I walked down to Penn’s Landing this month and stood at the edge of the Delaware River with the Benjamin Franklin Bridge hanging in the sky over the water. I’m Harry Hayman, and I opened the post about that walk with five words: Philadelphia, this one hits different. I meant every one of them. When we opened Warmdaddy’s in 1995, one of the things we believed, one of the things we were betting on, was that Philadelphia’s waterfront was going to be part of the equation. That was thirty one years ago. Today I get to be in the room, in a small way, for conversations about what the Delaware River waterfront becomes next, and I want to set down what I saw, what the public record says about the project, and what I think it will take to build it right.

What I Saw at Penn’s Landing

I took seven photos. One shows the Ben Franklin Bridge from the water’s edge, a granite block in the foreground and a No Wake Zone sign standing out in the river. The bridge opened on July 1, 1926 as the Delaware River Bridge, was renamed for Franklin in 1955, and at its opening had the longest suspension span in the world. Another shows a signpost for the Independence Seaport Museum, which sits at 211 South Columbus Boulevard and tells the story of the region through the river, with the warship Olympia and the submarine Becuna among its vessels.

Across the water, in a third photo, is the Battleship New Jersey, hull number 62, a museum and memorial ship on the Camden waterfront. The ship was built at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and commissioned in 1943. It is a fair reminder that this river has been a working river, a fighting river and a trading river long before anybody called it a destination.

The last photos show something newer. Construction banners line the site, and they carry the project’s own summary. It is a $329 million partnership between PennDOT, the City of Philadelphia and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation. It replaces and expands the covered area over I-95 between Chestnut and Walnut streets with a larger cover that extends east over Christopher Columbus Boulevard. The park on top is meant to include flexible open space for performances and festivals, food and drink, a new play area, a relocated RiverRink for winter skating, and a water play area. The banners point to 95revive.com and parkatpennslanding.com.

What the Record Says About the Park and the Cap

I read those banners against the published sources, because a banner is a summary and I wanted the details.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation’s own pages describe an 11.5 acre park bounded by Chestnut Street, Walnut Street, Front Street and the Delaware River, part of PennDOT’s $329 million I-95 CAP project, and the same page lists the features I read on the banner. The project’s park site adds open lawns, a year round cafe, an outdoor amphitheater and a pavilion to that list, and says the partial demolition of I-95 between Chestnut and Walnut has already happened. The 95Revive site carries the construction and detour information for drivers.

Who does what matters here. WHYY’s PlanPhilly reported in March 2023 that PennDOT builds the cap while the waterfront corporation and the City are responsible for building out the park. A July 2025 WHYY report said crews were building the first third of the cap, over I-95 South between Chestnut and Walnut, that the second section over I-95 North would follow, and that the third section would cover part of Columbus Boulevard. The same report said the park contract with the waterfront corporation had not been finalized at that point. I could not find a more recent public statement on that contract, so I am leaving it there.

A new piece is the South Street bridge. In December 2025 the project announced an extension of the South Street Pedestrian Bridge over Columbus Boulevard, with construction set for summer 2026 and a public opening expected in 2027. It is meant to link Center City to the Delaware River Trail, Spruce Street Harbor Park, Cherry Street Pier and the future park.

The Timeline, As Published

Dates are where I want to be careful, because they have moved before and may move again. This is what the sources say, with their dates.

The most recent timeline I found is Billy Penn’s report from April 10, 2026. It says the pedestrian bridge construction starts in summer 2026 and the bridge opens in 2027, that deck installation over Columbus Boulevard runs from November 2026 through February 2027, and that the entire cap is expected to be finished in 2029. It says the park could be built as early as 2030, and it adds that the actual construction timeline is still uncertain. The park’s own site gives the park opening as 2029 or 2030 and puts the bridge opening between late 2027 and early 2028. Those two sources do not match exactly on the bridge, so I treat 2027 into early 2028 as the honest range.

The history of the schedule is part of the story. In July 2021, WHYY reported that the groundbreaking had slipped from 2021 to 2023 and that the park’s opening had moved from 2024 to 2026. PennDOT’s spokesperson attributed the delay to COVID and the complexities of lease and property rights, along with engineering complexity found during final design. Today’s target is 2029 for the cap and about 2030 for the park. I have been in this city long enough to know that a project this big runs on patience, and I also know patience is not the same thing as drift.

Thirty Years in the Making, and Longer

When I wrote that this thing has been thirty years in the making, and actually longer, I was thinking about the people who kept the idea alive. The public record bears me out. Penn’s Landing carries the name of William Penn’s arrival, although the actual landing was farther south in Chester, and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation was set up in 2009 to manage the publicly owned central waterfront.

The planning work is well documented. The Master Plan for the Central Delaware began in 2009, after the Civic Vision and Action Plan for the Central Delaware of 2006 and 2007. It was released in fall 2011 and adopted by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission in March 2012. It sets out a roadmap for roughly six miles of waterfront from Port Richmond to Pennsport, with the stated goals of extending the city and its neighborhoods to the water and restoring the original waterfront as a public amenity. WHYY’s 2011 coverage of the final presentation lists the ideas, among them public parks about every half mile joined by a trail, east and west connector streets under I-95 to the water, and a phasing plan that put early public money into four priority sites. Penn’s Landing is one of the four. The park site itself says the 2011 master plan first envisioned this park.

That is the groundwork I meant. Planners, public agencies, civic leaders, designers, engineers, and a lot of stubborn Philadelphians put it there. I am a restaurateur, and I have never pretended to be any of those other things.

Warmdaddy’s and the Bet on the River

When we opened Warmdaddy’s in June 1995, it sat on Front Street near Market in Old City, at 4 South Front Street, a blues and soul food room conceived as a blues counterpart to the jazz club Zanzibar Blue, with brothers Robert and Benjamin Bynum running it day to day. In the mid-2000s it moved down to the south end of the waterfront, and in 2020 it closed that riverfront location and announced plans to reopen in Spring Garden. The address changed. The belief behind that first room did not.

What I can say is the belief we carried in 1995. A restaurant on Front Street, a few steps from the river, sits in the middle of the argument about this waterfront whether it wants to or not. It lives on foot traffic, on visitors, on music, on a neighborhood that feels safe and inviting after dark, and on a river that people can actually reach. When a highway trench separates a city from its river, a business on the wrong side feels that every night. So the bet was simple. Someday the city would stitch that connection back together.

That is why the cap matters to me. The plan puts a park over the highway, on land people can walk across, with a skating rink, a place to eat, a play area and a lawn big enough for a festival. It is public space first, and public space is what lets a restaurant, a museum, a pier and a family all share one address.

All Hands on Deck, and What It Should Feel Like

Here is the case I made in the post and the one I will keep making. The project needs everybody at the table. Developers, restaurants, arts and culture, hospitality, community groups, transportation, parks, music, museums, water access, families, nightlife, business, residents and visitors all have a stake in the same few acres. No silos, no turf wars, no protecting little pieces of the pie, no that is not my department. If the process becomes a list of who owns which corner, we will get a list of corners.

The waterfront already has real assets, and the photos I took show a few of them: a landmark bridge, a maritime museum, a warship across the water, a public riverfront with room to breathe. The question is how we connect them, curate them, program them, and build a destination that feels like Philadelphia, not a generic entertainment district that could sit in any American city. That is the challenge and the opportunity, and I do not pretend to have every answer. I do not. Nobody gets there alone.

What I do have is thirty one years of watching, waiting, building, failing, learning, rebuilding and believing. The schedule says 2029 and 2030, and I will believe in the dates the way I believed in the river: patiently, and with my sleeves rolled up. If this city gets it right, it will not only change the waterfront. It will change Philadelphia. Let’s build it, and let’s build it right.

Philadelphia's Delaware River Waterfront: All Hands on Deck