In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

Just as the era of large breweries was
ending in Philadelphia, however, the craft
brewing phenomenon was getting underway.
Philadelphia’s first craft brewer, Dock Street
Brewing Company (named in honor of the
city’s earliest breweries along Dock Creek),
was established in 1985. Others followed,
including Sam Adams, Independence, and
Yards Brewing Company, along with a number
of brew pubs that made smaller amounts of
beer that they sold on their premises. By
the closing years of the twentieth century
Philadelphia had become a vibrant center
in the craft beer movement. It remains so in
the 2010s.
There was no equivalent to the craft beer
movement in the sugar industry. With the
closing of Philadelphia’s last two refineries,
Jack Frost (formerly Pennsylvania Sugar
Refining and popularly known as “the Sugar
House”) in Fishtown in 1981 and Amstar
(formerly Franklin Sugar and Domino Sugar)
in South Philadelphia in 1982, sugar refining
in the city came to an end. In a fitting piece of
symbolism, the Sugar House property gave
rise to Sugar House Casino in 2010—what had
once been a major manufacturing site became
home to the epitome of a service industry.
@
Historic and modern aerial views of
the Atlantic oil refinery in Southwest
Philadelphia, both looking north with the
Philadelphia skyline in the background.
Top: View of the refinery, with the Schuylkill
River in the foreground, c. 1926.
AERO SERVICE CORPORATION COLLECTION,
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA.
Above: View of the same refinery, owned by
Philadelphia Energy Solutions, c. 2010s.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PHILADELPHIA ENERGY SOLUTIONS.
and process some fourteen million gallons of
crude oil daily in the mid-2010s, constituting
the largest as well as the oldest continuously
operating oil refining complex on the American
east coast.
BEER AND SUGAR
By the latter part of the twentieth century,
the beer and sugar industries in Philadelphia
had each consolidated down to just two
surviving firms: brewers Ortlieb’s and
Schmidt’s and refiners Jack Frost and Amstar.
All four remained large-scale manufacturers
into the early 1980s but were gone by the
end of the decade. Ortlieb’s went out of
business when it was purchased by rival
Schmidt’s in 1981. When Schmidt’s itself
closed in 1987 it marked the first time in
over three hundred years that Philadelphia
did not have a major operating brewery.
OTHER MAJOR
FOOD PROCESSORS
If large-scale food processing in Philadelphia
ended in the sugar and beer industries in the
1980s, it continued in the city’s other food
sectors, anchored by several longtime local
companies making snack cakes, lunch meats,
and rolls. Tasty Baking Company was founded
in 1914 by two new arrivals to Philadelphia,
baker Philip Baur and egg salesman Herbert
Morris, who had the novel idea of selling
individually wrapped, fresh-baked snack
cakes. They originally set up shop in
Germantown, but early success led to the
opening of a large plant in 1922 on Hunting
Park Avenue in Nicetown, down the street
from the Budd Company. Known to locals by
the name of its signature product, Tastykake,
the company’s baking facilities ran twentyfour
hours a day, six days a week, producing
snack cakes and pies that made their way
IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBERTY
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