Walk north from Penn Treaty Park along the water right now and you will hit a fence before you hit The Battery. It has been there since mid-June, and it is not going anywhere until the construction crew working the last stretch of the Delaware River Trail finishes its job. That fence sits about a hundred feet from where the trail used to just stop, a gap that has annoyed runners and dog walkers for years and is, at long last, actually closing.
Three blocks inland, on Frankford Avenue, the opposite problem exists. Too much has changed too fast to keep a mental list current. A burger chain opened its first Philadelphia location there five days ago. A car-storage social club with a fifty-two-foot bar opens in ten days. A brewery that closed a location you probably walked past for five years made local news two weeks ago. If you last paid attention to this stretch of Frankford Avenue back in the spring, you are already working from an outdated map.
Why That Stretch of Trail Took Six Years to Close
The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation finished the segment connecting Rivers Casino to Penn Treaty Park back in 2020, and it ended abruptly, about a hundred feet short of what is now The Battery, the redeveloped former PECO Delaware Generating Station just north of the park. Closing that gap meant securing a HUD grant, then running survey and geotechnical work starting in the summer of 2024, then a design phase that stretched into early fall of that year with input from community groups and agencies. Actual construction did not start until the week of June 15, 2026, when DRWC and its contractor, Mayfield Site Contractors, began work expected to take about three months, with completion targeted for mid-September.
Part of the delay on site has nothing to do with paperwork. Crews spent part of May conducting selective air spading around the planned boardwalk pile locations specifically to protect a large London Plane tree standing near the trail alignment, the kind of on-the-ground tradeoff that does not show up in a press release but does show up in how long a hundred-foot gap takes to close. As of the most recent update from Friends of Penn Treaty Park, the trail segment is still listed as closed through September, so anyone routing a run or ride north out of the park should plan on the same detour they would have hit in July.
The Same Park Is About to Get Busy
None of this touches the park itself, which is about to have one of its fuller stretches of the year:
- Parks on Tap, the city's roving beer garden, sets up at Penn Treaty Park September 2 through 6, bringing drafts from breweries like Mainstay Independent and Conshohocken alongside food and cocktails, with a portion of proceeds going back to the park.
- Indigenous Peoples' Day Philly returns to the park on Monday, October 12, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The site predates the park by centuries under its original name, Shackamaxon, a historic gathering place for the Lenni-Lenape, which is why organizers still use both names for the event. Admission is pay-what-you-wish, with suggested donations of $12 for adults and $5 for kids and elders.
- The Fishtown Neighbors Association's RiverCity Festival has landed at Penn Treaty Park every fall for more than a decade, drawing thousands for live music, a beer garden, and craft vendors. The exact date shifts year to year, so check the festival's own site as October approaches rather than relying on last year's calendar.
All three happen inside the park's existing footprint, so the closure does not touch them directly. It just means the trail heading north out of any of these events will look exactly like it does on an ordinary Tuesday: fenced, not passable, at least until DRWC confirms the segment has reopened.
Frankford Avenue Isn't Waiting Around
While the waterfront works through a permitting hangover years in the making, Frankford Avenue keeps turning over storefronts on a much shorter clock.
7th Street Burger, the New York smash-burger chain built on a spare, almost bare-bones menu, opened its 35th location at 1215 Frankford Ave on August 26, its first of three planned Philadelphia spots. Liguria Pizzeria took a storefront at 1826 Frankford Ave earlier this year, run by brothers Sherif and Amro Nagud, who bring New York-style pies plus cheesesteaks and fries to a spot next to Ham & Bone pet supply. LeoFigs opened June 10 at 2201 Frankford Ave with an in-house winery upstairs, a restaurant serving comfort-leaning small plates, and a small marketplace selling goods from friends of the owners, including local honey, olive oil, and soap. Forest & Main Brewing Co., long an Ambler favorite, opened its first Philadelphia taproom in the neighborhood, pouring its own lager, pilsner, and Festbier alongside a vegan-friendly food menu.
The most visible change arrives September 10, when Cannonball Club opens at 1105 Frankford Ave inside what was the Morse Elevator Works building, later the Otis Elevator Company site. The building had sat empty for years before this project, and the finished space stores roughly 75 vehicles on lifts across four levels beneath a restored clerestory, with a public café at street level and a members-only fifty-two-foot bar overlooking the collection. A membership without vehicle storage runs $250 a month, with storage itself adding $850 a month on a yearlong contract.
"I don't want some guy to come in here and just forget about it and not actually interact with the club," owner Chris Allen told the Inquirer. "In my mind, it's a waste of one of our spots."
Allen bought a Huntingdon Valley storage building at the start of the pandemic as a place to keep his own cars, then grew it into a second location once he saw an opening in Fishtown. The Fishtown Neighbors Association had a chance to weigh in on the zoning variance Cannonball needed to open as an entertainment venue, and neighborhood support was strong enough that the project moved forward with only a handful of objections.
What Closed While You Weren't Looking
Growth stories tend to leave out the other half. Source Urban Brewing closed its Fishtown location after five years, a change reported in mid-August alongside the Cannonball coverage. It is a reminder that a Frankford Avenue rundown compiled even six months ago already has at least one gap in it, on top of everything new. If you are working from a list you saved back in the spring, at least one address on it is no longer accurate, and at least three more addresses on the street are doing something they weren't doing then.
Two Speeds, One Neighborhood
Put the two halves of the neighborhood side by side and the pattern gets clearer. The water side is finishing a process that started with a HUD grant application years ago and is only now, after seasons of surveys and design meetings, actually visible on the ground as a construction fence with an end date attached. The commercial spine three blocks inland runs on no such fixed calendar. It opens and closes on its own schedule, sometimes faster than a resident can keep track of by memory alone.
For anyone living here, that means two different habits are worth building this fall. Check DRWC's construction updates before you plan a river route north of Penn Treaty Park, since the fence only comes down once the agency says it does. And treat any list of what's open on Frankford Avenue, including this one, as good for right now rather than good indefinitely, because the street has already proven it won't hold still for long.
If you're keeping an eye on how Fishtown keeps shifting, whether that's the waterfront timeline or the next storefront to change hands, Connor Gorman Real Estate tracks the neighborhood closely and is always glad to talk through what a particular block or building is actually like day to day. You can browse more of our ongoing coverage on the Fishtown neighborhood page, or reach out directly with questions about the area.
