Let me tell you a story about a creek. It was called the Gingrass Creek, and some geniuses thought it would be a good idea to bury it under a large section of the Baden neighborhood. I looked at this area back on that freezing cold morning back in the winter of 2018. You can see the path of the Gingrass Creek in this Sanborn map from 1908 below.
The Metropolitan Sewer District has cleared out huge swaths of the street grid, building water retention basins in their place. You can read about the project, which wrapped up earlier this year, at their website.
The edge of the demolition zone has some abandonment, as well.
It is actually sort of surreal; portions of Switzer Avenue, which I looked back at back in 2018, have actually been blocked off with Jersey barriers and are no longer accessible.
I looked at the houses to the left back in 2018; they somehow managed to survive being demolished due to being just to the east of the former creek.
Sitting up on the high ground is Our Lady of the Holy Cross, but its future, despite its elevation above the floodplain is in jeopardy. It is being subsumed into a much larger parish along with several other congregations as part of All Things New.
The creek continued on south of Bittner Avenue; I was always curious why Church Road had a incongruous pocket of mid Twentieth Century homes, and it was because that was the location of the channel of the old stream, which is buried underneath it.
