NIGHT OF DISASTER
HOW EYRE PARK FLOODING CHANGED CHESTER FOREVER:
“I can’t tell you how wonderful it was living down here. Everyone was like family, everyone knew each other, everyone respected each other.”
— Loretta Rodgers, longtime Delco Times correspondent, speaking to the Times on the grounds of Eyre Park
CHESTER » The idyllic peninsula along Chester Creek known for years as Preston Lake embodied its former name 50 years ago in ways those who championed its development would have never wished.
Days of rain in the aftermath of tropical storms Heidi and Fern culminated the evening of Sept. 13, 1971 to hand the city its worst flood damage of the modern era. Flood waters from Chester Creek crested more than 16 feet over the flood plain at 11 p.m. and laid waste to the 200-plus homes of Eyre Park on the peninsula north of West Ninth Street, next to the present Chester High School. The flood claimed 10 lives across the county, destroyed 32 bridges and left property damage, never fully tallied, estimated at $100 million. Beyond the property damage, it left a lasting impact on the lives of those experienced the destruction of Eyre Park.
“I can’t tell you how wonderful it was living down here. Everyone was like family, everyone knew each other, everyone respected each other,” said Loretta Rodgers, longtime Delco Times correspondent, speaking to the Times on the grounds of Eyre Park. Rodgers, nee Boden, lived in the neighborhood from third grade until the flood struck at the start of her freshman year at Notre Dame High School in Moylan. “The hardest thing was in an instant losing everything that we knew. That’s something that I’m not sure anyone who lived down here ever got over. Everyone has their own story about what happened down here,” she said.
“I couldn’t imagine a better place to grow up. You could go outside any day and they’d be 30 kids out there looking to play something,” said Joe Gallagher, retired football head coach at Haverford High School. Gallagher, who spent his youth in Eyre Park, was a junior at St. James High School in Chester at the time of the flood. “But from
that day on, we all dissipated. We never saw each other; people were all over the place,” he said.
The flood also displaced residents who were entering a new period in their lives, buying their first homes in the years before the flood. “I was excited. I don’t know if ‘The Jeffersons’ were out by then but I thought we had moved on up,” said Cathy Morse, speaking to the Times with her brother Sterling Morse and mother Ossie Morse. The Morse family had moved to the neighborhood roughly a year before the flood from the Ruth L. Bennett Homes. “The downtown area was still pretty vibrant. We lived right across the walk bridge (to Ninth Street); the YMCA was right across the street,” said Sterling. “(The flood) disrupted everything in our lives. People were displaced. They disappeared; going to Sharon Hill, little towns outside Chester looking for housing.”
Others found themselves in the wrong place at the time. Mike Studzinski, recently graduated basketball player at PMC Colleges (formerly Pennsylvania Military College, today Widener University) and substitute teacher in the then-Chester School District, had a pickup basketball game at the Eyre Park-based Central YMCA interrupted by flood warnings. Studzinski escaped on the nearby footbridge to West Ninth Street. “The water was about a foot higher than the floorboards of the bridge… there were couches and things hitting up against it,” he said.
The land Eyre Park occupied had a varied history with the surrounding Chester Creek (or Chester River as it was popularly known during the time of the land’s development). The land now surrounded by West Ninth Street, Interstate 95, Chester High School and I-95 was held by prominent Chester families from the Colonial Period until mid-20th century.
The land passed from the Preston family to the Eyre family in 1775, with the latter holding it until 1969. In the mid-19th century, Joshua P. Eyre Jr. cut sluiceways on the property abutting his farm to harvest ice from Chester Creek, forming the Preston Lake Ice Company. The area was then popularly known as Preston Lake. The land passed to Sallie Pennell Eyre, who in 1893 married Gen. William G. Price Jr., land developer and prominent military and civic figure.
While developing commercial and residential properties in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the Chester area, Preston Lake lied fallow in Price’s portfolio. Price and other parties had multiple false starts with development in the early 20th century, removing the sluiceways, restoring the creek banks and adding paper streets to city maps in the process. Trap shooting clubs made use of the area, and Times editorialized that it would behoove the city to acquire the property to add to Deshong Park before residential demand for the ideal location drove prices out of reach.
In the mid-1930s, Price offered to sell the property to the Chester School District to build a new high school, vocational school and athletic complex. When the bid fell through, he announced the construction of Eyre Park in late 1938.
“Not only will the development place upon the local real estate market much needed modern housing but it will also serve to bring about the development of a residential park area on the west bank of the Chester River which will conform suitably to the park on the east bank and greatly improve the central city in appearance,” the Times wrote in December 1938. Privately owned homes were built between 1939 and 1940, with a final round constructed for war workers in 1943. The latter would stay in control of the Price and Eyre estate as rental houses until a sale to an investment company in 1969.
Chester Creek first turned its wrath on the homes on Nov. 25, 1950, when days of rain caused buildup at a dam then standing at Ninth Street. Flooding drove the development’s 208 families from their homes and caused an estimated $150,000 in damages. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers then designed a dike system around the neighborhood in 1952, turning over the combination 1,100-foot concrete floodwall and 2,200-foot earthen levee to the city in 1954 as part of Armed Services Day ceremonies.
While the dike system stood as a reminder of past troubles, residents who spent their youth in Eyre Park said the idea of a second catastrophic flood was not in their daily thoughts. “I heard stuff about (the 1950 flood), the reason they built the dike system,” said Gallagher. “It was more out-ofsight, out-of-mind.”
“We didn’t know we were living in a teacup,” said Cathy Morse of herself and her four siblings. Ossie said she and her husband had learned of the 1950 flood from neighbors upon moving to Eyre Park.
“We moved there when I was in the third grade and it was the most wonderful place to live,” said Rodgers, who moved with her grandparents and mother from nearby Taylor Terrace to join many branches of her family living in Eyre Park. “Eyre Park itself was like one big playground for the kids,” she said, describing nightly games of neighborhood-wide “manhunt” tag where the World War II memorial in the development’s center served as a jail for captured players. “We would leave the house at 9:00 in the morning and not come back even for lunch half the time. We would go home (for dinner) and then there was a baseball game down at the field by the Y every single night,” she said. Along with the YMCA, the neighborhood was also home to a playground in the city-wide park system. “We couldn’t wait for the summer when the playground would open and we’d play box hockey,” Rodgers said.
“It gave us more of a variety of people to be around,” said Sterling Morse, a junior at Chester High School at the time, now of Washington, D.C. “I got to meet some of the folks who went to St. James,” he said. “We were right on the edge of the East Side, which was a whole different culture.”
A regular activity for neighborhood youth gave some forewarning of the flood.
“I don’t know how many days in a row it rained, but it was bunch. It was consistent hard rain,” said Gallagher. “One of the things we used to do a lot was say ‘let’s go see how high the creek is.’” The day of the flood, Gallagher and a neighbor ran to the top of the dike to find “the water was feet away, and it was flowing,” he said.
The two ran door-to-door along North Eyre Drive warning neighbors. “Half of the people thought, ‘Ah these kids, they don’t know what they’re talking about,’” he said. “Some of them listened and went and checked themselves. It wasn’t long after we did this that it started pouring over,” he said. Gallagher’s family fled to Ninth Street shortly after.
“That night my cousin and I had gone over to the earthen dike on South Eyre Drive,” said Rodgers, seeing water “about 8 inches from the top.” With “The Lucy Show” coming on in 15 minutes, Rodgers elected to return home and warned her mother to put the car in the garage in case of overflow. “‘The Lucy Show’ came on and I heard this noise. I ran to the back window and what I saw is something I hope to never see again,” she said. “It looked like a wave from the ocean coming down the back alley right toward our house.”
Sterling Morse had been dismissed early at Chester High School that day due to flooding in the school, still in the Ninth and Fulton streets building. Morse found ankle-high water on Ninth Street as he walked home, but still elected to go to Spencer’s Stationary downtown to purchase a slide rule. “When I came back (the water) seemed normal enough,” he said. “But around 8:00, I was … watching ‘Nanny and the Professor’ and that’s when they came around with the bullhorn, knocking on doors, telling us to evacuate immediately,” he said.
Studzinski had traveled to the Central YMCA from his West End residence in a new Volkswagen convertible the day of the flood. “I came out to start it … it was raining and wet, it just wasn’t firing,” he said, turning down offers to help to push it the few blocks out to higher ground on West Ninth Street. “It got worse as the minutes clicked by and I realized that I got to get out of there. The streets were starting to flood and I took my car with a bunch of guys and we pushed it to the top of the hill at the YMCA,” he said.
Placing a call from the YMCA to his father to meet him on Ninth Street, “I ran from the front door and went across that footbridge, which was one of the stupidest moves I think I’ve ever made in my life,” Studzinski said. Not knowing if the floorboards were still beneath him and with debris hitting the bridge, “I was hanging on the handrail to make sure that I wasn’t going to fall through.”
Trekking through the muddy aftermath the next day, Studzinski found the Volkswagen placed on the YMCA flagpole platform by others who had been stranded at the facility. “There is my Volkswagen sitting up on the hill, clean as a whistle… when we walked up and opened the door, out ran mud and water,” he said. “Wrong place, wrong time. Looking back on it I wish I would have pushed my vehicle out of there. It could have been avoided,” he said.
Gallagher witnessed harrowing rescue efforts while still on higher ground along West Ninth Street waiting with his parents to head to his sister’s apartment in Ridley Township. Local police departments and fire companies acted unaided at the outbreak of the disaster, not joined until 4 a.m. by 30 troopers form the State Police Belmont Barracks in Philadelphia. Efforts by then-State Sen. Clarence D. Bell, R-9 of Upland, then a brigadier general and assistant commander of the Pennsylvania National Guard, to secure outside help were complicated by thenGov. Milton J. Shapp spending vacation time in Puerto Rico following a governors conference there the week prior.
After cars were no longer able to exit the development, some residents found themselves trapped in the second floor of their homes. “The rescue team had these boats, God bless these guys; they were picking people up outside their windows,” he said. Ropes were fixed to buildings along Ninth Street to catch the boats heading through the surging flood waters.
“One of the worst things I ever witnessed was this one rescue boat coming. It had about six or seven people in it, and it was… near King’s Chevrolet… the boat hit the bull rope and flipped over, and all you could see was feet and arms just getting carried away,” he said.
“I remember my father lying in bed with his feet crossed. “He said ‘I’m not going anywhere,’” said Cathy Morse. “When the bullhorns came and people were running in the streets, it was almost like a movie,” she said. “Running here and there, didn’t have an idea of which way to go, the water was flooding the cars out.” Persuaded by the police calls for evacuation, the family managed to trek to a family member’s house at Fourth Street and Central Avenue. Sterling attempted to return to see
the flooding, but found the Ninth Street impassable.
Rodgers estimates she, her mother and grandmother were in one of, if not the last, cars to exit Eyre Park before rescue teams shut off road evacuation and turned to rescue boats. “I can still remember my mother crying as we came to the light (at South Eyre Drive and Penn Street). We knew when we got to the light were safe,” she said. Having to take a circuitous route to an aunt’s house on East 24th Street due to the flooding, Rodgers saw the flood waters overtaking Eyre Park from Interstate 95.
Living with her grandparents and mother in Eyre Park, Rodgers’ grandfather had died three weeks prior to the flood. “My grandfather was the only father I ever knew. I lost him, then started high school, which is a big milestone in a person’s life, and then we lost our house — all within a three-week period,” she said. “That’s something I’d never want anyone else to go through.”
Rodgers’ uncle, then Chester Superintendent of Schools John Vaul, had lived through the 1950 flood under similar circumstances, losing his mother-in-law who lived with his family three weeks prior to the flood. His children battled measles and croup at the time of the disaster.
While Vaul and fellow residents spent the aftermath of the 1950 flood shoveling out mud and debris to move back into their homes, authorities in 1971 quickly began a salvaging and relocation process.
“I never saw so much mud, and up to your knees. You became desensitized,” Rodgers said. She and her mother found the Magnavox console television and sofa sitting atop a large wall-mounted mirror that had been ripped off the wall. “My grandfather’s Mass cards were strewn all over the house. When they opened the garage door, it just like lava… just all the mud coming out,” she said.
“The next day we were trying to salvage whatever we could. Everything in the second floor was OK because the water level went to the top of the first flood ceiling,” said Gallagher, recalling a surreal sight on the first floor. “We had a coffee table in our living room and there were a couple glasses on it that survived. The coffee table rose to the ceiling apparently and came back down. This glass was still upright,” he said.
“The Army came, the Amish people came, the Red Cross people came, and they all helped us. The Red Cross came every day and gave us bologna sandwiches,” Rodgers said. Authorities distributed vouchers to Chester Hardware in the 300 block of Edgmont Avenue for rubber boots and other cleaning equipment.
“The only thing we salvaged from the house was the bedroom furniture and a mirror that was hanging in the living room,” said Cathy Morse. “I remember going in the house and the mud was unbelievable. The couch was turned upside down. It was like a horror movie,” she said.
The families of Rodgers, Gallagher and Morse all joined other Eyre Park residents in the newly constructed and under-filled Chester Towers in the 1100 block of Edgmont Avenue. While the one-bedroom apartments posed space challenges for the displaced families, it provided temporary reprieve during the search for permanent housing.
“I was just glad that they opened the doors for us,” said Ossie Morse. “At least we had peace once we got together, whether we were in one or two rooms,” she said. Her family moved into vacant parsonage space through their church, Thomas M. Thomas Presbyterian, before finding a new house at Second and Thurlow streets. “It was a very interesting time for us, especially for those of us still in school,” said Sterling. “We were crossing a lot of boundaries. We lived in Bennett, then over in Eyre Park, then down on Fourth and Flower, then on Thurlow Street in South Chester… we became cross cultural.” Rodgers’ and Gallagher’s families each found apartments in the Walnut Park Plaza on East 24th Street.