Fishtown

This guide to Fishtown in Philadelphia starts on the muddy banks where Gunner's Run met the Delaware River, where generations of fishermen hauled in shad, a fish that swims hundreds of miles from the Atlantic to spawn in the exact stream where it hatched. It follows writer John McPhee's nickname for the shad, the smokehouses and gill nets that built the neighborhood's economy, and a popular legend crediting Charles Dickens with naming the place in 1842. Locals, the guide notes, were already calling it Fishtown well before that visit.