Race Street Pier

This guide to Race Street Pier in Philadelphia opens with the Ghost Ship, a spectral hologram of an eighteenth-century sailing vessel that flickered under the Benjamin Franklin Bridge for a month in 2019. From there it follows the Delaware River's own layered traffic across centuries, from Lenape canoes to colonial trading ships to the freight and passenger vessels that tied up at a two-level shipping pier built on this spot in 1896. It leans on an old riverside belief that everyone who crosses this water leaves something behind in the current. Stand at the lower end of the pier, on the amphitheater steps, where the hologram used to surface.