I’m glad the Philadelphia Inquirer is doing this series of stories on poverty in the city, but I’m sorry that the same bunch of racist clowns are filling the comments section:
On a windy sidewalk in Kensington one day, Walter Licht, a University of Pennsylvania historian, stood near the site of the factory at Lehigh Avenue and Fourth Street to explain how this part of Philadelphia was once a fertile incubator of jobs.
“Imagine it’s 7 a.m. in the 1920s,” said the distinguished-looking professor with a gray beard and smiling eyes. “There are 10,000 people or more walking these streets, streaming into factories to go to work. And generations of young people saw their fathers go to work each day, knowing that they would get jobs, too, when their time came.”
Beginning in 1820, North Philadelphia was the premiere manufacturing site in America, Licht said. What made the area great was its ability to churn out specialty, niche products. North Philadelphia made the world’s best dental instruments, rugs, locomotives, textiles, book bindings, saws, cigars, hats, leather shoes and silk hosiery. It drew a disproportionately high number of English and German workers with well-developed skills in various trades.
Not so much a city with huge industries – like Pittsburgh’s steel and Detroit’s automobiles – Philadelphia thrived as an amalgam of humming, small to medium-size workshops.
That made the city special. Ultimately, it helped cast Philadelphia as the poorest big city in America.
By the 1920s, problems already started to develop, Licht said. That’s when consumers began craving the cheaper, standardized products being sold by Sears, the Wal-Mart of the age. Mass-marketed goods cost one-tenth the price of North Philadelphia’s artisan-made, quality merchandise.
“The shift turns to buying schlock, instead of a more expensive saw, rug or coat that could last three generations,” Licht said.
One by one, North Philadelphia firms started to lose their markets, and the disintegration of industry here was well under way.
The manufacturing demanded by World War II staved off the decline for a while. But afterward, “we go into a massive slide,” Licht said.
Meanwhile, African Americans continued the great migration from the South, moving into the area at the precise time the industrial district in and around North Philadelphia was collapsing.
Riots in 1964 helped hasten white flight toward Northeast Philadelphia, and Latino people started moving in.
There was a brief hope that industry could resurge in the 1950s and 1960s, as Philco TVs were being manufactured in the district. But the Japanese ended that dream with the first Panasonics and Sonys. By 1970, not a single TV was being made in the city.
Other places in the country managed to hang on to industry longer than Philadelphia because they had bigger corporations employing thousands, Licht said. But this city had no U.S. Steel or General Motors.
“It explains why this congressional district is worse off than others,” Licht said. “This collapse of fragile small and medium firms was much more enduring than any place else.”
Continue reading “Making a living”