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.

It would take until the '80s, heavy industry on the way out, the Clean Water Act on the way in, for the river to clear up. The shad noticed. And came back. (Not by the millions that once made for a lucrative commercial catch, but enough for a feel-good, let's-party cameo.)

It was 28 years ago that Lambertville threw a Shad Fest to mark the turnabout. And this year on the same date, April 25, in Penn Treaty Park off Delaware Avenue, Fishtown is getting into the act with a Shad Fest of its own.

Last week a big banner featuring the silvery fish went up outside Johnny Brenda's, one of Fishtown's new wave of gastropubs. Chef-owner Paul Kimport, who also heads the local business association, was getting a griller-smoker rig fabricated. And designing a shad sandwich with fish (probably from off North Carolina), Groff's double-smoked bacon, and garlicky spring ramps, and roe with Amish brown butter, lemon, capers, and toast points.

Local historian Ken Milano, meanwhile, was warming up for tours of the old fishing grounds. They are bracketed now by the site for the SugarHouse Casino and a vast, littered wasteland on the riverfront that was once alive with proud shipyards and wharves.

Fishtown's commerce, severed from the water by broad spans of highway, has shifted inland, giving rise to a hipster music scene, an Irish bruncherie, a terrific burger joint (Sketch), and, near Second and Girard, Otolith, a sustainable fish market featuring, alas, frozen halibut from Alaska.

More than a few industrial buildings stand echoingly vacant. But the old popcorn factory, for one, has been recast as glassy condos called (for the street nearby) Memphis Flats.

From its windows you can look out on the Palmer burial ground below and still see the tombstones of the Faunces and the Cramps, the Tees and the Rambos, the shadders who so long ago defined the image of Fishtown, and gave it (as much as the intrepid shad did themselves), its enduring and unforgettable name.