In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

among the largest in the world at this time,
employing a total of 2,800 workers.
In 1894 John Bromley’s son Joseph purchased
a mill at Fourth Street and Lehigh
Avenue that he enlarged and converted to
lace making. This became the Quaker Lace
Company, another longtime Kensington
institution (and the mill whose tower served
as the vantage point for the description of the
Kensington manufacturing district quoted
above). When Joseph Bromley’s grandson
closed the Quaker Lace factory in 1992 it
marked the end of 147 years of the Bromley
family textile business in Philadelphia.
BRILL
STREETCARS
local transportation companies. It built 1,500
streetcars for the Philadelphia Rapid Transit
Company over a two-year period beginning
in 1911, at times delivering over 100 cars per
month on the project. Another local order was
for a fleet of Bullet cars in 1930 that remained
in service on a Philadelphia-area high-speed
line until 1990. Brill acquired other rail car
manufacturers over the years and had a
number of plants throughout the nation in
addition to its Philadelphia headquarters. The
latter facility switched in the 1940s from
making steel-wheeled rail cars to production of
rubber-tired buses, but this business declined
in the 1950s and the plant closed in 1954.
@
Above: Aerial view of the J. G. Brill
Company at Sixty-second Street and
Woodland Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia
in 1927. Founded in 1868, the company
operated here from 1890 to 1954, producing
over 30,000 streetcars and other vehicles.
PHILADELPHIA COMMERCIAL MUSEUM COLLECTION,
PENNSYLVANIA STATE ARCHIVES.
Below: Rail cars being made at
J. G. Brill Company for Philadelphia’s
Market-Frankford elevated train
(the “Frankford El”) in 1927.
PHILADELPHIA COMMERCIAL MUSEUM COLLECTION,
PENNSYLVANIA STATE ARCHIVES.
The J. G. Brill Company was founded by
German immigrant Johann Georg Brill
(1817-1888) and his son George as a horse
car company in 1868. The firm was originally
located at Thirty-first and Chestnut Streets
in West Philadelphia, but as it transitioned
into the manufacture of electric streetcars in
the late nineteenth century it needed more
space and in 1890 the company moved to
a larger facility at Sixty-second Street and
Woodland Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia.
Here, J. G. Brill developed into the world’s
leading street and rail car manufacturer,
employing as many as 3,000 workers who
over the course of sixty-four years produced
over 30,000 vehicles at the plant.
J. G. Brill shipped its rail cars all over
the world but was also a major provider for
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71