Philly Plain Dealer

I Went to Celebrate the Ben Franklin Bridge’s 100th Birthday. I Never Even Made It Onto the Bridge.

I’d like to tell you that I knew the Ben Franklin Bridge’s 100th birthday celebration was going to be crowded. After all, it’s a century-old icon connecting two cities, the sun was shining, and the event was free. I should’ve expected people to show up.

What I never expected was for the celebration itself to be the main obstacle.

My fiancée and I started our day around 11 a.m. at PATCO’s Collingswood Station, hoping to access the festival from the Camden side. I’d heard about the festival in passing and, foolishly, thought it was something we could just “stop by” and check out. Arriving at the station immediately dispelled any hope of making this a quick trip.

The line to buy a ticket to the train was out the station doors. Oh, how I wish we’d taken this cosmic hint and turned tail for home. But we didn’t. We sat, waited, got our tickets, and squeezed onto a train so packed that shifting positions was nearly impossible. Thankfully, we were only riding three stops.

Then we got to Camden.

If you’ve ever left a PATCO station, you know you have to tap your card to get out. That’s perfectly reasonable, until several thousand people all try to do it at the exact same time.

Exiting the train proved to be the most nightmarish public transportation experience of my life. The entire station was jammed wall to wall. There was quite literally no escape. People couldn’t move, and the sweltering breath of thousands of people in an underground, enclosed space started to shift the atmospheric composition of the whole room in a way that no longer supports human life. People were yelling. You could feel the collective panic of the room begin to rise.

After twenty minutes of absolute gridlock, an emergency exit was opened, which was probably the best decision anyone made all afternoon. I guess someone, somewhere, realized the three-dollar fare wasn’t worth the inevitable crowd-crush event and resulting class-action lawsuit that would follow.

Unfortunately, escaping the station only deposited us into another bottleneck. Camden’s streets were equally slammed. We shuffled forward in slow motion toward the bridge, stopping every few feet, like peasants in a bread line. No one was excited anymore. Eventually, the bridge came into view, and so did the mass of humanity already occupying it. Thousands of people stood frozen shoulder to shoulder on the northern half of the bridge. The southern half was completely empty, cleared of people for reasons nobody around us could explain.

The crowd is walking fast on the Ben Franklin Bridge.

We met someone whose gram walked it during the ribbon cutting 100 years ago.

It was fun to broadcast live on @FOX29philly walking across the bridge. Food trucks are on the Camden side!! pic.twitter.com/WHvezjdSDt— Meteorologist Drew Anderson (@DrewForecast) July 11, 2026

The line to access the bridge itself was unbelievable. Because you couldn’t access the south side of the bridge for unknown reasons, the entire crowd had to pass underneath the bridge via a small pedestrian tunnel that was never designed to accommodate such a large, pulsing mass of people. The line wrapped around multiple blocks. 

At this point, I had to ask myself how badly I wanted to walk on a bridge. Would I be willing to stand in these massive lines, in this disgusting humidity, just to shuffle around a crowd on the Ben Franklin Bridge? The answer came pretty immediately: no, I was not.

So, we made the executive decision to turn around. And I know in my heart of hearts that this was the correct decision.

That conviction only hardened on our walk back. Men in flip-flops piloted double-wide strollers with palpable frustration (why, oh why would you bring a double-wide stroller to this? Why?!). People dragged their screaming children toward the roil. Attendees were screaming at emergency workers for water because as it turns out, there weren’t any water stations at all. Not on the bridge, not at the festival, nowhere, on a mid-July day with nothing but sun and concrete for a mile and a half in every direction. If you were thirsty, you had to wait in line to get into the festival, then wait in another line to buy a seven-dollar lemonade from a stand using AI art to advertise their food. 

On the internet, the frustration from this festival was widespread. A quick search of “Ben Franklin Bridge” on TikTok turns up hundreds of videos of people airing their grievances about the event and the crowds. 

I can’t verify all of this firsthand, but multiple people online described kids passing out in the heat, emergency crews dumping water directly over people’s heads to cool them down, and ambulances taking heat-stricken attendees to the hospital. 

What I can’t get past is that nobody in charge seemed to plan for the version of Saturday that actually happened. A once-in-a-century event drew a once-in-a-century crowd, and the infrastructure required to move and hydrate that crowd was nonexistent. It wasn’t the crowd’s fault. The complete absence of a plan for the crowd was appalling.

The bridge deserved better than what it got. So did the thousands of us who wanted to spend our Saturday celebrating an iconic piece of infrastructure. Instead, we spent our afternoon cosplaying as livestock in the hot sun.