Spring Striper and Shad Fishing in Philadelphia Fish within the city limits of Philadelphia to catch spring stripers and shad at the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Shad and Stripers in the City of Brotherly Love Philadelphia’s fishing roots began before William Penn laid out his grid of streets between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. The Lenape, an Algonquin-speaking people, built weirs along the rivers seeking some of the millions of anadromous fish that entered the Delaware watershed each spring to spawn. Blooms on the aptly-named shadbush heralded the start of their fishing season. While English and Swedish settlers adopted the Lenape’s style of roasting whole shad on wooden planks displayed around a fire, they employed large haul seines to catch shad by the thousands. In fact, Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood earned its name from the German-American fishing families who inhabited it in the 18th and early 19th centuries. John McPhee’s popular book, The Founding Fish, alleges that 1778’s Schuylkill River shad run saved Washington’s beleaguered Continental Army at Valley Forge, some 25 miles upstream of British-occupied Philadelphia. With improved water quality in recent years, area anglers have returned to the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers seeking shad and striped bass within Philadelphia’s city limits, and I’m proud to say that I am one of them.