Port Richmond Generating Station
Ahulking neoclassical behemoth on the banks of the Delaware River, the Port Richmond Generating Station bears both the scars of its age and the faint etching of its past owner and purpose: the Philadelphia Electric Company.
The building’s birth dates to the Jazz Age, when Philadelphia was booming and needed energy to bring light to its eventually Springsteen-serenaded streets. The method of making electricity was simple and sultry: Coal- fired boilers would superheat water, the resulting steam would spin turbines and converters would channel the spark out into Philly’s territory.
Despite its industrial ethos, the company wanted the station to look good, too, so it hired John T. Windrim, the famed Philly architect who had designed a series of anciently inspired buildings around town. For the Port Richmond station, Windrim’s vision included an arching, skylighted turbine hall that was “modeled after the ancient Roman baths,” according to Jack Steelman’s Workshop of the World, a study of the city’s industrial history.
That building opened in 1925, though only part of Windrim’s plan came to fruition: The Depression, after all, dramatically reduced the need for power, and the prospects for generating a profit off it. Still, improvements and addendums kept it purring till the mid-’80s, when it finally closed after six decades in service.
Since then, neglect and the Northeastern winters have pockmarked the glass ceiling of the wide- open main hall, leaving it with dozens of broken windows, casting slivers of sunshine on the floor below, which sometimes floods, as rain and snow pelt the stone carapace and puddles therein. A tree sprouts from the rooftop and rust cakes smokestacks.
Massive tubes and bulbous boilers still create a sense of outsized, Alice in Wonderland wonder. Crust-covered railings and balconies surround the eerie central atrium, and in a mothballed control room, every knob, monitor and indecipherable gauge is coated with dust, even as discarded papers still litter the floor. The facility’s coal tower remains
standing in the middle of the Delaware, connected to the riverside ruin by an arm of metal, but vandals and scrappers have had their way with some of the fixtures inside and outside the plant. Rain and snow fall inside the structure during storms, and tidal waters sometimes lap at the ancient machinery.
Even so, the Richmond plant has managed to foster some fame for itself in its retirement, appearing as a postplague psych ward in the 1995 movie Twelve Monkeys and, more recently, as a backdrop for menacing machines in 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (as was its sister plant, the Delaware Generating Station, a little farther downriver).
The parcel of land on which it sits was sold to a local development company in 2019, and the building’s future is unclear. Until then, the Richmond continues to watch the city around it evolve, with new skyscrapers rising around it like the steam that once billowed inside.
NEGLECT HAS POCKMARKED THE GLASS CEILING OF THE WIDE-OPEN MAIN HALL.