HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:45:49 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.42 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 PHP-CGI/0.9
Cache-Control: max-age=1036800
Expires: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:45:49 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:04:36 GMT
ETag: "391c9f3-af04-477bd234"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 44804
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <title>Philadelphia's Industrial History: A Context and
  Overview</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/styles.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/colourtag.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/greybox/gb_styles.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="print"
        href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/print.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/layout/splash_w_sidebar.css" />
        
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/layout/size/width/92pc.css" />
        
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/layout/size/height/92pc.css" />
        
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/layout/content_margin/default_margin.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/layout/navbar/top_20px.css" />
        
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/image_size/noresize.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/font/family/verdana.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/content_border/show.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/photoalbum/alignment/bottom.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/photoalbum/frame/show.css" />
        
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/logo/size/auto.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href=
        "../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/logo/placement/bottom.css" />
        
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/header/side.css" />
  <link rel="stylesheet"
        type="text/css"
        media="screen"
        href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/defaults/none.css" />
<style type="text/css"
       media="all">
/*<![CDATA[*/
#footer { color: #999;}
#footer a {color: #333;}
#container {border-color: #ccc;}
/*]]>*/
</style>
<script type="text/javascript"
      src="../rw_common/themes/camilo/javascript.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
                        var tmp_image_path="../rw_common/themes/camilo/greybox/next.gif";
                        var tmp_path_array=tmp_image_path.split("/");
                        tmp_path_array.pop();
                        var gb_path=tmp_path_array.join("/");
                        var gb_path = gb_path+"/";
                        var GB_ROOT_DIR=gb_path;
//]]>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
      src="../rw_common/themes/camilo/greybox/AJS.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
      src="../rw_common/themes/camilo/greybox/AJS_fx.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
      src="../rw_common/themes/camilo/greybox/gb_scripts.js">
</script>
  <meta name="PRIORITY"
        content="0.415254" />
  <meta http-equiv="content-type"
        content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
  <meta name="robots"
        content="all" />
  <meta name="generator"
        content="RapidWeaver" />
  <meta name="generatorversion"
        content="3.6.5 (3.6.5)" />
        <!-- compliance patch for microsoft browsers -->
  <!--[if IE 7]>
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/ie7fix.css" />

<![endif]-->
  <!--[if lt IE 7]>
                <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="../rw_common/themes/camilo/css/iefix.css" />
                <script defer type="text/javascript" src="../rw_common/themes/camilo/pngfix.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
  <!-- This page was created with the camilo 3.0b1 theme from Rapid Ideas. http://www.rapid-ideas.com -->
  <!-- Theme Name: Camilo, Version: 3.0b1 -->
</head>

<body>
  <div id="container">
    <div id="pageHeader_top">
      <h1>Workshop of the World</h1>

      <h2>stories of industry in &amp; around Philadelphia</h2>
    </div>

    <div id="pageHeader">
      <h1>Workshop of the World</h1>

      <h2>stories of industry in &amp; around Philadelphia</h2>

      <div id="logo"></div>
    </div>

    <div id="mainContent">
      <div id="sidebar">
        <div id="sidecontainer">
          <div id="navcontainer">
            <ul>
              <li><a href="../index.html"
                 rel="self">WORKSHOP OF THE
                 WORLD&mdash;PHILADELPHIA</a></li>

              <li><a href="../introduction/introduction.html"
                 rel="self">Introduction</a></li>

              <li>
                <a href="overview.html"
                    rel="self"
                    id="current"
                    name="current">Overview</a>

                <ul>
                  <li><a href="../overview/bldg_tech.html"
                     rel="self">Building Technology</a></li>

                  <li><a href="../overview/chemistry.html"
                     rel="self">Chemistry</a></li>

                  <li><a href="../overview/food.html"
                     rel="self">Food</a></li>

                  <li><a href="../overview/tools.html"
                     rel="self">Machines/Tools</a></li>

                  <li><a href="../overview/metals.html"
                     rel="self">Metals</a></li>

                  <li><a href="../overview/textiles.html"
                     rel="self">Textiles</a></li>

                  <li><a href="../overview/transportation.html"
                     rel="self">Transportation</a></li>

                  <li><a href="../overview/utilities.html"
                     rel="self">Utilities</a></li>
                </ul>
              </li>

              <li><a href="../center_city/center_city.html"
                 rel="self">Center City</a></li>

              <li><a href="../chestnut_hill/chestnut_hill.html"
                 rel="self">Chestnut Hill</a></li>

              <li><a href="../fairmount_park/fairmount_park.html"
                 rel="self">Fairmount Park</a></li>

              <li><a href="../fishtown/fishtown.html"
                 rel="self">Fishtown</a></li>

              <li><a href="../frankford/frankford.html"
                 rel="self">Frankford</a></li>

              <li><a href="../germantown/germantown.html"
                 rel="self">Germantown</a></li>

              <li><a href="../kensington/kensington.html"
                 rel="self">Kensington</a></li>

              <li><a href="../manayunk/manayunk.html"
                 rel="self">Manayunk</a></li>

              <li><a href="../nicetown/nicetown.html"
                 rel="self">Nicetown</a></li>

              <li><a href="../northeast/northeast.html"
                 rel="self">Northeast Phila.</a></li>

              <li><a href=
              "../northern_liberties/northern_liberties.html"
                 rel="self">Northern Liberties</a></li>

              <li><a href="../north_phila/north_phila.html"
                 rel="self">North Phila.</a></li>

              <li><a href=
              "../richmond_bridesburg/richmond_bridesburg.html"
                 rel="self">Richmond-Bridesburg</a></li>

              <li><a href="../south_phila/south_phila.html"
                 rel="self">South Phila.</a></li>

              <li><a href="../southwest_phila/southwest_phila.html"
                 rel="self">Southwest Phila.</a></li>

              <li><a href="../tacony/tacony.html"
                 rel="self">Tacony</a></li>

              <li><a href="../west_phila/west_phila.html"
                 rel="self">West Phila.</a></li>

              <li><a href="../new/new.html"
                 rel="self">NEW</a></li>

              <li><a href="../resources/resources.html"
                 rel="self">RESOURCES</a></li>

              <li><a href="../sitemap.html"
                 rel="self">SEARCH A-Z</a></li>
            </ul>
          </div>

          <div id="side_plus">
            <div class="sideHeader"></div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>

      <div id="sidebar2">
        <div class="sideHeader"></div>
      </div>

      <div id="content">
        <div id="breadcrumbcontainer">
          <ul>
            <li><a href="../index.html">WORKSHOP OF THE
            WORLD&mdash;PHILADELPHIA</a>&nbsp;::&nbsp;</li>

            <li><a href=
            "overview.html">Overview</a>&nbsp;::&nbsp;</li>
          </ul>
        </div>

        <div id="content_text">
          <span style=
          "font:12px Verdana, serif; color:#ff0000;">Links to
          industry classification are in navigation bar at
          left.</span>
          <br />
          <br />
          <img class="imageStyle"
               alt="Pasted Graphic"
               src="overview_files/page0_1.jpg"
               width="502"
               height="96" />
          <br />
          <br />
          <span style=
          "font:14px Verdana, serif; font-weight:bold;">Philadelphia's
          Industrial History: Context and
          Overview</span><span style=
          "font:12px Verdana, serif;"><br /></span>

          <p style="text-align:right;"><span style=
          "font:10px Verdana, serif;">� Philip B. Scranton, Ph.D.,
          Workshop of the World, 1990.</span>
          <br /></p>

          <p style="text-align:left;"><span style=
          "font:13px Verdana, serif;">"Workshop of the World" was
          the proud claim of Philadelphia boosters for the best
          part of the century after the Civil War. Though at
          present the city is best known for its vehicles of
          consumption (the Eagles, the Orchestra, fine restaurants,
          the Mummers) once not so long ago Philadelphia
          represented prowess in production, the American apex of
          skill, versatility and diversity in manufacturing. Thanks
          to the dedication of area SIA [Society for Industrial
          Archeology] members, we are now afforded a special
          opportunity to revisit this nearly forgotten city, its
          world of workshops. With this guide in hand, you may map
          for yourself tours of a Philadelphia different from the
          one imagined by the hundreds of thousands who stroll
          through Independence Hall and Old City. &nbsp;Where they
          call up visions of bewigged gentlemen debating the birth
          of a nation, scribbling away with quill pens, you must
          conjure a later cacophony of steam engines, whirling
          lathes, pounding forges, clattering looms, smoke, sweat
          and strain. You can circle among the landmarks of
          Philadelphia's industrial age, drawing from these silent
          stones a sense of the energy and intensity that lay
          behind the boast, "Workshop of the World!" And as you
          encounter mounting numbers of mute brick and concrete
          masses, you will inevitably come to the question: What
          happened? What went wrong? As with most historical
          processes, there is no simple (or single) answer, but
          surely it is as important to cherish and reflect upon
          Philadelphia's industrial greatness as it is to draw
          inspiration from its eighteenth century political
          heritage.
          <br />
          <br />
          This introduction aims to offer a bit of historical
          context for reading and using what follows, a narrative
          sketch of the urban evolution in which the city's
          neighborhoods were shaped and peopled. It also seeks to
          set Philadelphia's course alongside that of other cities,
          so as to highlight briefly what made it special. Let us
          begin with our title phrase and at the point when it was
          close to being an accurate description of Philadelphia.
          <br />
          <br />
          From roughly 1880 through the 1920s, Philadelphia's
          industrial districts supported an array of mills and
          plants whose diversity has scarcely been matched anywhere
          in the history of manufacturing. When the U. S. Census
          charted some three hundred categories of industrial
          activity, surveys of Philadelphia showed firms active in
          nearly ninety percent of them. No city had a wider range
          of textile products, for example, as Kensington,
          Germantown, Frankford and Manayunk churned forth laces,
          socks, carpets, blankets, rope and cordage, men's
          suitings and women's dress goods, silk stockings,
          upholstery, tapestries, braids, bindings, ribbons,
          coverlets, knit fabric and sweaters, surgical fabrics,
          military cloths and trimmings, draperies, and yarns of
          every description. At the turn of the century, roughly
          seven hundred separate companies operated in textiles
          alone, employing some sixty thousand people. Yet this
          immense workforce amounted to only one quarter of the
          city's industrial workers. Unlike New England centers
          that often focused on a single sector (for Massachusetts,
          textiles in Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River and New Bedford,
          paper in Holyoke, shoes in Lynn), Philadelphia could and
          did do nearly everything across the spectrum of
          transforming materials into products.
          <br />
          <br />
          Moreover, though it hosted some huge facilities,
          Philadelphia was known far better as an incubator for
          small enterprises, as a city packed with workshops and
          mid-size firms begun in many cases by workers or
          supervisors who "graduated" from employment to
          entrepreneurship. In Lawrence, Pittsburgh, or Detroit in
          its Ford era, a tiny number of great firms were the major
          employers (American Woolen, U. S. Steel) and dominated
          the landscape as well as local economic and political
          life. Yet in Philadelphia, even the eight to ten thousand
          workers engaged at the Baldwin Locomotive Works were a
          minuscule fragment of the city's quarter million
          industrial employees. Hence the city was dependent
          neither on one manufacturing trade nor on any cluster of
          giant corporations for its economic health. Nor however
          could the rapid rise of a leading firm or sector produce
          a city-wide growth boom, as autos did for Detroit.
          Diversity was unspectacular, but it avoided the high-wire
          act of being dedicated to a single industry. It was such
          reliance that turned the textile and shoe cities of New
          England into "ghost towns" during the 1920s, and more
          recently has ground down Detroit and Pittsburgh. By
          contrast, Philadelphia's decay like its advance was
          spread across half a century, a pattern that robbed it of
          sudden drama and made it difficult to perceive or
          reverse.
          <br />
          <br />
          In its heyday, Philadelphia's thousands of modest scale
          firms were linked together through contracts and trade in
          elaborate ways that make it possible to view the city as
          a vast workshop as well. Carpet makers purchased yarn
          from one firm, had it dyed at a second, bought pattern
          designs from a third, punched cards to control the
          weaving process (Jacquard) from a fourth. The card makers
          got coated paper stock from specialist paper
          manufacturers in Manayunk; the dyers bought special
          machinery from Procter and Schwartz which in turn
          purchased metal castings from various city foundries.
          Even at the level of the biggest establishments, such
          connections were frequent. Midvale Steel, makers of
          everything from armor plate to ship's cannon and drive
          shafts, bought its yard locomotives from Baldwin and
          commissioned special machines for metal cutting from
          William Sellers, the city's most venerable machinery
          building plant. Some of Midvale's plate doubtless found
          its way to the Navy Yard or to Cramp's, shipbuilders for
          a century along the Delaware. Baldwin Locomotive long
          operated as a network of workshops complete with internal
          contracts upon which shop masters might turn efficiency
          into a profit. The presence of hundreds of firms with
          every sort of capacity so close to hand encouraged
          Philadelphia mill men to value and use nearby talent,
          thereby deepening the web of interconnections.
          <br />
          <br />
          Of course, none of this could have been developed without
          the "world" out to which Philadelphia shipped its final
          products and from which materials, fuel, and for a long
          period, fresh workers and entrepreneurs arrived by ship
          and rail. During the decades surrounding 1900, the city
          drew heavily on Pennsylvania's rich coal reserves,
          depended on the reliability of the vast Pennsylvania
          Railroad system, the Reading and the B&amp;O, and
          profited from its deepwater port, through which a sturdy
          fraction of the world's wool supply flowed steadily. Of
          course, Philadelphia firms supplied the nation with tools
          and saws, fabrics and machinery, but they were also alert
          to the possibilities of export trade.
          <br />
          <br />
          Philadelphia may by 1890 have virtually covered the world
          of manufacturing, but its products were in large measure
          confined to domestic markets. Much of the reason for this
          lay in the American system of protective tariffs. In
          order to "free" the new United States from economic
          dependence on technically more advanced Britain, the
          federal government early determined to erect a set of
          import taxes (tariffs) which would bring foreign goods'
          prices up to or above those of products "Made in the
          U.S.A." These barriers certainly had something to do with
          the rise of industry (precisely what is still being
          debated), but by the late nineteenth century they
          generated a secondary consequence. The entire cost
          structure of American production and consumption was, on
          average, pitched at a level higher in global terms than
          that of our principal rivals, Britain and Germany. As a
          result, though our standard of living may have been
          higher (again a disputed point), most of our goods were
          priced higher for export than those of European
          competitors. The erratic but considerable expansion of
          demand at home sustained overall growth, but as the
          industrial system matured, concern mounted about how to
          establish additional outlets for the products of our
          manufacturing capacity.
          <br />
          <br />
          This question was debated intensely in Philadelphia,
          especially during the long depression of the 1890s, when
          home markets flagged and export trade to pick up the
          slack could not be found. At the century's turn, local
          activists created the Commercial Museum, whose building
          still squats alongside Convention Hall and its modern
          extensions in West Philadelphia. In essence the Museum
          was to be a collective marketing agency for Philadelphia
          wares, not a site for displaying relics. Visitors,
          especially foreign visitors, were shown what Philadelphia
          made and encourage to contact its firms to meet their
          needs, however unusual or precise. It's hard to know for
          certain, but if this brokerage may have worked better in
          the imagination than in fact, it nonetheless remained
          active for a generation, publishing a monthly journal
          (Commercial America) trumpeting Philadelphia's ability to
          get any job done, on time, and right. Such an institution
          was born here, and not in Pittsburgh, exactly because of
          the city's diversity and skill in making to order. Tons
          of pig iron were staple goods that could be had more
          cheaply on the world market than from American plants,
          but finely crafted machinery, scientific instruments or a
          host of other local specialties competed in terms of
          quality, not price, with rival items from Europe. No firm
          better exemplified this capacity than Baldwin, which
          moved beyond supplying the Santa Fe to providing
          locomotives to rail systems in Brazil, Russia, and Japan,
          among many nations. The Brill Company, specialists in
          street railway cars, plowed similar furrows with success
          over the long term, as did scores of textile firms during
          the briefer fever that World War I brought. After 1914,
          Philadelphia's prominence as a fabric center brought
          millions of dollars in contracts for military goods to
          the city's mills, while its metalworking plants supplied
          other needs nastier than those for leggings and caps, and
          its shipyards fattened on repair work diverted from
          belligerent nations. The early part of the "Great War"
          was good for exports, if not for humanity.
          <br />
          <br />
          If Philadelphia was in some measure able to go to the
          world, so too did firms from afar come to Philadelphia.
          Its immense reserve of skilled labor drew immigrant
          entrepreneurs as well as firms seeking to get inside the
          tariff wall by starting American plants. Belgian textile
          mill owners, Swedish metal tradesmen, and German chemists
          all sought a place in the Quaker City. The chemists, of
          course, were Rohm and Haas, a team that had devised a
          specialty product for leather tanning, an item that
          eliminated the use of animal dung's particularly
          unpleasant contribution to a generally unsavory process.
          As Philadelphia held the nation's largest concentration
          of fine leather works, locating a plant here for
          synthesis of "Oropon" was a natural choice, and added yet
          another layer to the city's interindustry connections. So
          too did national corporations that needed access to
          skilled labor for construction of complex products find
          their way to Philadelphia (GE and Westinghouse, the
          latter just outside the city boundary at Lester).
          &nbsp;In its greatest era, Philadelphia could hardly be
          faulted for proclaiming itself the world's workshop. Two
          questions quickly appear: what brought this about, and
          how did it erode?
          <br />
          <br />
          As John Bowie has pointed out, the city's association
          with manufacturing commenced shortly after its
          settlement, expanded in the age of artisans, and
          blossomed dramatically in the nineteenth century.
          Philadelphia was the largest colonial city, if not its
          richest. &nbsp;Why? &nbsp;In the age of eighteenth
          century agricultural development, Philadelphia, Like
          Charleston and New York, profited vastly from its
          location as the linking point between highly productive
          farm districts and the wider world. Though theirs was a
          risky trade, Philadelphia merchants built fortunes
          through handling incoming fruits of the land, supplying
          farmers and rural stores with their needs, and marketing
          Pennsylvania wheat, etc., across the colonies and across
          the seas. Not only did such activity lead towards Oliver
          Evans' continuous process flour mill, it also fed tastes
          for refined consumption, in housing, furnishings, reading
          matter, and so forth. These in turn provided tasks for
          cabinetmakers, printers, and by extension, papermill
          operators and sawyers, who intersected with the region's
          charcoal iron producers (offering intermediate goods for
          making tools, nails, et al.) to created a bustling, but
          politically vulnerable manufacturing base. Both producer
          and consumer demand could by the Revolutionary era be met
          largely from local sources, surely adding to the regional
          fervor for independence from English colonial
          constraints. Such productive interactions made the city
          nearest the Revolution's breadbasket a prime candidate
          for economic growth in the new century.
          <br />
          <br />
          These were the beginnings, the raw materials for
          industrial extension. With fundamental competence in
          wood- and metalworking, imbedded in a prosperous region,
          Philadelphia drew new talent for long generations after
          Franklin came down the coast from Boston. A few of the
          merchant elite (the Harrisons in chemicals, most notably)
          contributed to the dynamic of mechanical inventiveness
          and product differentiation, but by mid-century,
          Philadelphia looked and was different from New York,
          Boston or Charleston, each more known for commerce (New
          York perhaps wrongly) than for production. Boston
          merchants may have owned cotton mills but rarely
          frequented them. &nbsp;Charleston planters and traders
          moved in an orbit cosmically separate from the workshop
          worlds of Kensington, and New York bankers and railway
          financiers stood far above the harsh scrambling of their
          own city's degraded craft districts. The "best"
          Philadelphians also floated serenely to their Assemblies,
          but quietly and surely hosts of Scots and Yorkshiremen,
          Celts and Teutons were creating both goods and
          institutions that forged a city of industry, a process
          which the elite diarist Sidney George Fisher viewed with
          proper disdain.
          <br />
          <br />
          Machinery men like Alfred Jenks, William Morris and
          William Sellers led the new vanguard, and help generate
          steam engines, textile equipment, and machine tools,
          along with the Franklin Institute, in its time one of the
          world's great forums for promoting and assessing
          mechanical inventiveness. These men knew or sensed that
          in interaction and exchange, in public intercourse rather
          than secrecy, lay the mechanism for advancing their
          individual and collective interests. In its journal,
          exhibitions, prize awards, and public debates, the
          Franklin Institute captured, refined and distributed the
          essence of Philadelphia's prowess and drew to the city in
          return some of the finest scientific and technical
          innovators of the nineteenth century. (Fittingly, the
          Atwater Kent Museum, devoted to the history of
          Philadelphia, occupies the Franklin Institute's early
          quarters on Seventh Street south of Market.) Networks
          among proprietors and workers stemmed not only from such
          institutions, but were also created in the social spaces
          of industrial neighborhoods and inside workshop walls.
          Before the Civil War, most masters lived close by their
          shops and mills, whether in densely settled Kensington or
          Northern Liberties or in the hollows of Germantown.
          Shared problem solving was as routine matter, as was
          contracting out jobs to "competitors" when a rush of
          business arrived, "calling into service others'
          machinery" as it was termed. &nbsp;In such relations lay
          one key to Philadelphia's special genius, its flexibility
          and specializations, its endless versatility, for the
          firm was not a closed box but a unit in a constantly
          shifting web of interconnected activities. New products,
          ideas, solutions percolated through the city (some
          patented, most not) generating productive "external
          economies" that made the districts as a whole far more
          than the sum of their parts.
          <br />
          <br />
          To stress this is not to argue that Philadelphia was a
          Garden of Eden for working people and entrepreneurs.
          There were plenty of terrible jobs; exploitation of women
          (particularly in outwork sewing) was acute, whereas both
          skilled and unskilled operatives had to cope with
          seasonal unemployment year after year. Firms, especially
          new ones, went belly up with depressing frequency,
          sending masters back to the workshops of others and
          cashiered employees in search of new positions. Some
          bosses were notoriously brutal, others were cheats,
          "knocking off" copies of designs by their more creative
          rivals or swindling their workers and clients. All the
          standard human passions and frailties surged through the
          city's factory districts, yet there was such a vitality
          to the world of possibilities open in Philadelphia that
          tens, then hundreds of thousands came, struggled and
          stayed.
          <br />
          <br />
          When secession and war split the nation, the city was
          deeply divided. &nbsp;Its old elite had extensive
          southern connections, and a substantial fraction of its
          factory output flowed to southern merchants. Once the
          course towards combat was set, rebel sympathies and
          general misgivings were forced into private spaces, as
          Philadelphia mobilized both its people and its industries
          in the Union cause. As J. Matthew Gallman notes in his
          recent study of Civil War Philadelphia, due to its
          "extremely diverse array of shops and manufactories...the
          City of Brotherly Love [was] particularly well prepared
          to adjust to rapidly shifting wartime demands."</span>
          <span style=
          "font:7px Verdana, serif; color:#1e00ef;"><u>1</u></span>
          <span style="font:13px Verdana, serif;">As in succeeding
          wars, the city's metalworking plants became arsenals and
          its textile mills fed the Quartermaster Corps' vast
          needs. &nbsp;Profits for many firms were equally vast,
          and were poured into constructing expanded facilities,
          perhaps in part because rapid inflation whittled away the
          value of liquid assets. Where Lowell, utterly dependent
          on cotton and unable to shift its rigid technology to
          wool or blended fibers, essentially closed shop for the
          duration, Philadelphia used its flexibility to good
          advantage, reaping the economic benefits of war so
          adroitly that area textile investment grew half again as
          fast in the 1860s as during the previous decade, even
          with inflation factored out. It was a bloody prosperity,
          to be sure, but by 1870 the nation recognized that
          Philadelphia possessed a supple, creative industrial
          system which could master any task set before it.
          <br />
          <br />
          As it approached an era of prominence, industrial
          Philadelphia appeared to be, as one carpet weaver put it,
          "the paradise of the skilled workman." Wages were high,
          and if work was cyclical, job opportunities were growing.
          Hundreds took the step up to proprietorship, "commencing
          on their own account" in small partnerships, renting
          "rooms with power" in mills purposely built for hosting a
          dozen or more newly-started enterprises. However,
          conflict like cooperation was built into the Philadelphia
          system. &nbsp;Workers had here created some of the
          nation's earliest trade unions in the teeth of legal
          obstructions and masters' opposition to any interference
          with their direct relations with individual employees.
          These institutions had often crumbled in depressions, but
          were rebuilt again and again. It was in post-war
          Philadelphia that the Knights of Labor commenced (1869)
          and put forth its vision of a cooperative commonwealth, a
          vision that proved unattainable without extensive
          conflict. Both the rapid rise and collapse of the Knights
          in schism and strikes (c. 1880-86) indicated the profound
          tensions that lay then as now just beneath the surface of
          capitalist industrialism. Ultimately, employers had a
          critical if limited form of power over their workers,
          capacities to fire or promote, distribute good and
          miserable tasks. This power was constrained by workplace
          and trade customs, by habits and practices of reciprocity
          in and beyond the mills, but when it was used unjustly or
          irresponsibly, conflicts burst out, fueled on each side
          by a sense of the other's betrayal. Values were generally
          as much as issue as was money; settlements were never,
          indeed could not ever be, final.
          <br />
          <br />
          Hence in the decades of high industrialism, Philadelphia
          witnessed strikes and lockouts great and small, including
          general strikes in 1903 and 1910. This rhythm of conflict
          amid necessary cooperation brought labor and capital into
          new forms of antagonistic institutional development. Thus
          the Labor Lyceum and the Lighthouse in Kensington stood
          across a divide from the Manufacturers' Club in Center
          City, and sectoral unions faced trade associations (the
          Metal Manufacturers' Assn., Master Dyers, Worsted
          Spinners, and so forth).</span> <span style=
          "font:7px Verdana, serif; color:#1e00ef;"><u>2</u></span>
          <span style="font:13px Verdana, serif;">The gap narrowed
          and widened at different rates in different decades in
          different sectors, was bridged more in some firms and
          trades than others, was more visible in the age of
          permanent institutions than earlier, but it would not go
          away. What is important and essential is that creativity,
          flexibility and cooperation persisted despite this
          structure of conflict, that contests between proprietors
          and workers were as much (or more) a feature of
          manufacturing's peak era as they were in its decades of
          decay. Simple notions that workers organized unions and
          industries thus fell to pieces square neither with the
          pattern of Philadelphia's success nor with the dynamics
          of its industrial decline.</span><span style=
          "font:10px Verdana, serif;"><br />
          <br /></span><span style=
          "font:13px Verdana, serif;">Philadelphia was not alone in
          1900 as an American center of diversified and flexible
          manufacture. In New England, Worcester (MA) and
          Providence (RI) developed along similar lines, as did
          Newark and Trenton in the Mid-Atlantic. All of them
          entered eras of slow, seemingly inexorable decline after
          World War I.</span> <span style=
          "font:7px Verdana, serif; color:#1e00ef;"><u>3</u></span>
          <span style="font:13px Verdana, serif;">The reasons for
          this slippage were multiple. The increasing importance of
          science and research, carried on by multi-plant corporate
          giants, devalued the experiential shop-based knowledge of
          smaller firms in these urban centers. The latters'
          associations were legally powerless to compel members to
          support comparable inquiry collectively, or even to
          install standard accounting and pricing practices (as was
          done in Europe). Government policies failed to comprehend
          the complementarities between specialist and mass
          production and indirectly favored the latter through
          pressure for standardization and narrowing of product
          ranges to eliminate economic "waste." In consumer goods,
          shifts in retailers' and distributors' business practices
          following the sharp "inventory depression" of 1920-21
          pushed inventory risks for seasonal and style goods back
          on their manufacturers. As dealers cut the stocks they
          held to increase turnover, producers were led toward
          predatory price cutting to secure sufficient orders to
          keep workers active and mill running, thus ruining
          profitability. As consumers benefitted in the short run,
          producers' protests to governments fell on deaf ears. In
          capital goods, the war and post-war period were equally
          critical. Massive emergency demand for ships, locomotives
          and machinery, all with long working "lives," led to a
          slump in the 1920s, worsened by the great depression.
          Finally, shutting off the immigrant flows that had
          ceaselessly revitalized industrial districts soon yielded
          the greying of the core of skilled workers so vital to
          the system. As Americans had failed to multiply the few
          educational institutions which trained "practical"
          machinists, etc., and paid steadily less attention to
          vocational education, both the status and supply of
          flexible, problem-solving "mechanics" eroded amid dreams
          of automatic factories and white collar jobs for
          everyone. Put it all together and you get first a
          trickle, then a torrent of liquidations by
          Philadelphia-style firms, commencing in the 1920s and
          accelerating through the terrible thirties. World War II
          demand for special work quickly done (millions of yards
          of mosquito netting, for example) kept many survivors
          afloat. Yet the contraction soon resumed as mass
          production of standard goods by Fortune 500 corporations
          seemed to have swept the day and swept away versatile
          specialists.
          <br />
          <br />
          In Philadelphia, Cramp's shipyard closed in the 1920s,
          was reopened for emergency service in World War II, then
          faded from memory. Baldwin's moved part (and later all)
          of its production to Eddystone near Chester to secure
          bigger quarters, only to founder in bankruptcy in the
          1930s and be absorbed into a merger. After World War II,
          Eddystone too gradually fell silent. The textile
          districts emptied out bit by bit, a few firms moving to
          the suburbs or the South, hundreds more sticking it out
          to the end on the sites of their glory years. What
          remains is still an impressive cluster of specialty
          manufacturing firms, but in the half-century after 1925
          the city lost two-thirds of its industrial jobs and
          virtually all of its greatest firms. Of the 25 largest in
          1925, only the Budd Company remains a major player in its
          sector.
          <br />
          <br />
          The chapters that follow offer an extraordinarily
          striking portrait of what endures, in a physical and
          architectural sense, of industrial Philadelphia. Its
          range of neighborhoods makes an effective selection among
          the places and spaces created through industrialization
          (or with Chestnut Hill, spawned from its profits).
          Moreover, multiple sites from every era and every
          significant trade are covered, along with major features
          of the transportation, power and public utility net,
          crucial elements in the matrix not often given as careful
          attention as is done here. Finally, enterprises of every
          scale have been documented and, though flexible batch
          operations predominate, several among the city's few bulk
          producers (e.g., sugar refining) make an appearance.
          Thus, in your hands is a fully representative guide to a
          great manufacturing city. If much of what we have left is
          buildings and memories, both are worth preserving for
          uses that as yet lie only in our imagination. This guide
          is a tool for preserving sites and for sparking thought,
          one that will itself be used over and over in the years
          ahead. I, for one, am grateful to the Oliver Evans SIA
          team for creating it, and expect that a few hours from
          now, you will be too.</span><span style=
          "font:16px Verdana, serif;"><br />
          <br /></span><span style=
          "font:4px Verdana, serif;">1</span> <span style=
          "font:9px Verdana, serif;">&nbsp;</span> <span style=
          "font:12px Verdana, serif;">J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering
          Wartime: &nbsp;A Social History of Philadelphia during
          the Civil War, (New York, 1990), pg.
          254.</span><span style=
          "font:9px Verdana, serif;"><br /></span><span style=
          "font:4px Verdana, serif;">2</span> <span style=
          "font:9px Verdana, serif;">&nbsp;</span> <span style=
          "font:12px Verdana, serif;">Philip Scranton, Figured
          Tapestry: Production, Markets and Power in Philadelphia
          Textiles, 1885-1940, (New York, 1989).</span><span style=
          "font:9px Verdana, serif;"><br /></span><span style=
          "font:4px Verdana, serif;">3</span> <span style=
          "font:9px Verdana, serif;">&nbsp;</span> <span style=
          "font:12px Verdana, serif;">For an insightful study of
          Trenton's long, downhill slide, see John Cumbler, A
          Social History of Economic Decline, (New Brunswick, NJ.,
          1989).</span></p>
        </div>
      </div>
      <br style="clear: both;" />
    </div>

    <div id="footer">
      � 2007 workshopoftheworld.com <a href="#"
           id="rw_email_contact"
           name="rw_email_contact">Contact Me</a><script type=
           "text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
var _rwObsfuscatedHref0 = "mai";var _rwObsfuscatedHref1 = "lto";var _rwObsfuscatedHref2 = ":in";var _rwObsfuscatedHref3 = "fo@";var _rwObsfuscatedHref4 = "wor";var _rwObsfuscatedHref5 = "ksh";var _rwObsfuscatedHref6 = "opo";var _rwObsfuscatedHref7 = "fth";var _rwObsfuscatedHref8 = "ewo";var _rwObsfuscatedHref9 = "rld";var _rwObsfuscatedHref10 = ".co";var _rwObsfuscatedHref11 = "m";var _rwObsfuscatedHref = _rwObsfuscatedHref0+_rwObsfuscatedHref1+_rwObsfuscatedHref2+_rwObsfuscatedHref3+_rwObsfuscatedHref4+_rwObsfuscatedHref5+_rwObsfuscatedHref6+_rwObsfuscatedHref7+_rwObsfuscatedHref8+_rwObsfuscatedHref9+_rwObsfuscatedHref10+_rwObsfuscatedHref11; document.getElementById('rw_email_contact').href = _rwObsfuscatedHref;
//]]>
</script>
    </div>
  </div>
</body>
</html>
