Devil's Pool
Natural basin where a creek plunges beneath a disguised nineteenth-century sewer aqueduct in stone.
This guide to Devil's Pool in Philadelphia's Wissahickon Valley opens with a puzzle: why would the city disguise a nineteenth-century sewer line as a Roman-style stone aqueduct? You'll hear how, in 1892, Philadelphia's water department hired stonemasons to quarry the valley's own schist and match it so closely to the surrounding outcrops that the arch reads as bedrock rather than plumbing, all in service of the City Beautiful movement's horror of ugly infrastructure. The guide also follows an older layer of the site's history, the Lenape memory of this creek junction as a boundary between good and evil, complete with a boulder said to seal something beneath the water. Stand at the basin and look sixty feet up before deciding which story explains what's holding the water in place.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.