Rise and fall of city's manufacturing sector

How will they know? How will future generations of Philadelphians have any inkling that their city once thrived as a premier manufacturing center? Of the fine products issuing from its shops, mills, and plants prized by customers around the nation and the world?

There are few traces left of this history - abandoned factory buildings here and there - and the acres and acres of empty lots that form the landscape of decaying neighborhoods that once brimmed with industrial sites and jobs give no clues. The curious onlooker might ask: What was here? What happened?

Delving into the past is to find that the decline of Philadelphia manufacture is directly related to its rise, two sides of the same coin: of the strengths and weaknesses of a particular kind of industrial system that graced the city, one that rested by and large on the production of quality goods.

A rich agricultural hinterland, an enterprising merchant community, and ready markets for the products processed and crafted in the city transformed Philadelphia into a major commercial entrepôt within a half-century of its founding by William Penn in 1682. By the time delegates convened in 1776 to write the Declaration of Independence, the city had become second only to London in the volume and value of goods that entered and left its port. Philadelphia's commercial fortunes plummeted, however, in the early 19th century as the city lost trade to its chief rival, New York City. In response, Philadelphia embarked on a new direction that would mark its history for the next 150 years: prospering as a major manufacturing center.

No single invention, businessperson, event, or circumstance can be designated as a prime mover in Philadelphia's rise to industrial supremacy. Thousands of initiatives occurred as a steady mushrooming of varied enterprise. However, at least four features characterized Philadelphia's industrial structure in its heyday.

Product diversity. Never a one- or two-industry city, Philadelphia became known for its fine textiles and garments, boots and shoes, hats, iron and steel, metal items, machine tools and hardware, locomotives, saws, rugs, furniture, ships, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, glass, cutlery, jewelry, paints and varnishes, printing and publishing, medical instruments, and more.

Diversity of work settings. Goods were made in homes, craft shops, sweatshops, small manufactories with hand- and foot-driven machinery, water- and steam-powered mills, and multidimensional plants. Some products even passed through several of these settings from initial processing of raw materials to final finishing.

Specialization in processes and products. Philadelphia manufacturers did not prosper by competing with mass producers of goods in other parts of the country, but rather by operating in niche markets fashioning high-quality wares or by concentrating in single aspects of production (in textiles, for example, separate establishments emerged respectively to spin special fibers, weave fine cloth, and dye elaborate fabrics). Even in some large firms, such as Baldwin Locomotive, Stetson Hat, and Midvale Steel, specialty production remained the hallmark. Baldwin rarely made two engines alike; Stetson's fine felt and straw hats were sold in beautifully made boxes with silk linings and adorned with the renowned Stetson logo; and Midvale produced a specialty gray steel and took orders for specialty castings and forgings (unlike its rivals, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel).

Skilled workforce. Large, corporate enterprises with armies of mass assembly workers were not part of the economic skyline. Instead, there was a prevalence of small- to medium-size, family-owned and -managed manufacturers that relied on highly skilled workforces.

Although the first use of the label "Workshop of the World" cannot be precisely determined, by the first decade of the 20th century, the phrase was regularly attached to Philadelphia in journals and books and in the pronouncements of business and civic leaders. However, the success and prosperity that marked Philadelphia industry crested in the 1920s, when declines occurred in textile and garment manufacture and in shipbuilding - although new production of radios and electrical appliances sustained employment. The Great Depression brought retrenchments everywhere as unemployment at its peak reached more than 40 percent of the city's workforce. Military orders during World War II boosted production, but a massive enduring decline in industrial jobs occurred thereafter.

At a postwar height in 1953, 359,000 Philadelphians were employed in manufacture, 45 percent of the city's labor force; in our own times, the number of industrial jobs has dramatically fallen to below 30,000, 5 percent of the total. These figures reflect the greater deindustrialization of the United States, though the downward spiral for Philadelphia far exceeded the nation as a whole. Since the early 1950s, overall manufacturing jobs have declined from a high of 19.4 million to 14 million, from 32 percent of all employment to 10 percent.

As Philadelphia's industrial ascent had a particular cast, so did the descent.

The city did not lose manufacturing jobs because national corporations bought and liquidated the facilities of local firms to undo competition; nor because financiers breezily bought, broke up, and sold firms to make paper profits; nor because of foreign competition and the flight of businesses to low-wage areas in the United States and abroad - as happened in other American cities and regions over the course of the 20th century. Rather, Philadelphia's manufacturers closed down because of changes in consumerism. Synthetic fibers, for example, wiped out the city's famed silk hosiery trade; parquet flooring and wall-to-wall shag carpeting decimated the tapestry rug industry; men stopped wearing fine felt hats to the detriment of Stetson; and cheap hardware merchandized by Sears Roebuck and other mass distributors cut deeply into the sales of the magnificently made, durable saws of the Disston Saw Co.

Mass production and marketing that promoted inexpensive, disposable products proved the death knell of Philadelphia industry as custom manufacturers - slow, unable, or unwilling to react - failed to compete with standardized producers of goods elsewhere in the country and across the globe. The loss was great not just for the city and its people; greater awareness and respect for workmanship and quality were lost as well.