Philadelphia, PA: 1866-2019 America's First Petrochemical Corridor

Corridor: (Satellite, most of the the land is now literally brown.)

See Jarad Farmer's map below as to what was where.

Erik Nordberg linked to Researchers create 'digital monument' to site of 2019 South Philly refinery explosion, Thom Carroll/For PhillyVoice
"The University of Pennsylvania funded the creation of a website titled "Petrodelphia: America's First Petrochemical Corridor" that was published on Oct. 16 after five years of research by a team of nearly 30 students, freelancers and experts from various fields."
A developer bought the 1,300-acre property in 2020 for $222m and plans to build warehouses "spanning millions of square feet." [I wish the neighborhoods good luck in terms of truck traffic.]

Nancy Cardozo: Here's the link: https://petrodelphia.org

Note that the dates are before 2019. Today (Nov 2025), everything is gone including the office building.

This was the Atlantic Refining (ARCO) Point Breeze refinery.

Street View, Oct 2018

I was the Chevron/Gulf Girard Point refinery.

Street View, Oct 2016

petrodelphia, "1975 aerial" layer selected
Note the Naval Yard in the lower-right corner.

Jared Farmer, p14

A Gas-o-Meter still stands, but it looks empty. I presume this has been saved as an industrial monument of the gas works. Nothing was saved from the refineries. I think they should have saved something like a distillate column.

Street View, Apr 2025

petrodelphia_0029, 1973, Dick Swanson,
Gulf and ARCO Refineries

petrodelphia_0009, Oct 12, 1975, Joseph P. McLaughlin
Nine-alarm fire at ARCO refinery

petrodelphia_0093, 1973, Dick Swanson
Gulf Refining with ARCO in distance under air pollution

This photo did not make sense to me until I noticed the date of 1931. A lot of things changed between the 1930s and the 1970s.

petrodelphia_0033, Jul 11, 1931, Educational and research purposes only
Atlantic and Gulf refineries, looking downstream

This is what a street view looking South from Penrose Bridge at the Gulf refinery would have looked like.

petrodelphia_0030, Dick Swanson, 1973

• The Schuylkill River has caught fire at least three times—in October 1892, in November 1892, and in April 1977. The second episode began when a refinery worker commuting home via rowboat lit a cigar and threw the match into the river, which was coated in benzene from a leaking pipe.
• As of the 1890s, Philadelphia had the greatest refining capacity of any US city, thanks to Atlantic Refining, which comprised some 20 percent of all US capacity and accounted for an equally significant share of the world output of kerosene. Overall, about 30 percent of all US petroleum exports in the 1890s shipped from Philadelphia.
• “It has been said that nothing goes out of the Chicago Stock Yards unutilized, except the squeal of the pig, and it may be said of Philadelphia’s great petroleum refinery that everything but the odor of the crude oil is converted into some useful product,” wrote the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce in 1917, the year Atlantic Refining opened its first service station in Philadelphia. However, that statement was patently untrue for the prior Standard Oil era. Before the mass adoption of automobiles with internal combustion engines, large volumes of distilled light fractions such as gasoline and naphtha had been routinely dumped into the Schuylkill River. Stream pollution abatement programs at Atlantic Refining did not begin until the 1920s.
• Another externality of the Atlantic refinery in the Rockefeller years (1874–1911) was the offloading of volatile waste distillates to Philadelphia peddlers and grocers, who sold them as cooking fuels. This led to a significant increase, peaking around 1900, in accidental injuries and deaths from scalding and burning, to the disproportionate harm of women and children.
• Greater Philadelphia was, as of the mid twentieth century, one of the leading refining centers in North America. In addition to the ARCO and Gulf refineries on the lowermost Schuylkill River, five major facilities existed along a 23-mile stretch of the Delaware River in proximity to Philadelphia: Petty Island, New Jersey (CITGO); Paulsboro, New Jersey20 (Mobil); Eagle Point, Westville, New Jersey (Texaco); Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania (Sun); and Trainer, Pennsylvania (Sinclair).
[Jared Farmer]