This Place Is BMPing: Liberty Lands

Each week, we profile a BMP—short for Best Management Practices—to demonstrate how local businesses, organizations and neighbors are helping to keep our streams and rivers clean by managing stormwater on their property.

After the EPA remediated the site of a former tannery in Northern Liberties in the late 1980s, the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association turned the former brownfield into a park. Liberty Lands, as it is now known, completed its remarkable turnaround with the construction of a stormwater management project. A rain garden detention pond collects runoff from the site and an adjacent street, filtering it through a stone bed and delivering it to a series of three in-ground cisterns. An irrigation system pumps water from the cisterns to irrigate trees and grass at the park. Maintaining the grass cover at the sloped site helps reduce erosion problems.

Learn more about this stormwater BMP project, find it on a map and view photos at  the Temple-Villanova Sustainable Stormwater Initiative project page.