Cherry Street Pier

This guide to Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia traces the shed's start in 1919 as Municipal Pier Number Nine, and its takeover two years later by the United Fruit Company, which rushed boatloads of Jamaican bananas off steamers and onto waiting freight cars. It follows the pier's decline once shipping moved to newer docks, sitting closed for decades and briefly used to store kayaks and swan boats, before a 2017 rebuild reused the old shipping containers along its walls. Look down at the rail tracks still set into the concrete beneath your feet, laid for the produce cars that once rolled toward the city's markets.