Chester will be preparing for what it hopes will be a prominent role in the nation’s 250th birthday party. And the new year looms as one of the most-eventful ones in a history that predates even William Penn’s landing where the Delaware River meets Chester Creek.
But in 2025, Delaware County’s only city will reach a milestone it would prefer not to mark.
Confronting overwhelming debts, on Jan. 24, 1995, then-Mayor Barbara Bohannan-Sheppard asked Pennsylvania to declare Chester officially “distressed,” and after finding what they described as “municipal chaos,” state investigators assented three months later.
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Story by Anthony R. Wood, The Philadelphia Inquirer