Cohocksink: Stand In The Place Where You Live

Cohocksink: Stand In The Place Where You Live by artist Denis Haugh is located in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The mural is essentially about the importance of history and a sense of place. By tracing the path of the now buried Cohocksink Creek which runs beneath the park, the history and geography emerges. The earliest industry in the area was a grist mill built on a branch of the creek just north of the park in the early 1700’s. In 1715, Thomas Masters and his daughter Sarah received one of the first patents issued in America for a process to create ‘Tuscorora Rice” from ground corn. Water is quite literally, the underlying theme in this second phase of the mural. The design transforms the honeycomb pattern from the original mural into the cells of a leaf with all of its molecular hydrology A series of circular insets start on the left with the globe depicted in a drop of water. Next is a map of North America with its major bodies of water, followed by the major waterways of Tri State area. The next circle zooms into the lattice work of creeks that once flowed throughout Philadelphia. The 5th circle shows a close up of the area around the park including the Cohocksink that branches north to the site of the Masters Mill. The final insert shows the plan for the mill from an early drawing. At the bottom left is a bucolic scenic of the creek and wetlands before the era of Columbus and settlers (1491). The center bottom is a copy of a photograph from the early 1900’s showing the culvert creek and industry above.

History of the Liberty Lands Murals
This mural is located in Liberty Lands park. The park was originally the site of Burke Brothers Tannery. By the 1990’s, the site had become an abandoned industrial relic eventually demolished by the city after a failed mixed-use development attempt. A group of neighbors worked together to obtain grant funds to transform the site into a park and community garden. One of the initial plans in the original application was for a large mural on the wall that runs along the south side of the park. That became the Cinema Verde mural completed in 1998. In 2006, the 10th year of the founding of the park, the Mural Arts Program committed to complete a mural on the adjacent wall measuring 24′ high X 60′ wide. This mural, entitled Cohocksink: Stand In The Place Where You Live is essentially about the importance of history and a sense of place. By tracing the path of the now buried Cohocksink Creek which runs beneath the park, the history and geography emerges.