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Hog Island is no longer a home to hogs; nor is it an island. But the stretch of land along the Delaware River which is now the airport is actually deeply rooted in Philadelphia culinary culture. Hog Island was given its name because early residents supposedly didn’t use fences to corral their swine as the surrounding dikes and marshlands acted as nature’s pig pens. By 1917, industry took over and it became home to what was at the time the worlds largest shipyard. According to Domenic Vitiello, professor of Urban Studies at Penn, in the late nineteenth century, hoagies were popular amongst the Italian dock workers of Hog Island who enjoyed the portability of the sandwich. At the time they were called “Hoggies” by sandwich makers both because of their size and the association with Hog Island workers. The name changed to “hoagies” as the Italian immigrant population adopted the term for its own. Hog Island has given us many things over the years; at one point it belonged to the Lenape Indians; then, in 1917, it was the world’s largest ship port, and finally, it was purchased by the city of Philadelphia in 1930 and turned into the well-oiled machine that is PHL. Nowadays, Hog Island is pretty much gone, but as gross as it sounds, it lives on in some way within our city’s iconic sandwich — the hoagie.