In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

hangar space in 1980 at Northeast Philadelphia
Airport. It upgraded and expanded the facility
over the years and eventually consolidated its
American manufacturing operations there.
AgustaWestland is now one of Philadelphia’s
more high-profile manufacturers, employing
some 600 workers who make several helicopter
models. In 2015 the company began making
a new civilian tiltrotor aircraft similar to
the military’s Osprey, which is made by Boeing
just outside Philadelphia.
Another transportation equipment manufacturer
active in Philadelphia is the South
Korean rail car company Hyundai Rotem,
which opened a facility in South Philadelphia
in 2006, lured by a contract to build some
120 vehicles for SEPTA, the city’s mass transit
system. Hyundai Rotem has also built cars
for other urban transit systems and employs
about 150 workers.
CHEMICALS AND
PHARMACEUTICALS
As it has since the late eighteenth century,
Philadelphia continues to be an important
chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing
center, home to a multi-faceted sector that
now encompasses oil refining, the production
of industrial grade chemicals that are used in
other manufacturing processes, and making
flavors and additives for food processing.
Philadelphia also hosts a wide range of
chemical and pharmaceutical research and
development activities and the corporate headquarters
of several multinational chemical/
pharmaceutical firms. The greater Philadelphia
area’s concentration of major drug companies
and leading research hospitals and universities
makes it one of the premier “Eds and Meds”
regions in the world.
There were about fifty chemical and
pharmaceutical firms within the city itself
in 2015, employing some 2,400 workers in
various manufacturing capacities. These are
in addition to the administrative personnel
of the four major chemical/pharmaceutical
firms whose corporate headquarters are in
Philadelphia but whose manufacturing operations
are elsewhere: GlaxoSmithKline, Dow,
FMC, and Braskem. Of the latter companies,
two have local roots: the British pharmaceutical
firm GlaxoSmithKline, whose U.S. headquarters
is at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, is successor
to the Smith, Kline, & French company, and
Dow Chemical, with offices on Independence
Mall in Old City, is successor to Rohm & Haas.
As noted previously, the American pharmaceutical
industry began in Philadelphia in the
1810s. Several of the city’s nineteenth-century
drug makers grew to be quite large before
merging with other firms and moving out of
the city in the twentieth century. Two of
Philadelphia’s early chemical and pharmaceutical
giants, Powers & Weightman and
Rosengarten, merged in 1905 and the consolidated
company moved to New Jersey after
being acquired by Merck in 1927. Wyeth
Laboratories moved out of Philadelphia to
various suburban locations before consolidating
in nearby Collegeville, Pennsylvania,
in 2003. McNeil Laboratories, which was
started by Robert McNeil as a drug store in
Kensington in 1879 and grew to be a major
drug maker on the strength of its signature
product, Tylenol, also moved to the
Philadelphia suburbs in 1961, after being
acquired by Johnson & Johnson.
MANUFACTURING
TASK FORCE
In January 2013 Philadelphia Mayor
Michael Nutter and City Councilman Bobby
Henon created a new Manufacturing Task
Force. Recognizing that manufacturing had
great potential and was still a vital component
of Philadelphia’s economic life even if it was
@
Leaders of the Philadelphia Manufacturing
Task Force pose with Mayor Michael A.
Nutter and City Councilman Bobby
Henon in front of a helicopter at the
AgustaWestland plant in Northeast
Philadelphia in 2013. Left to right,
William Hunt, CEO, AgustaWestland
Philadelphia Corporation; Daniel K.
Fitzpatrick, President, Citizens Bank of
PA/NJ/DE; Mayor Nutter; Councilman
Henon; and Alan Greenberger, Deputy
Mayor for Economic Development and
Director of Commerce.
PHOTO BY KATE PRIVITERA, CITY OF PHILADELPHIA.
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