A fish town once more

On the streets of resurgent Fishtown last week they were laying plans to celebrate the (somewhat) resurgent shad, the fish that, after all, gave the place its name.

Memories have grown a little fuzzy over time, giving rise to various theories of how Fishtown - the river ward east of Kensington from whose bosom it sprang, and sandwiched between Northern Liberties and Port Richmond - came, finally, to be called Fishtown.

But really, it's as simple as you'd suspect. It apparently wasn't Charles Dickens' idea, a favored myth. It was Fishtown's peculiar aquatic destiny: Every spring since time immemorial, the shad ran up the Delaware here, coming back from the sea to spawn, to create new generations of bony, oily progeny (they taste sort of like bluefish), a major source of protein for the native Lenape Indians, and later for successive waves of European (English, German, Irish) settlers.

It wasn't just the fact of the shad's April run, though. It was the particular twists and banks of the river north of what is now Penn Treaty Park, I-95 sailing nearby. The pockets where creeks entered the river created "shad wallows," good spawning (and thus good fishing) sites because the turbulence aided in egg fertilization.

The Lenape situated their summer camps near those wallows, historian Rich Remer writes, weaving netting from the tall sedge grasses, and herding fish into weirs near the shore where they could easily be speared.

The Swedes came next, briefly. And the English, whose colonial fishery off the New Jersey village of Lambertville to the north is the last one on the river still in limited operation. And finally German immigrants, whose extended Fishtown families controlled shad fisheries from near the Delaware Bay upriver to the edge of Trenton.

So you read accounts of fishermen up to their hips offshore, hauling nets in the April (and oftentimes May) chill. And see old prints of fishwives hauling baskets of shad on their heads. And learn of the smokers that smoked the fish in every square.

That heyday lasted through the 19th century and into the early 20th. But it has been long gone, thanks to the usual suspects - free-for-all fishing with greedy gill nets in the middle of the river, and the toll of toxic industrial pollutants. By the 1950s, in a river that once teemed with shad, some years passed by with none at all.