Shipbuilding

No one seems to know exactly how many people are buried in Fishtown’s Palmer Cemetery. Created for the community by the merchant Anthony Palmer in the 1730s, the cemetery has been such a popular final destination for residents over the generations that the community’s historians have lost count of its eternal tenants, which could number as high as 50,000.

Wedged between the Delaware River and the El train, Fishtown is a working class neighborhood northeast of Center City in Philadelphia. True to its namesake, the area was known in the 1700s as a prime fishing and shipbuilding site, built by German and Irish immigrants. Massive industrialization later transformed the neighborhood into the "workshop of the world," but the neighborhood grew poorer as the factories left after the second World War. By the 1970s, many residents were leaving for the suburbs.