In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

MILK AND ICE CREAM
Like any major city, Philadelphia had a
number of dairies that processed and sold
milk to local residents. The two best-known
were Abbotts and Harbisons, both of which
operated for over 100 years and were bought
out by larger companies in the latter part
of the twentieth century. Abbotts was in business
from 1876 to 1984 in several locations
before it consolidated operations in South
Philadelphia in 1964. Harbison’s was in
business from 1865 to the mid-1960s, most
of that time in East Kensington. The rusting
Harbisons milk bottle atop the company’s
former Kensington factory still looms large
over the neighborhood, a familiar sight to
the thousands of daily riders on the Frankford
El that runs close by the site. Like the
Sparks Shot Tower in South Philadelphia, the
Harbisons milk bottle serves as a prominent
physical relic of an important period in
Philadelphia manufacturing history.
Philadelphia was known in particular for
its ice cream makers. Breyer’s started with
William Breyer making ice cream in 1866 and
later opening a store in Kensington in 1882.
After several moves the company built a large
plant in 1924 at Forty-third and Woodland
Avenue in West Philadelphia, where it employed
some 500 workers by the early 1930s. Breyer’s
changed hands several times, eventually being
acquired by food giant Unilever, which closed
the Philadelphia plant in 1995.
Bassett Ice Cream, another Philadelphia
favorite, has been making ice cream for over
150 years and is still serving customers at
its nineteenth-century counter in the city’s
bustling Reading Terminal Market. Bassett is
considered America’s oldest ice cream company.
Lewis Bassett began making ice cream at
his Salem, New Jersey, farm in 1861. When
Reading Terminal Market opened in downtown
Philadelphia in 1892 Bassett moved
production to the basement of the building
and opened a retail store in the market above.
The company moved its production facilities
out of Reading Terminal to the Fairmount
neighborhood in 1973 and then out of
Philadelphia to Johnstown, Pennsylvania,
in the 1980s, but it remains a Philadelphia
family-run firm through five generations.
RADIOS
Philadelphia had two major radio manufacturers
in the early twentieth century: Atwater
Kent and Philco. (A third, RCA, had a plant
just across the river in Camden, New Jersey.)
Both benefited from radio’s enormous rise in
popularity in the 1920s. Atwater Kent (1873-
1949) began making small electrical devices as
a young man in the 1890s. He founded a company
in Philadelphia in 1902 to make electrical
components for automobiles and in the early
1920s began focusing on high-end radios. In
1923 he built a large plant at Abbottsford and
@
Above: Spreckles’ Sugar Refinery on the
Delaware River at Reed Street in South
Philadelphia. Spreckles was one of several
large refineries that operated along the
river in Philadelphia in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
INDEPENDENCE SEAPORT MUSEUM, PHILADELPHIA.
Bottom, left: The former Harbison Dairy
plant in Kensington, with the iconic milk
bottle-shaped water tower that has been a
neighborhood landmark since its installation
in the 1910s.
PHOTO BY TIM MCCUSKER, 2015.
Bottom, right: The Bassett Ice Cream
counter in Reading Terminal Market, where
the company has sold ice cream since 1893.
For many years, Bassett made its ice cream
in the basement of the building.
PHOTO BY JARED KOFSKY/PLACENJ.COM, 2011,
WIKIPEDIA COMMONS.
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