Delaware River Generating Station

An undated historical photograph of Delaware River Generating Station in Philadelphia.

Updated September 24, 2021 | By Matthew Christopher

It’s always hard to fathom how something as large, expensive, and integral to a city’s history as Philadelphia’s Delaware River Generating Station winds up abandoned. Dust floated lazily through the air of the turbine hall, illuminated by some impressive shafts of light filtering in through the skylights overhead, and I felt, as I often do in abandoned buildings, that I was now in a place that had transcended time itself and stood in both the past and present, part of both and neither.

It wasn’t always a ruin, of course. Once the largest power plant in the city of Philadelphia and the source of most of its electricity, the Delaware Station (as it was, at some point, renamed) was first conceived as a solution to the patchwork of over 25 electrical services in Philly that provided power to businesses, streetlights, industries, and homes. It was hoped that Delaware Station could consolidate power under the umbrella of a single public utility source. This would improve efficiency and lower cost greatly, and also meet the needs of the many industries that had developed in the area.

Philadelphia Electric purchased the lot of a former shipbuilder in 1913 anticipating the need for more power stations, and plans were drawn up by architect John Windrim, who would later design the Franklin Institute. Delaware Station was meant to be a Beaux Arts monument to the stability and might of Philadelphia Electric – at once impressive and reassuring. When completed Delaware Station would be the first large-scale reinforced concrete power plant in the United States.

Construction on Delaware Station started in 1917 but sputtered out in two months due to lack of funding. The need for another power station only increased after the World War I as more homes were wired with electricity. Funds were raised through sales of stocks and bonds and construction resumed in 1919, with the hope that at least half the plant would be completed and operational the following year. By 1923, when Delaware Station was complete and cranking out 180,000kw – almost half of the city’s supply – Philadelphia Electric was still struggling to keep pace with the skyrocketing demand. Plans were made to construct the behemoth Richmond Station three miles away, but by the time the first third of it was finished and online in 1925 several other power stations had also been built and the city’s power needs had been met. Delaware Station remained the king.

View of Delaware Station's turbine hall from the gantry crane

By the 1950s, coal powered plants were considered obsolete, dirty, and inefficient when compared to the new rising star in the energy industry: nuclear power. Delaware Station remained online after the construction of the nuclear power plants in Peach Bottom and Limerick, and a more efficient expansion was added in 1953. According to the incredibly informative National Register of Historic Places form completed in 2016, by 1969 the main turbine hall and original boiler houses were inactive and only the 1953 expansion was still online. The NRHP form states by 2000 the plant’s expansion was only used to balance out times of peak demand and the entire station was mothballed in 2008.

Whatever the case may be, Delaware Station sat in limbo for years. In 2015 the property was sold to developers Bart Blatstein and Joseph Volpe, who planned to turn it into a hotel and high-end event space complete with restaurants and ballrooms.

Rendered view of the plans for redevelopment of Delaware Station

Delaware Station was sold yet again in 2019-2020 to developer Lupert-Adler for $14.24 million, and the plans have changed: now it will be residential space, with two additional floors added to the top of the building. There have been a number of seemingly improbably, high-profile reuse projects that were successful in the city, and I hope this is one of them. Delaware Station was certainly awe-inspiring as a dead space, but not particularly beneficial to the surrounding area. I hope it can be equally awe-inspiring in its rebirth.

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