I found this old photo which originated in the Library of Congress. It was taken in 1912 and shows the Delaware River at Trenton. At first glance I thought it was from the Pennsy side. But if I look at the abutments of the Morrisville-Trenton Train Bridge, which was built in 1902, it appears we are looking downstream based on the water flow. Why would they have current/ice breakers on the back side of abutments in a river? The arial image below shows the bridge looking from above Morrisville, PA.
In the postcard below you can see the train bridge on the left side. I tried looking up the factory that is shown mid-image but I haven't been able to locate it. What is interesting is the various
images show boats in the river on different tides. The upwards of the nine foot tide existed way back in the day and still exists today, of course. The tidal line stops just below the Calhoun Street Bridge. At an
early glance I was surprised that the Trenton waterfront, in the 1910 and 1920's, wasn't loaded with factories, bulkheads and barges, but simply sloping banks that lead down to the river. The reason I found these images is because I have been searching for vintage pictures of any literature regarding striped bass in the Delaware River around Trenton.
In the late 19th and early 20th century the Delaware River was a major fishery for herring, shad, and sturgeon, the later harvested mostly for caviar. I will find articles and images of the striped bass fishery that occurred before the river went to shit and was almost void of aquatic life by the 1970's.
In a paper by Gerald Kaufman titled, The Delaware River Revival: Four centuries of Historic water Quality Change from henry Hudson to Benjamin Franklin to JFK, he refers to an earlier study and paper done by ichthyologist M.E. Crittendon who concluded by 1971that "gross pollution of tidal freshwater had extirpated the striped bass from its historical chief spawning and nursery areas in the Delaware River".
There is so much more to striped bass than catching them. I am in love with a fish.