn Foundation grant will enable Glen Foerd, the city-owned estate on a wooded bluff overlooking the Delaware River, to better serve walkers, cyclists, kayakers, wedding-goers, art patrons, music lovers, and bird-watchers.

“The grant is by far the largest we have received,” said Ross Mitchell, executive director of Glen Foerd.

“It’s transformational,” he said. “It will enable us to offer our kayaking and environmental programming free for two years and help us build relationships with all the different communities in Northeast Philadelphia, including communities of color and others that have been cut off from the waterfront. Glen Foerd is a unique place to access the river.”

The grant will help the nonprofit Glen Foerd Conservation Corp. expand environmental, educational, recreational, and cultural programming at the 18-acre park and 20-room mansion in Far Northeast Philadelphia. The funding also will help sustain a partnership between Glen Foerd and the Philadelphia School District, enabling students like Manar Albahadly, Christopher Medina, and Ethan Winter to continue participating in a boatbuilding workshop at Northeast High and other schools.

Glen Foerd is among the founders of Riverways, an outdoor education program that encourages kids from disadvantaged Philly and Camden neighborhoods to kayak on and care about the Delaware and Cooper Rivers.

“Thinking about our boats being on the Delaware River, which I had only seen from afar, gives me a new appreciation for it,” said Albahadly, a 17-year-old senior.

Plans also call for building a permeable-surface parking lot and improving the entrance to and exit from the park into East Torresdale, the neighborhood traversed by an estimated 35,000 Glen Foerd visitors annually.

“We want to preserve Glen Foerd not only as a historic house but as a cultural destination for Northeast Philadelphia, and for the region,” Mitchell said. ”My idea is to make people want to come here by offering creative programming.”

Dan Coonan, second vice president of the East Torresdale Civic Association, said he has enjoyed adventurous cultural events, including those by the EgoPo Classic Theater company and the West Philadelphia Orchestra, at Glen Foerd. “The Northeast can be kind of a cultural desert, and there’s lots going on at Glen Foerd,” he said.

The grant also represents “a great opportunity to get more kids on the river,” Coonan said. “When I was growing up in Mayfair, when we went down to the river, it was all dead industrial sites.”

» READ MORE: Philly-area trail network gets nearly $6 million from William Penn Foundation to improve and expand

Built in 1850 and expanded in 1895, the house is one of the last surviving riverfront mansions erected by wealthy Philadelphians during the second half of the 19th century. It stands at the confluence of the Delaware and the Poquessing Creek, along a scenic stretch of the river well north of the city’s industrial heart.

The house is still standing because the working-class neighborhood around it organized against a proposal to redevelop the site as a condominium complex in the 1980s, said City Councilmember Mike Driscoll.

He described his house in the Village of Torresdale section as “three doors” away from Glen Foerd.

“It’s public space, and it’s a jewel,” Driscoll said.

The Council member also said that while improvements to the entrance from and exit onto neighborhood streets from Glen Foerd “are needed, they have to be done right. We already have a lot of traffic coming through here during events.”

Glen Foerd is the farthest north of eight parks that are being connected by trails to form the 11-mile Delaware Riverfront North Greenway, which will be part of the region’s emerging Circuit Trail network.

“We consider Glen Foerd a partner,” said Stephanie Phillips, executive director of the nonprofit guiding the greenway’s development.

“Northeast Philadelphia residents need to have welcoming and safe access to their riverfront,” she said. “There are wonderful spaces here and the new infrastructure will attract more people.”

Said Coonan: “I’m a bike rider, and I have waited my entire life for the Northeast to get connected [by trails]. And now it’s finally coming together.”

» READ MORE: New Northeast Philly connector trail being built at base of Tacony-Palmyra Bridge

With the waters of the Delaware at their cleanest in decades and the incremental transformation of a six-mile stretch of the city’s central waterfront north and south of Penn’s Landing well underway, the William Penn grant is well-timed, said Joseph A. Forkin, who lives a block from Glen Foerd and also chairs its board.

“There was a long history of disinvestment on the waterfront, and the city kind of turned its back and forgot about it,” said Forkin, who also is president of the Delaware River Waterfront Corp. The nonprofit is guiding the redevelopment of the six-mile expanse of the central waterfront.

“Recreation is a very important way of just getting people to the river, so they can start to recognize this natural resource for what it is,” he said. “There is also more recognition of the need for equitable access, whether from close by, or regionally, so that disadvantaged neighborhoods can take advantage of the river.”

By providing support for the boatbuilding and Riverways programs, the William Penn grant “will help create a new generation of interest in the river,” said Forkin.

Andy Adams, a Northeast High alum who has taught social studies there for 16 years, said the boatbuilding came about after he worked at Glen Foerd in summer 2021.

“We’re always looking for ways to get our kids outside safely and have them create things with their hands,” he said. “Boatbuilding is a new way to broaden their horizons.”

Northeast students have so far built four flat-bottomed, 13-foot “Schuylkill skiffs” and want to do more.

Winter, an 18-year-old senior, said he enjoyed the experience and plans to study environmental science in college.

And Medina, a 16-year-old junior, said that “being able to be out on the water in something I created was amazing. I loved it.”

Medina also has participated in the Riverways program at Glen Foerd, taking water samples from the Poquessing and building a garden.

The Delaware, he said, “is so beautiful when you discover what it is.”