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Original Document
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Original Document
Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, “Philadelphia, Past Achievements, Present Greatness, and Future Possibilities,” 1924.

THE PORT AND ITS TRADE
 
THE days of the sailing ships and the pirates have passed, but there is just as much romance in the present day water-front of Philadelphia as ever existed in the past.
 
An available water-front of fifty miles on both sides of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers attracts the ships of the whole world to the Port of Philadelphia. Flags of all nations, the sailors of all lands, and the products of every country and clime of the world daily ride majestically upon the broad bosom of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. Vessels from all lands deposit their precious cargoes on the modern piers that Philadelphia has erected to replace the old docks and wharves of the sailing ship days.
 
Philadelphia is the second port of the United States, with its possibilities unlimited for its capabilities of absorption of the traffic of the ocean have not yet begun to be reached.  Men of vision see Philadelphia returning to the proud place it held in the days of the founding of the Republic as the great American port.
 
Above all other ports Philadelphia holds an advantage of incalculable value to shippers. A belt line encircling the city, with railroad trackage on the piers, making direct physical connection between the ship and the car possible, eliminating that bane of modern port life, the lighterage of cargo, gives Philadelphia a tremendous advantage over other ports.
 
It is a fresh-water port, an advantage that all men of the sea can understand. The channel is thirty-five feet in depth to the sea, with an ultimate forty-foot channel in the near future.
 
Briefly summed up, the advantages accruing to this port consist of the lack of congestion with direct handling from ship to car, absence of lighterage, lower rates, economy of time and money and freedom from port charges by city or state.
 
More than two hundred and sixty-seven docks of all kinds dot the water-front, more than one hundred ocean-going steamers and scores of coastwise and river craft can be handled at one time.
 
Extensive marine terminals of three great trunk line railroads, the Pennsylvania, the Reading Company and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, are a part of the port facilities. The city has built ten modern, especially designed, and mechanically equipped piers, with two in course of construction. In addition there are more than a dozen coal piers, and a large group of ore, lumber and grain piers, the latter so large and modern that Philadelphia has become the center for flour, lumber and ore shipments, as well as the coal port, which honor it always has held as the outlet of the great fuel fields.
 
More than a half hundred of the leading ports of the world are now reached through service from the Port of Philadelphia, while intercoastal and coastwise service is growing with leaps and bounds.
 
Mariners sensed the advantage back in the early Jays of the settlement of this country. As far back as 1609, Henry Hudson, looking for the Northwest Passage, came up the Delaware, and on his heels came the hardy seamen of Sweden, Holland and England, who settled various posts along the Delaware until William Penn came and located at the ideal spot, at the junction of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, where the city would have the broad sweep of two rivers to give it ingress and egress to the world.
 
As the great gateway to America it developed rapidly, so that at the time of the Revolution, Philadelphia not only was the leading city of the new country, but was the greatest Port. It played a vital part in the Revolution and the early days of the Republic and during the days of Stephen Girard in the early part of the nineteenth century, it still retained its premiership.
 
The port became the center of American shipbuilding and as the city grew as America's greatest industrial city, and the country back of it became the source of the greatest supply of raw and manufactured materials, Philadelphia continued to expand as a logical gateway to the world.
 
INDUSTRIAL SIGNIFICANCE
 
PHILADELPHIA comes rightfully by its title of "The 'World's Greatest Workshop" because it produces a greater number of vitally essential articles than any other municipality, and fashions more of the world's necessities.
 
Figures sometimes are tiresome, but often impressive. When it is understood that with one-sixtieth of the country's population this city produces more than one-twenty-fifth of all "American made goods," it is easy to visualize the importance of Philadelphia's manufacturing.
 
Many things have contributed to Philadelphia's greatness in the industrial field. Accessibility to raw materials, both of this and other nations, physical facilities for spread of industries, unusual type of labor, and attention upon the part of generations of industrial leaders and employees to the industrial development of the city, have made Philadelphia-made goods standard the world over.
 
Virtually all cities do some sort of manufacturing for local or neighborhood needs. But when the whole world demands and uses the products of one city, as in the case of Philadelphia, it may safely be said that the city had attained supremacy in that field.
 
Philadelphia is set down within a ring of nature's bountiful gifts. Coal, steel and cement, for instance, are produced in the greatest quantities in the world right at the door of Philadelphia.  Naturally, then, Philadelphia's establishments have fashioned these for generations to such good effect that it leads the world in the production of steel ships, locomotives, street cars, various lines of hardware, storage batteries and other essentials, and that it should play the prime part in the great construction work constantly going forward in this country,
 
Volumes could be written about Philadelphia's production. But only a few figures are needed to show its immensity. More diversity of products is shown in Philadelphia than in any other city, so that it is proper to say that all of Philadelphia's eggs are not in one basket, nor is the city directly affected by seasonal conditions.
 
Year by year the city produces about two billion dollars worth of manufactured products. Three-fifths of all of the street cars in the country are made here, a locomotive an hour for thirty-one hours is a record achieved by one plant. In the great shipyards lining the Delaware, America's merchant ships, naval ships, and vessels for other countries' marine have been constructed. For a period, one yard alone, that at Hog Island, produced an 8800 ton steel ship every forty-eight hours.
 
Some of the world's essentials are turned out here in stunning quantities. In a single year this city has produced 45,000,000 yards of carpet, 6,669,600 hats, 180,000,000 yards of cotton piece goods, 400,000,000 cigars, 250,000,000 pairs of hosiery, sixty per cent of the world's glazed kid, 10,000,000 saws, 365,000,000 pounds of cotton and cotton waste, and 83,862,700 false teeth.
 
To draw upon statistics a bit farther, it is worthy of note that Philadelphia holds first place in this country in production of textiles, locomotives, steel ships, street cars, leather, storage batteries, cigars, dental instruments, talking machines, carpets, bone buttons, hosiery, saws and felt hats.
 
It occupies second place in production of worsted goods, sugar and molasses, fertilizers, foundry casting, petroleum products, chemicals, druggists' preparations and machine-shop products.
 
To make Philadelphia the "world's greatest workshop" there had to be in addition to access to raw materials, ample capital, and railroad and port facilities, a sufficient supply of labor and that of the very finest type.
 
That this is so in Philadelphia is indicated by the fact that Philadelphia has a higher percentage of skilled workmen than any other city, an independent, thinking type of employee, forty percent of whom own their own homes, and the majority of the remainder live in individual houses at low rental, that the percentage of foreigners is lower than in any large city, and that all living conditions are superior.
 
That the Philadelphia workman has pride in his work, and contentment with his surroundings also is shown by the fact that there has not been a real strike in Philadelphia in nearly two years.
 
The manifest assets that Philadelphia possesses, and which are set down in this book, are known to the employees of the great industries, and appreciated by them, hence their record for production, dependability and initiative.
 
The facilities for industry are incomparable.  One might picture Philadelphia, because it is a great workshop, as a gloomy, smoky city, a city of stacks and grime. But such is not the case. It has no peer from the standpoint of beauty of layout, of buildings, streets, parks and home sections.
 
But the city has been so wisely laid out, and so adapted to its work by nature, that the great, humming industries are spread out in sections along the river courses in such fashion that they do not encroach upon the residential sections, yet with the homes of workers in close enough proximity to industries to make the transportation problem easy.
 
The manner in which the railroads bisect the city, and the high ridge of ground that follows the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers for the whole length of the city, has spread the industries to good advantage, keeping them clustered in distinctive groups, and making it possible to parallel them with home sections.
 
Also they are grouped in such fashion that labor of like kind gathered in one community. The great textile section, almost a city in itself, occupies the Northeastern part of the city. The leather industry also lies in that direction. The great metals concerns form a ring about the Northern and Western rims of the city.
 
Any mention of Philadelphia's industry or port, without the inclusion of one of the most important elements of the city that is possessed of significance in each subdivision, would be incomplete. This is the League Island Navy Yard, located in the extreme Southern end of the city at the junction of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers.
 
This Navy Yard, with an area of nearly one thousand acres, greater than the combined dock and yards of most of the big powers of the world, is the most important station of the United States Government. Also it is the world's largest station and usually 7,000 sailors and a regiment of marines are on duty there.
 
An aircraft factory, which, when running at capacity, employs 3600 operatives, a fitting-out pier 1000 feet long; the largest crane in the world, higher than an eighteen-story building and capable of lifting a fourteen-inch turret with its guns in place out of a battleship and lifting it higher than Brooklyn Bridge; a drydock 1030 feet long, 116 feet wide and 43 1/2 feet deep, equal in size to any locks in the Panama Canal; are some of the outstanding points about League Island.
 
The Frankford Arsenal and the great Quartermaster's Depot of the United States Government employing several thousand workers, are vitally important phases of the city's industrial life and of the national welfare.

Credit: “Philadelphia, Past Achievements, Present Greatness, and Future Possibilities” (Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, 1924), 19-31. 
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