© John Mayer,
Workshop of the
World (Oliver Evans Press, 1990).
Southwest Philadelphia is
bounded by the Schuylkill River to the east, the Delaware
River to the south, Cobbs Creek to the west and Baltimore
Pike/South Street to the north. The area included farms,
large estates and open marshes through the nineteenth
century. 1
John Bartram's
estate, located on the Schuylkill River near Woodland
Avenue and built c.1730, is an important reminder of the
more pastoral quality of this section of the city.
This neighborhood includes several small communities that
were clustered around industrial mill seats such as the
Angora section with the Angora Cotton Mill (destroyed
c.1912) and Paschallville with the Passmore Mill and
later Fels and Co. (partially demolished c.1956 and
1985).
As the railroads made their way to Philadelphia from the
south, supporting industries grew up along the rail lines
that passed through the area. 2
The Brill
Company, located at Woodland Avenue between 60th and 62nd
Streets, was a major traction equipment/rail car
manufacturer operating from the 1868 through the 1940s.
The Brill works covered 30 acres of ground and employed
nearly 1,500 employees as late as 1920.
3
Improved street car rail transportation built mostly
during the twentieth century, stimulated much of the
residential growth in the area.
One of Philadelphia's larger and most short lived
industries to occupy Southwest Philadelphia was the Hog
Island Ship Yard, a World War I merchant ship building
facility, built by the American International
Shipbuilding Corporation (Stone and Webster, engineers).
The Hog Island Ship Yard produced 110 standardized,
pre-fabricated ships between October 1917 and January
1922. Built up on the site of what has become the
Philadelphia International Airport, only a few of the
thousands of pilings remain of this massive facility. The
shipyard employed 34,000 men at its peak, included 50
shipways, and covered 300 acres. The most enduring
reminder of the shipyard is the 1,479 houses built for
Hog Island workers in Buist Park (in the area of 2500
South 67th and 68th Streets) in the Elmwood
section. 4
Today most of the industry has left Southwest
Philadelphia and has been replaced by parks, commercial
shopping strips, and residential communities. The marshy
portion of the area, bordering the Schuylkill and
Delaware Rivers, is home to the airport and
Philadelphia's state-of-the-art sewage/sludge treatment
facility.
1 Richard Webster,
Philadelphia Preserved, (Philadelphia, 1976), pg. 193.
2 see Philadelphia City
Atlases of the 27th Ward, 1876, 1885, and 1910.
3 see Pennsylvania State
Department of Labor and Industry, Third Industrial
Directory of Pennsylvania, (Harrisburg, 1919), pg. 880;
see also Federal Writer's Project, Philadelphia: A Guide
to the Nation's Birthplace, (Harrisburg, 1937), pg. 500.
4 see Bulletin Archives,
Clippings File, "Hog Island," at Temple University's
Paley Library, Evening Bulletin, Nov. 14, 1920; see also
David Tyler, The American Clyde, (Newark, DE, 1958), pgs.
105-8; see also Philip Scranton and Walter Licht, Work
Sights, (Philadelphia, 1986), pgs.
229-30.
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to
Stephen J. Salamon and Jeffrey Ray for assistance with
the photography. Thanks to Harold E. Spaulding, the
Industrial Explorer, for his assistance on several sites
in this section. Thanks to the Charles G. Mayer
Foundation for help.
Resources:
Southwest Philadelphia
bibliography