In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

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Frankford Arsenal in Bridesburg, 1970s
aerial view. Opened in 1816 on twenty
acres, the Frankford Arsenal eventually
expanded to almost 100 acres and at times
employed as many as 22,000 workers.
It closed in 1977. In this photo, the Arsenal
is framed by Frankford Creek and the
Delaware River on the right, Interstate 95
on the left, and Bridge Street running
from left to lower right in the foreground.
Adjacent to the Arsenal are two chemical
companies: Allied Chemical, whose
smokestacks are visible at lower left, and
Rohm & Haas, located across Frankford
Creek on the right.
HISTORIC AMERICAN ENGINEERING RECORD,
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
NATIONAL COMPANIES
AND FEDERAL FACILITIES
In addition to homegrown firms,
Philadelphia hosted the manufacturing
operations of several national companies
beginning in the early twentieth century.
General Electric had a major presence in
Philadelphia for almost a century, while its
main competitor, Westinghouse, had plants
just outside the city. GE built the Electric
Switchgear Building on North Seventh Street
in Callowhill in 1916 to make electrical
transmission equipment. Then in the early
1920s it built a huge plant at Sixty-eighth and
Elmwood Streets in Southwest Philadelphia.
At the latter facility GE employed up to 7,000
workers who made high-voltage switching
and circuit breaker devices from 1924 until
the plant closed in 2002.
The GE plants were part of an important
new development in manufacturing in the
early twentieth century: the shift from steam
to electric power. Just as the introduction of
the high-powered steam engine had revolutionized
manufacturing in the early nineteenth
century, so too would the availability a century
later of electric power transmitted by wire from
remote power stations. Many Philadelphia
industries converted to electric power in this
period, often using equipment manufactured
in the city.
In the paint business, the DuPont Company
took over the Harrison Brothers factory on
the Schuylkill River in Grays Ferry in 1917
and operated a research and development
plant on the site until closing it in 2009. The
entire Schuylkill River area from University
City south to where the Schuylkill empties
into the Delaware River was home to a
concentration of chemical firms and oil
refineries through the twentieth century.
Some of these industries continue to operate
on the lower Schuylkill to this day.
Philadelphia’s two arsenals, Frankford
and Schuylkill, continued operating at their
original locations into the late twentieth
century, but the Navy Yard had outgrown its
Southwark facility by the end of the Civil War.
In 1868 the federal government purchased
League Island from the City of Philadelphia,
an 800-acre island at the confluence of the
IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBERTY
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