Billboards for the SugarHouse casino on Delaware Avenue herald a future with slot machines for 22 empty riverfront acres.
But it's a fascination with the past that is drawing new attention - and controversy - to the project.
It's a past that stretches back to 1,500 B.C., when native people assembled by the Delaware River to craft tools from stones.
And it's a past that includes a small British fort from 1777, one of 10 built by occupying troops to keep out Gen. George Washington's soldiers.
Pennsylvania's top agency on historic matters has called for more extensive archaeological work at the property, on the Fishtown-Northern Liberties border. Initial work has uncovered 182 American Indian artifacts, including an arrowhead, a drill, and fragments of waste from making stone tools.
A state archaeologist called the find "significant."
"Things like that are pretty darn rare, especially in an urban environment," said Mark Shaffer, an archaeologist with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
The intense curiosity about the past has come up as a result of SugarHouse's request to the Army Corps of Engineers to build into the water.
SugarHouse needs federal permission to dredge, fill in more than an acre of water, and build a stone embankment. An archaeological review is part of the process.
The state's historic commission already is urging that one section of the property - a 30-by-50-foot plot that yielded the American Indian relics just inches from the surface - be excavated completely and considered for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
Douglas Mooney, an archaeologist and president of the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum, said the discovery was "exceedingly rare."
"In all of Philadelphia County, there are only a dozen known, recorded Native American sites," he said.
Before European settlers arrived, tribes were thought to meet regularly along the river near the SugarHouse site. Swedes and Quakers later built homes on the land, before being squeezed out by commercial enterprises: shipyards, wharves, a foundry, and, much later, a massive sugar refinery, railyard and power plant.
Terrence McKenna, the project executive for the Keating Group, which is building the casino, said the developers recognized the historic significance of the property and would comply with any guidance from the Army Corps or the state's historic commission.
