Delaware Water Gap

Why should it be a National Park?

The Delaware River cuts an S-shaped notch through Kittatinny Ridge, and on either side of that notch lies seventy thousand acres of public land within seventy-five miles of both New York City and Philadelphia. Four million people visit every year. It is one of the most heavily used landscapes in the National Park System, and it exists because of a dam that was never built.

In August 1955, Hurricane Diane flooded the valley and killed seventy-five people, thirty-seven of them mostly children at a camp on Brodhead Creek. Congress authorized the Tocks Island Dam in 1962, and the Army Corps of Engineers began buying land for a reservoir. More than fifteen thousand people were displaced, many by eminent domain, and whole villages in the Walpack Valley were emptied. Then the dam fell apart politically. The Delaware River Basin Commission voted it down in 1975, Congress deauthorized it in 1992, and the government was left holding seventy thousand acres of land it had taken for a lake that does not exist.

What survives instead is a free-flowing river, one of the last major ones in the East, with Raymondskill Falls dropping in tiers on the Pennsylvania side and Dingmans Falls a few miles north. Sunfish Pond, a glacial lake on the ridge, was saved from becoming a pumped-storage reservoir in part by a 1967 protest hike led by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The Minisink was Munsee Lenape homeland for thousands of years, and the archeological site there is a National Historic Landmark.

Since 2022 a coalition led by a retired superintendent of the recreation area has pushed to redesignate it a National Park and preserve, arguing that recreation area was always the wrong name for a place whose reservoir never came. The opposition is rooted in something specific: the memory of the taking. People here watched the government seize fifteen thousand neighbors' homes for a project it then abandoned, and a proposal to change the sign at the entrance sounds, to them, like the opening move of something larger. A congressman blocked funding for the redesignation in 2024. No bill has been introduced. The dam's opponents were proved right about the river, and their descendants are now the ones most suspicious of the park.