© Roy E. Goodman and David G.
Orr, Ph.D., Workshop of the World (Oliver Evans Press,
1990).
The word "Liberties" refers
to a land policy of William Penn common in Britain and
her colonies. The "first purchasers" of large tracts of
land were to receive a bonus of 2 percent of their
acreage, to be allotted to them in the "great towne" of
Philadelphia. However, when the city bounds were fixed at
1280 acres it was necessary to make grants of free or
liberty lands in the surrounding country. On account of
greater accessibility of the Northern Liberties, compared
with the western areas, allotments were 8 acres per 500
acres purchased elsewhere.
Naturally the rural landscape was an ideal setting for
those processes and businesses that were less desirable
for a more urban setting. Tanneries, claypits, dyeworks,
brickyards, and the like preceded the factories of
nineteenth century industrialization. The district of the
Northern Liberties as it is known today is the area lying
between the west side of 6th Street and the Delaware
River, and between Vine Street and the Cohocksink
Creek (roughly Girard Avenue).
Governor's Mill, constructed in 1700, in the vicinity of
2nd and 3rd Streets near Girard (which had not
yet been built), was an early grist mill. The Cohocksink
Creek provided water power and imported English machinery
processed the corn brought to the mill. However, its
distance from the city made for an unprofitable
situation. Thomas Masters purchased the operation in
1714. Interestingly, Masters' wife Sarah (Sybilla) was
granted what has been said to be the first American
patent for the process to create "Tuscorora Rice" a
cleaned and cured form of corn. Scull and Heap's map of
1750 notes the existence of the mill. Throughout the
eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, a
variety of items were processed there. By 1760, chocolate
and mustard were being ground. Weaving machinery to
handle flax and hemp was installed in 1792.
Shortly, before 1803, a calico printing works was
established at the site, whose name had already been
changed to the Globe Mill. Ownership of the mill had
changed many times through the years along with the
appearance of the plant. It was to be become the largest
textile mill in Pennsylvania until the middle of the
nineteenth century. An 1832 account acknowledges the
employment of 114 men and women. The male adults averaged
a weekly wage of $8.50, while their female counterparts
received $2.62 in compensation. The 200 children laboring
at Globe were able to contribute $1.37 to their families'
well-being. Employees worked in three buildings. Two
steam engines and a water wheel supplied the muscle to
power 47 looms set to weave saddle girths. From 518,000
pounds of cotton, 9,126 spindles of thread were produced.
According to the account, apprentices (generally twelve
in number) received one-quarter of their annual schooling
from the mill. The majority of the workers lived in the
Northern Liberties.
Among the ranks of early Northern Liberties innovators
was John Behrent, Jr. (a woodworker and joiner located at
3rd and Brown Streets), who developed an "extraordinary
instrument by the name of pianoforte." Built in the
manner of a harpsichord in 1775, Behrent's creation is
believed to have been the first piano constructed in
America. No examples or sketches are extant.
John Harrison's chemical works at 3rd and Green Streets
produced the first significant batches of American-made
sulfuric acid in 1792, as well as America's first
strychnine. By 1807, a sizable lead chamber plant had
been erected for chemical processes. Fire in 1809
destroyed the plant and a fourteen-acre plot in
Kensington soon replaced the Northern Liberties
operation. However, Harrison's technical discoveries
greatly contributed to the advancement and growth of the
American chemical industry.
Oliver Evans, noted inventor and steam engine builder,
lived at 437 North 2nd Street in 1793, and at
215 North 2nd Street in 1796. Evan's neighbor
was John Fitch, owner and builder of the famous steam
boat, who occupied 462 North 2nd Street in 1791.
1
Henry Deringer, the famous firearms maker, lived on North
Front Street and then on Tamarind (now North Hope)
between the 100 block of Green and Coates streets (now
Fairmount Avenue). He lived and worked in the
neighborhood from 1814-1868. His popular pocket pistol
looms large in American gun lore. The "Deringer" was
widely sold in the South and in California during the era
of the Gold Rush. It developed from an 1831 prototype
percussion pistol. Supposedly, hunters and farmers
traveled down the Delaware River to visit his shop and
purchase guns and rifles. Deringer's larger weapons were
supplied to the U.S. Government through the earliest
Federal arms contract made. In 1808, along with several
other U.S. arms manufacturers, Federal arsenals were
being stocked with these weapons.
Keeping with this patriotic spirit, in 1791 William Peter
Sprague produced the carpet that adorned the U.S. Senate
Chamber in Congress Hall until 1800. An Englishman
trained in the Axminster technique of handknotting
carpets, Sprague moved from 458 North 2nd Street in
1793, to 422 North 3rd Street which was the ‘first
brick house above Brown Street’ according to the
1793 Philadelphia City Directory. The diversity of the
Northern Liberties and an excellent account of Sprague,
his carpet and his business is described by Susan
Anderson 2
:
The
neighborhood was not a fashionable one, Wealthier and
more influential Philadelphia families chose to live
south of High Street, (Market), closer to the State House
and other public buildings. Rather it was a center for
artisans and small businessmen who lived along the
unpaved muddy streets in small crowded houses and in
little ‘courts’ and alleys behind the
numbered streets between Third Street, and the Delaware
River.
In the vicinity of Sprague’s residences were
laborers, coopers, tanners, ferrymen and mariners,
clothweavers and stockingweavers, painters and
wheelwrights. There were two ‘doctors of
physic’ on Second Street; a mid-wife and a
‘druggist’ lived nearby. The schoolteachers
lived cheek to jowl with boatbuilders, starchmakers, and
seamstresses, and there was even a sugar refinery on
Coates Street near Third. When the Sprague family was
living on Second Street in 1790, there were two taverns
within sight, and an inn directly next door, to add to
the busy neighborhood.
It was in reality a complete small community, a microcosm
of industriousness separated and rather isolated from the
rest of Philadelphia. To the north side of Peggs Run was
a broad, tidewater marsh where sportsmen hunted birds. It
flooded frequently and a boat was sometimes required to
get across to the business establishments of
‘Camptown’ or ‘Campington,’ as it
was sometimes called from the barracks built by the
British on North Third Street before the
Revolution. 3
Sprague’s Philadelphia Carpet Manufactory, the
first true commercial carpet works in America, relocated
several times, although it remained in the Northern
Liberties.
Thomas Haig and his family produced a variety of
earthenware goods at their 4th Street location above
Poplar. Decorative examples of Haig's highly respected
work can be found at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. From
1844 to 1870 at 545 North 2nd Street (old
numbering) the Haigs manufactured non-decorative ceramics
such as cooking furnaces, chimney flues and tops, drain,
sewer and water pipes, and stoneware for chemical and
pharmaceutical uses.
Philadelphia, in 1859, could boast of over two dozen
processors of hides, with most of these tanneries located
between Arch Street and Girard Avenue, Front Street and
Fourth Street. The Adams and Keen Company, at 934 St.
John (now American) Street, share in the City's premier
position as the largest pre-Civil War producer of
leather. Morocco, a fine grade of leather obtained from
goatskin tanned with sumac, was an especially prized item
offered by Adams and Keen. The oak necessary in the
tanning process, the goatskins imported from India, and
the transport of hides and leather to other urban centers
depended on the Delaware corridor's excellent port and
rail complex.
The most notable and best documented establishment in the
neighborhood was Henry Disston's ‘Saw
Manufactory’ at Front and Laurel Streets, described
by Bishop as:
...the
most extensive in the United States, and probably the
largest in the world. All the operations incidental
to the manufacture of saws of all kinds are carried on
here (including the steel making), on a scale of
unsurpassed magnitude, and not only saws, but all the
minor constituent parts and adjuncts, from a saw screw to
a saw file.
The buildings on Laurel Street cover two hundred and
fifty thousand square feet of ground (eventually covering
eight acres), and comprise a rolling mill, two hundred
and forty by seventy-five feet; a warehouse; a machine
shop and main saw factory, two hundred by one hundred
feet, three stories in height; a wood working department,
four stories high; a blacksmith's, hardening, and file
shop and brass foundry; and sundry other buildings of
less dimensions. In the lumber department, a stock of
three hundred thousand feet of beech and apple wood
for saw handles, is at all times in process of seasoning;
on the north side of Haydock Street, another building
fifty by two hundred and fifty feet, three stories high,
in which butcher knives and trowels and reaping knives,
etc., are made. 4
The marvels of automation are also highlighted:
To
tool the five dozen Wood-Saws in an hour, is rapid work
for the best mechanic in the world; Mr. Disston has
machinery by which one man can toothe thirty dozen
in the same time. He can toothe perfectly a sixty-inch
Circular Saw in two minutes, which by the old process
would require the labor of one man two hours. The
tempering process, which is patented, is most complete,
and saves at least one-third the labor ordinarily
required, or in other words sixty men can do as much work
as one hundred formerly did. The apparatus for
grinding is novel...it includes machinery that will grind
both sides of a saw at one operation, and long as
well as short saws. We believe that the machines in the
Grinding Department are the only ones of the kind in the
world. Mr. Disston has also a new process for stiffening
saw blades, or in other words, refining the grain after
tempering by repeated blows of a steam hammer. In the
Rolling Mill, there are forty melting holes for making
Cast Steel, and three sets of rolls, the largest being
capable of turning out a saw plate sixty-four inches in
diameter. This mill gives its proprietor the
ability to fill an order for any saw, however,
extraordinary the size, in a few days, that would
otherwise have required months. The steel is made from
the best brands of Swedish and Norway Iron.
5
The Northern Liberties industrial mix remained as
diversified from the 1850s into the twentieth century as
it had been during the earlier era of burgeoning
enterprise.
Breweries, paint and chemical works, tanneries, iron and
stove foundries, sugar refineries, and tool factories
were among the most conspicuous operations located in the
Delaware River corridor. Northern Liberties' ideal
location, close to the commercial heart of Philadelphia
and Camden in tandem with proximity to river and rail
services represents the major factor that transformed the
area from just an "industrial community" into the central
conveyance link for rapidly expanding factories. Delaware
River sites benefited most from the rail network;
however, coal and other goods were tied into the port's
rail lines from the Schuylkill River as well.
Railroads sold stock and floated loans like the 30-year
note (due 1881) offered by the Pennsylvania Railroad to
‘the Commissioners and Inhabitants of the
Incorporated District of the Northern Liberties.’
Yet, changes from a localized dependence on labor and
components to a notion of a ‘factory’ as we
perceive it did not arise quickly. For example, Charles
Gilbert's Stove Manufactory occupied a three and one half
story building on Second Street just north of Vine from
1844 to 1867. An 1846 print depicts a man and a
woman laboring on the third floor of this well-stocked
store. The ‘Ofen Fabrik’ signage would
attract many area German residents.
In contrast, the Liberty Iron and Stove Works, on the
south side of Brown Street between Fourth and Fifth
Streets, operated from 1851 until 1915 under a variety of
owners. Reputed to be the largest and most profitable
factory of its kind in Philadelphia, Liberty produced an
assortment of small cast iron stoves, as well as huge
double oven models. Liberty's aggressive marketing
efforts, when compared with Gilbert's "mom and pop"
style, demonstrates how large factories emerged and
"geared-up" to meet consumer demands far beyond the
confines of Philadelphia. It also reflects how the ever
more extensive rail, river, and road grid aided
industrial growth.
In an editorial upon the death of Mr. Henry Disston the
Public Ledger of March 18, 1878 said, in part: "...a born
mechanic, in the comprehensive meaning of the term. He
had the faculty of observing wherein a familiar tool or
implement or machine was defective; the genius to devise
the means to improve it, and the handicraft skill to do
the manual work necessary to carry his own device into
effect."
The need for plant expansion and a site away from the
congested section of the city, sparked the purchase of a
350-acre tract in Tacony, a few miles northeast of
Northern Liberties in 1872. The Laurel Street complex
served as the office, packing and show rooms of the firm
until 1907 when it became a paper box factory. It was
demolished in 1968.
Although industrial activity flourished into the first
third of the twentieth century, the need for tracts of
land larger than those available in the Liberties
impacted on the manufacturing sector. Many of the small
and medium-sized operations remained, slowly succumbing
to the economic turbulence of the Depression. Competition
from newer and more efficient plants also affected area
factories. The well-developed transport network remained
an important factor for the economic health of Northern
Liberties.
The completion of the Market-Frankford elevated line in
1918, with stations at Fairmount and Girard, made the
transport of a large number of workers easier than ever
before. The docks, owned by the Reading, Pennsylvania,
and Baltimore and Ohio Railroads remained active through
the 1960s until the sugar companies and other businesses
were bought out or suffered bankruptcy.
The revitalization of the waterfront spearheaded by the
Penn's Landing Complex promises a new future for the
Delaware River corridor. Flanked by I-95, Northern
Liberties and the river are experiencing a new vitality,
albeit a phoenix rising from the ashes of bygone
industrial glory.
1 At that time, the
street addresses were numbered differently, with 201
North 2nd Street being just south of Vine Street, which
was the southern boundary of what became the incorporated
Northern Liberties in 1803.
2 Susan H.
Anderson, The
Most Splendid Carpet, (U.S. National Park
Service, (Philadelphia, 1978)
3 Anderson, p. 33.
4 Bishop. A
History of American Manufactures...
" (Philadelphia,
1868).
5 Bishop. A
History of American Manufactures...
" (Philadelphia,
1868).
Aknowledgements:
Thanks to Sara
Jane Elk, who provided research data for the Burk
Brothers Tannery Site. Thanks also to Frank Margeson,
Photographer, American Philosophical Society Library, who
provided the photograph of the first patent by Sybilla
Masters.
Update May
2007 (by
Torben Jenk):
Promoted by resident artists and developers as an
"artist's community" from the 1980s on, some former
industrial buildings offered working "studio" spaces at
affordable rents. 601 Green (built 1892) and 340-344
Brown are among the few that still offer studio space for
rent. 314 Brown Street, formerly G.H.P. Cigar, housed a
gourmet food distributor and fourteen studios in 30,000
square feet of renovated space, but was converted to
residential condominiums in 2006. The booming real
estate market has made raw space too valuable,
so Northern Liberties is gentrifying into a mostly
residential community. The smallest and simplest
unrenovated houses now sell for $200,000+, while newly
constructed row houses sell for over $500,000.
Condominiums under construction in modern twelve-story
towers and in the soaring top floors of loft buildings
are being marketed for $700,000 to $1,000,000.
The following industrial buildings have been converted
for residential use, sometimes with studio or commercial
space on the first floor: 305 Brown Street, 1151-1161 N.
3rd (formerly "Toilet Soaps," "Henry H. Collins," and,
until recently, "Becker Furniture"), 1147 N. 4th
(formerly "T&O Cos. Cigar Factory" and "General Cigar
Co."), 1156 N. 3rd ("Eagle Iron Wks" c.1895, "Weinrich
Garage" c.1924, later Quaker Japanning & Enameling),
425 Fairmount (Zimmermann Co. with its superb quartet of
life-sized terra cotta bull's heads in the cornice), and
710-720 N. 5th (formerly "G.A. Bisler, Paper Boxes,"
c.1930). 926-928 N. 3rd are being redeveloped as this is
written. The four-story building at 926 might survive but
only the facade remains of the building at 928—a
"facadectomy"—and their cojoined rears along
Orianna Street all seemingly were part of a former
"Furniture Mfy" (c.1895) and a manufacturer of "Paper
Boxes" (c.1924). The Cooper Barrel warehouse on the
300 block of Brown Street was recently demolished to
build new townhouses which have arisen atop their
foundations.
Other old buildings serve industry.
420-442 Fairmount Avenue
is a curious collection of buildings linked visually
by sky-blue boards covering the window openings. A
huge buff yellow brick chimney remains and a metal
bridge links the second floors across cobbled
Wallace Street to the south (the finest surviving
industrial streetscape in Northern Liberties). Parts
of this complex seem to have been used by
the "H.K. Wampole & Co., Drugs." It is now
occupied by Trans-Atlantic Company,
"established in 1951, as the leading and oldest
stocking importer of high quality, commercial and
residential grade builders, security and shelf
hardware products, we represent many outstanding
offshore manufacturers in the U.S.A."
Aircon Filter, 437-441
Green Street, is a manufacturer of "custom- and
standard-sized industrial air and grease filters for
use in most kitchen exhaust systems, HVAC systems,
paint booths, machinery, compressors, engines,
industrial ventilation electronic cabinets,
turbines, and many other applications; available in
aluminum, galvanized steel, and stainless steel."
Metal stampings are often stacked along the
sidewalk. Color Reflections prints all sorts of
graphic products from brochures to billboards,
scrolling banners to wallpaper, trade show booths to
vehicle wraps (that can cover a car or an entire
bus).
Color Reflections' office and "dynamic digital imaging"
studio is in the former Integrity Trust building, 400
Fairmount Avenue; they print the large stuff across the
street at 413 Fairmount Avenue. Keystone Uniform
Cap was started in 1918 and is now run by the third
generation who, with their fifty employees, have been "an
industry leader manufacturing customized uniform headwear
for bus, train, airline & security companies,
correctional institutions, as well as police and fire
departments nationally." Keystone is at 801 N. Front
Street. The J.T. Riley lumberyard (founded in 1905
somewhere in Center City) is at 330 W. Girard Avenue,
having taken over the former "Howard Ketcham Lumber Yard"
in the mid 20th century.
A few artists manufacture their work from industrial
parts. Ray King, 835 N. 3rd Street, "designs,
fabricates and assembles dynamic, high tech, light
responsive sculptures that animate and enhance the
architectural landscape...working with 3D computer
models, to explore the interaction of spectral light and
shadows with organic forms and shapes inspired by nature
to create a dialogue with the sun."
King cuts,
finishes, and laminates slabs of metal and glass; often
assembling the parts with stainless cable.
Leo Razzi "lives and
works in a former tannery, former printing house,
former ladder factory, former trucking
company" at 1019 New Market
Street, where he creates:
"pieces
out of wrenches, drill bits, augers, truck parts, gears,
chains, pipes, plate steel, electrical equipment, giant
springs. Techniques involve a mix of welding, glass
blowing, electrical work, plumbing, clay sculpting and
woodworking. All of this metal and noise and flame and
risk produce (or over-produce) extraordinary flower
boxes, table lamps, formidable tree bollards, hanging
racks, deck rails, a one-of-a-kind place to store your
garden hose, place to sit, even if you’re King
Kong, a place to give your dog a drink, and things that
at first glance have no purpose, but then
do. Without formal art training Razzi doesn’t
know what to call his craft, but responds to phrases like
industrial art, junk art and functionalism.
Constructionism or maybe overconstructionism also work,
since he makes flower boxes that can withstand a bomb
blast, garden hose reels that are bulletproof, and
benches you can hide under should it begin to rain
sledgehammers."
908 N. 3rd Street is a charming one-story buff yellow and
red brick building with decorative inset tile; a plaque
in the pediment proclaims "M.J. Lichow, 1924." At 908A,
Nathan Pucell and Ian Kerr recently opened the
Philadelphia Glass Works, "the only public lampworking
facility in the city...using and teaching techniques such
as lampworking [using a torch to melt and shape glass],
pate de verre [making a paste of glass that is applied to
the surface of the mold, then fired], and slumping
[heating to the point of plasticity where it can be
molded]." 908B houses Fury Design, a graphic design firm.
A building of the similar era is at 809 N. 3rd Street,
proclaiming "N. Tocconita Building" which the former
owner claimed was related to the manufacture of
bicycles.
Some industrial buildings are vacant, awaiting
redevelopment, such as 1133 N. 4th Street, formerly the
"James S. Wilson, Tapes & Bindings." The section
along 4th Street seems in best condition, one part elbows
up to Cambridge Street, the section extending back to
Orianna Street has been demolished. 312 Green Street
(southeast corner of Orianna) remains unidentified. A
large complex stretches from 1134-1148 North American
Street west to Bodine, partially identified as "Block
Go-Garts" in 1924. Nestled between 867 N. 4th and 868 N.
Lawrence (at the top of the 800 block of N. Leithgow
Street, formerly McGrath Street) is an almost-ruined
three-story stuccoed brick building which
was, according to neighbors, formerly a
slaughterhouse and a tin shop. At the edge of the
Delaware River at 950 N. Penn Street is a monumental
Romanesque building of brick and brownstone with a superb
pediment made of copper and glass facing the river.
Two pairs of industrial buildings straddle the ancient
Cohocksink Creek, which wound through Northern Liberties
and powered William Penn's "Governor's Mill" in 1701.
Made into a canal, then a sewer, basements along the path
of the Cohocksink still flood—an unfortunate
surprise for the new residents. The Cohocksink drained
into the Delaware River just north of Pier 35, across
Delaware Avenue from Brown Street and "Canal Street."
Straddling Canal Street and bending with the curve of the
creek are a pair of mostly vacant eight-story concrete
warehouses linked by a bridge across the creek at the
eighth floor that were probably built in the 1930s. The
warehouse to the south of the creek has shorter windows
and protruding mushroom capitals with exposed rebar,
surely to allow expansion along the northern facade which
is parallel to the regular street grid, not the
northwesterly direction of the creek.
Other buildings survive along the path of the Cohocksink.
George Wells Co, "established 1908, the finest purveyor
of meat, seafood and poultry" is at 982 N. Delaware
Avenue (between Delaware Avenue and Canal Street below
Laurel); a life-sized Black Angus steer stands atop the
entrance of this well maintained building. Most other
buildings along the Cohocksink seem owned by speculators
looking to profit from development along the Delaware
waterfront. Terra cotta letters proclaim "HERMAN L.
WINTERER" at 943-953 N. Front Street. A fading painted
sign atop a one-story building at 49 Laurel Street reads
"SHEIN'S EXPRESS, TRENTON - NEWARK - NEW
YORK." Further up the Cohocksink, just north of
where Hancock Street meets Laurel Street, is a second
pair of buildings straddling and bending with the creek,
both four stories and mainly brick. To the east was
"Keystone Car Spring Wks" and "Hub Spoke & Wheel Wks"
(c.1895) now possibly incorporated into 1011 N. Hancock
Street. To the west a "Warehouse" stretching west to 2nd
Street appeared before 1924 (now known as 1000-1010 N.
Hancock Street and 969 N. 2nd St.); a rail track and
trestles is visible inside this building from the Hancock
Street side.
Louis Kahn, the famous 20th century architect, grew up in
Northern Liberties. His son Nathaniel filmed a biography
entitled "My Architect, A Son's Journey—a Man,
his Buildings, his Secret Lives,"
which was
released in 2003 to wide acclaim. While doing
research, Nathaniel walked through Northern Liberties
and was struck by the similarity between Kahn's
monumental masonry structures with their large voids
and shadows, and the hulking industrial buildings of
Northern Liberties. When The New Yorker magazine wrote
about the biography, Nathaniel and his sister were
photographed in front of 1010 North Hancock Street.
Decades earlier, Lou Kahn had written, "A city should
be a place where a little boy walking through its
streets can sense what he someday would want to be."
Two early forms of transportation meander through
Northern Liberties. Horses from the "76 Carriage Co."
pull their carriages from their stable (north of George
Street, between N. Bodine and N. American streets) to
Independence Hall where they offer carriage rides through
Society Hill to tourists. "Ride the Ducks" keep their
fleet of WWII DUKW amphibious craft on the 800 block of
N. 4th Street. They also offer rides to tourists,
featuring a cruise into the Delaware River from their
ramp under the Ben Franklin Bridge.
A few years ago, when the century-old buildings on the
southwest corner of Girard and Germantown were demolished
to build a new liquor store, a number of neighbors peered
into the excavations hoping to find evidence of William
Penn's "Governor's Mill." We found nothing, but
remembered that it was here, in 1715, that the first
patent issued to any person in the American Colonies
[Thomas Masters] was put to work "for
the sole Use and Benefit of A New Invencon found out by
Sybilla, his wife, for the Cleaning and curing the Indian
Corn growing in the severall Colonies in
America..."
Resources:
Northern Liberties
bibliography