Elfreth’s Alley, ca. 1932, from the Sunday Evening Bulletin. Accessed via Temple University’s Special Collections Research Center, George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Collection. ID: P709154
We often focus on the years when Elfreth's Alley was a center of artisan production, but this week we turn to the industrial age, which did just as much to shape the street. We learn about a few Alley residents who were part of the Great Migration, Black Southerners who came to Philadelphia and other Northern cities for work.
Archives for Black Lives: Anti-Racist Description Resources: https://archivesforblacklives.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/ardr_final.pdf
Shells and pearl buttons excavated by the National Park Service ca. the 1970s from the site of a former pearl button factory on S. 3rd St. Image via the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum.
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS SOURCES
List of Sources
Cowie, Jefferson. Capital moves: RCA's seventy-year quest for cheap labor. 2019.
Du Bois, W. E. B., and Isabel Eaton. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: Published for the University, 1899.
“Explore,” National Pearl Button Museum, Muscatine, IA
“Goin’ North.” West Chester University. See link for full list of contributors.
“Historical Overview.” The Great Migration: A City Transformed.
“Inmate Handbook,” Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
Larocco, Christina, “Garment Work and Workers,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
Licht, Walter, “Workshop of the World,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
Maule, Bradley, “The Long Death And Rebirth Of The National,” Hidden City.
“Online Catalog,” Pennsylvania Department of Corrections
Pearl Buttons : Hearings before a Special Subcommittee of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives. June 23 and 24, 1919.
“Prison Labor,” Investigate, American Friends Service Committee
Scranton, Philip B. “Philadelphia's Industrial History: Context and Overview” Workshop of the World - Philadelphia
United States Congress House Committee on Ways and Means, Tariff Hearings Before the Committee ...: Sixtieth Congress 1908-1909. Schedule A-N. (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909).
Valverde, Miriam. “Instagram Post,” PolitiFact
Wolf, Jean. “Statement of Significance: 128 Elfreth’s Alley.”
Wolfinger, James. “African American Migration” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
TRANSCRIPT
TED MAUST: Nettie McCrae clocked out of her job at a clothing manufacturer and walked quickly through the alleyways of Philadelphia at dusk. On the 1930 United States census, McCrae was one of only 38 Black residents in a census district that stretched from 7th St to the Delaware River between Race St. and Chestnut St. There must have been people on these streets who wished she would move down to the 7th ward, the center of Black life in Philadelphia. McCrae turned down Elfreth’s Alley, now officially called Cherry Street, with a sense of relief; her neighbors might not appreciate her presence, but at least they would recognize that she lived here. She opened the door to #135 and slipped inside. She found her 1-year old son, Robert, being entertained by Goldie Morton, 9 years old. The house was home to the McCraes, Goldie and her parents Robert and Gladys Morton, and Charles and Elinore Wilson, who had been married a year. These seven were the only Black residents of Elfreth’s Alley. Like Nettie McCrae, Robert Morton and Charles Wilson worked in a nearby factory, though they made shovels rather than garments. Gone were the days of artisans on Elfreth’s Alley; by the early 20th century, this little street was part of the industrial landscape that earned Philadelphia the nickname “Workshop of the World.”
ENYA XIANG: Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia. We tell the stories of people who lived and/or worked on this street, which has been home to everyday Philadelphians for three centuries. While we start in this neighborhood, we will explore connections that take us across the city and around the globe.
In Episode 1 of this season, we introduced you to artisan dressmakers, making fabulous clothing designed for individual clients. As we explore industrial methods of production in this episode we want you to keep the questions we posed in Episode one in your mind:
TED MAUST (from Episode 1): “Think about the last article of clothing you purchased? How expensive was it to buy? What is it made of? Who made it and where?”
ENYA XIANG: Today on The Alley Cast, we look at the people who made Philadelphia a workshop for the world, and the ways in which industrialists changed the world around Elfreth’s Alley.
Episode 5: An Industrial Neighborhood
TED MAUST: I want to stop here and talk about race and language for a moment. In the last episode we started talking about the Black residents of Elfreth’s Alley, and over the next few episodes, we will be learning about Nettie McCrae and her household even as we learn about the big changes happening in Philadelphia as a whole. Throughout the episode, we will be using the term “Black” to refer to people of African descent. We use the term "Black" over the term "African American," to include individuals who were not U.S. residents. This decision is based on the recommendation of The Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia, specifically from their Anti-Racist Description Working Group Resources from 2019, which we will link to in our show notes. However, there are a few cases in this episode where I will quote from Black authors who use terms that may have once been acceptable, but which are outdated today, such as "negro" or "colored." Language around race has always been political, and has often been determined by the racial groups in power. Terms like these carry with them a legacy of racial injustice and violence. I want to be intentional in my explanation for when and why I use these terms; outside of the context of primary sources, the term "Black" is the appropriate and respectful term I will use.
When the homes and working buildings on Elfreth’s Alley were first built, many of the residents, perhaps most of them, were artisans. There were the dressmakers in what is now house #126, of course, as well as tailors, seamstresses and hatters, but there were also craftspeople making things out of wood--turners, coopers, cabinet makers, and chairmakers--and metal workers--blacksmiths, pewterers and tinsmiths. In the early 19th century, the house now known as #135 was home to a French immigrant named John Angue who was a cordial distiller. Washington Sailor at #108 advertised his clock and watchmaking business in local newspapers. Several sailmakers were kept in business by the port, just a block away.
While lots of this production was performed inside the homes along the street, there were also working buildings sprinkled among the homes--there was a kiln and pottery where house #121 now stands and a carpentry shop where house #127 is today.
By the early 19th century, these buildings were replaced by homes, but craft production continued on the Alley into the 1860s.
In house #126, where the dressmakers had lived, two successive German immigrant families--the Kolbs and the Schoendiensts--made shoes during the mid- and late 19th century.
The Kolbs and the Shoendiensts may have been making custom shoes for sale from the front room of #126 or they may have been part of what is known as “cottage industry,” where craftspeople fill orders for other retailers to sell.
The scale of production for these shoemakers likely involved the whole family. The Kolbs had 8 children, and it is reasonable to expect that the older children performed tasks in the shoemaking business alongside their parents and two apprentices who lived in the house.
By the time the Kolb children were adults, the city had dramatically changed.
Philadelphia is a city that has earned its share of nicknames--it’s “the city of brotherly love,” “the city of homes,” "The Quaker City". Around 1900, the city began to be known as the “workshop of the world.”
The name was well earned; for nearly a century, Philadelphia boasted an extremely diverse and prolific array of manufacturing. The US census bureau collected statistics on around three hundred categories of industrial activity; companies in Philadelphia could be found in 90 percent of those categories. In contrast to some other American cities which were home to a handful of mega-manufacturers, Philadelphia was home to numerous small- to medium-size outfits, with an emphasis on skilled labor and custom work.
The small scale did not necessarily mean light industry; many houses in the area right around Elfreth’s Alley were refitted for production of solvents as well as machined and forged products. In fact #128 Elfreth’s Alley was replaced with a stove factory in 1868. The building occupied the same lot as the typical Elfreth’s Alley home, but included a structural vault in the basement, likely to support a hefty forge or other machinery.
Though many of these industrial spaces were dominated by men; women were intimately involved in the work of the industrial city.
At 247 North 3rd street, just about a block away from Elfreth’s Alley, stood the American Manufacturing Pearl Company-- for a time the second-largest pearl button manufacturer in the nation-- which over at least 60 years provided employment to various residents of Elfreth’s Alley. So-called “pearl” buttons were manufactured out of iridescent shells, imported from Southeast Asia and Australia. In 1880, 18-year-old William Dannehy, resident of #122 Elfreth’s Alley worked there as a pearl cutter, and his wife Ellen Dannehy did too, as a pearl driller. It is likely that William cut circles out of the shells, called “blanks,” and brought them home for Ellen to drill holes in, making them finished buttons. In this way, industrial work, like cottage industry, extended into the home.
Those buttons were bound to grace the newest fashions of the age: ready to wear clothing
Even through the American Civil War, much of Philadelphia’s clothing manufacturing was decentralized: companies would meet demand, including United States army contracts, by hiring subcontractors. In this way the industry was very flexible to consumer demand, and crucially, subcontractors seem to have been able to find regular work despite the informal nature of the arrangement.
As Mary Smith, Sarah Melton, and Elizabeth Carr had produced custom gowns for Philadelphia’s upper classes in the 18th century, residents of Elfreth’s Alley in 1860 remained invested in the industry; that year’s census lists 5 tailors and 3 seamstresses living on the Alley.
By the end of the war, however, the garment industry had built up to huge capacity producing uniforms, and entrepreneurs capitalized by opening department stores--such as Wanamaker’s in 1876--which sold “ready-to-wear” clothing.
To meet this demand, much of the garment industry had been moved to factories. By 1930, Nettie McCrae may have done some finishing work within her home on Elfreth’s Alley, but she listed her occupation on the U.S. Census records as “Operator,” suggesting she used a sewing machine or perhaps a cutting machine in a factory context.
It is also worth noting that even women not performing industrial work themselves were necessary for the work of the industrial city, providing a variety of services-- preparing food, washing laundry, maintaining living quarters, and making and repairing clothing--whether within the family system as mothers, sisters, and daughters, or for pay, as boarding house operators, launderesses, maids, cooks, and seamstresses. In #135, both Gladys Morton and Elinore Wilson stayed at home, taking care of the children, maintaining the house, and supporting the members of the household who worked in the factories.
Because of the decentralized nature of manufacturing in Philadelphia, labor organizing lagged behind other industrial cities. The garment industry is a prime example. While there had been some professional societies--such as the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers of Philadelphia--as early as the 18th century, major union activity in the garment industry came to Philadelphia in the last decades of the 19th century. One important union for garment workers in the city was The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) which enjoyed strong support in South Philadelphia’s communities of European immigrants, many of them Jewish.
In 1909, the ILGWU went on strike in New York and Philadelphia, and won concessions such as a 54-hour work week.
It was during strikes like the one in 1909 and another in 1921 when Black women first entered the garment factories, as strikebreakers. Factory managers often chose to hire Black workers and recent immigrants to work during strikes. Not only would managers be able to pay these strike breakers lower wages and make them work longer hours, this tactic was an effective barrier to class solidarity. By playing on and exacerbating existing racial and religious intolerance, factories were able to weaken union organizing efforts.
Perhaps as a response to these tactics, the ILGWU sought to include more Black workers in the union and reported on the exploitation of Black workers as an act of solidarity, according to a 1926 article in the Philadelphia Tribune, Philadelphia’s leading Black newspaper:
“Mrs. Emma Carter Thompson,” the article reads, “has been engaged by Local No. 50 to investigate the shops in which colored workers are employed, and to organize the colored workers in order to improve collectively their working conditions. Mrs. Thompson’s investigations have shown that the non-union, and particularly the colored workers are being exploited. Some of the shops are dirty and unsanitary […] Prices for work are ridiculously low. Only the best and fastest workers can make as much as $18.00 per week [...] in some cases the prices average less than one-half compared with Union shops.”
The author ended the article with a call to action, writing that it was important for Black women to quote “think about these facts and to make an effort to enroll in the Union. It is through Organized means that they can attain better working conditions.” end quote
We don't know how Nettie McCrae got her job at the factory. Perhaps she already had work prior to the ILGWU strikes. Perhaps she was brought in as a strikebreaker. Maybe she joined the union. Surely she would have faced more barriers to finding work than her white counterparts and was more likely to work for exploitative wages.
By 1926, Black workers made up an increasing share of the workforce. Nettie McCrae was not native to Philadelphia --she had moved to the city from Virginia-- and she was far from the only one.
In 1916, the Pennsylvania Railroad, finding it difficult to find workers, offered Black Southerners free transport to come work for them. This offer corresponded with a boll weevil infestation of cotton fields in the south, making it even more attractive. By the time the program ended in 1917, it had brought 13,000 Black men and women to Pennsylvania.
Other industries besides the railroads were also looking for workers--in some cases, as mentioned previously, to replace striking union workers--and began offering more jobs to Black workers. This demand, in Philadelphia and other Northern cities, set off what came to be known as the Great Migration. It would bring 1.6 million Black Americans northward by the end of the 1930s. The Black population of Philadelphia doubled between 1900 and 1920, when it was a little over 134,000. By 1930, Black Philadelphians numbered well over 219,000.
When Nettie McCrae moved to Philadelphia she would have been eager to connect with other Black Southerners to regain a semblance of the community she had lost upon moving to a new and unknown city. Her absent husband--she was listed as “married” on the census--was also from Virginia and perhaps they moved North together. Even with a partner, arriving in Philadelphia must have been an isolating experience. For this reason, many of those migrating North did so with family, or followed family who had migrated earlier. Family connections often offered a place to stay upon arrival in the city as well as an existing social network and possible job opportunities.
Next to family, church was often the most important resource for newly arrived Black southerners, offering spiritual comfort, a space for social mingling, and a center of community and identity. The most prominent Black church in Philadelphia was--and still is--Mother Bethel AME Church at 6th and Lombard Sts. Mother Bethel was the founding congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal church in 1794, and formed an anchor for the Black community in the 7th ward.
It was in this ward, which had been the subject of W.E.B DuBois’ 1896 sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro, where some new arrivals found a home, while others settled in the growing Black neighborhoods in West Philadelphia and North Phialdelphia.
Black social networks were built by kinship ties and church community, but social clubs also emerged based on state of origin in order to connect Black residents with others from their state. It is possible that Nettie McCrae may have met her husband at a social club for Black Virginians.
In addition to church and social clubs, Nettie also found community with the families that she lived with on Elfreth's Alley. Robert Morton, listed as the head of the household at #135, was almost certainly part of the Great Migration; he had been born in North Carolina around 1890. Gladys was born in Pennsylvania, as were her parents. The Mortons had married around 1920, possibly within just a few years of Robert’s Northward journey.
Why did the Mortons, Wilsons, and McCraes live on Elfreth’s Alley rather than in one of the predominantly Black neighborhoods? It is possible that Robert and Charles worked at a shovel factory less than two blocks away from Elfreth’s Alley. Nettie McCrae’s work was probably close by as well. But living in a predominantly white neighborhood probably had its downsides. W.E.B. DuBois described the isolation of Black Philadelphians outside of the 7th ward like this:
“The Negro who ventures away from the mass of his people and their organized life, finds himself alone, shunned and taunted, stared at and made uncomfortable; he can make few new friends, for his neighbors however well-disposed would shrink to add a Negro to their list of acquaintances. Thus he remains far from friends and the concentred social life of the church, and feels in all its bitterness what it means to be a social outcast.”
Besides the 1930 census, we have yet to find a concrete record of the lives of the Mortons, Wilsons, and McCraes. We do have one tantalizing clue: a 1932 photograph from the Sunday Evening Bulletin. The photo is taken from the front of #139 Elfreth’s Alley and shows most of the street.
A man in a hat leans in a doorway; another sits on a stoop. Two small children walk toward the camera on the sidewalk. A “For sale” sign hangs off of one of the buildings. And right across the street sitting on the stoop of #136, is a Black woman on Elfreth’s Alley.
Could it be Gladys, Elinore, or Nettie? We don’t know. She looks away from the camera, her hair wrapped in a scarf. It is possible she is resident of a nearby building on 2nd St., perhaps.
We are left wondering about this woman’s identity and daily reality for the residents of this street. Photos and maps can, however, offer us a sense of the world through which they moved.
The 1932 photo also shows the relatively modern facade of #128 flanked by two 18th-century homes.
By 1930, the old stove factory at #128 had become part of a larger factory. The rear of the building was connected--at a 90-degree angle-- to the rear of another small factory building which fronted on 2nd Street. In 1923 it had passed into the hands of Nathan Fow Manufacturing, which was probably still making stoves, or something similar. Sometime thereafter, the factory was swallowed into the National Products Company, a manufacturer of food service equipment, which combined many smaller factories into one complex by the mid-20th century.
This consolidation of small factories and warehouses into larger complexes can be seen on fire insurance maps from the late 19th and early 20th century. Flipping through these maps year by year, you see Elfreth’s Alley become an island of residential buildings in a sea of warehouses and factories. Several factories--the National Products Company and the George Wetherill Paint Company--directly butted up against the back gardens of Elfreth’s Alley homes.
Philadelphia’s status as Workshop of the World didn’t last forever. Growing power of labor organizations and increasing competition from other markets led manufacturing in Philadelphia to pull up stakes and move elsewhere..
Where did this manufacturing go? Initially, it moved within the United States to places where labor was cheap and larger-scale factories were more economical. The pearl button industry in Philadelphia, which had employed so many residents of the Alley, felt increasing competition not only from Japanese producers, who were producing much cheaper buttons by 1919 but also from Iowa, where robust fresh-water shell harvesting drove midwestern pearl button production.
Over the last century manufacturing has sought out increasingly lower and lower costs, often at the expense of worker safety and quality of life as well as product quality. As late as the 1940 census, Joseph Kalin, living at #111 Elfreth’s Alley was working as a button cutter at the rate of $16 a week--in 2020 dollars, under $7 an hour. Soon plastic buttons would replace pearl buttons, and workers elsewhere would replace Kalin.
Seeking lower costs also prompted other industries like garment manufacturing, to move around the world to regions experiencing poverty, and which have fewer legal protections for both workers and the environment. For the garment industry in Philadelphia, this process of decline began in the 1930s.
Throughout the rest of the 20th century, manufacturing of all sorts have followed these patterns, leaving in their wake unemployed or exploited workers, empty factories and warehouses, and, in many cases, a legacy of environmental pollution.
By the mid 20th century, the neighborhood surrounding Elfreth’s Alley bore the marks of this rise and fall of industry. A few factories limped along in their twilight years, scaling down and specializing to survive. Warehouses sat empty for the most part. The residential housing that remained had changed too, in ways which we will discuss in episode 6. Nettie McCrae and the members of her household moved off the Alley by 1940, maybe in part because they could no longer find work in the neighborhood.
Garment manufacturing, of course, has not stopped. We may think of sewing or weaving as historical things; things that aren’t done anymore except by the artisan or the hobbyist. The truth is that these kinds of production still happen, just not in the United States.
So where was your clothing made?
The clothing I’m wearing right now was manufactured in Haiti, China, and India. My clothes passed through many hands both outside and inside of the United States--printing logos on the fabric, packaging the items, shipping them to warehouses and stores, or directly to me.
However, not all manufacturing has left the United States, or even the greater Philadelphia area.
The Caledonia Dye Works in the Kensington neighborhood is an example of the kind of small-scale production that made Philadelphia a manufacturing powerhouse a hundred and fifty years ago and it is still in operation today.
In Skippack township, just 30 miles outside Philadelphia, there is another complex which manufactures a variety of products including apparel, toiletries, and furniture--it is the State Correctional Institution -- Phoenix, a state prison which incarcerates nearly 4,000 individuals.
Prison labor is required of all incarcerated people, with wages ranging from an hourly rate of 19 cents to 52 cents based on the skill and experience of the worker. Nationally, 4% of incarcerated people work in manufacturing.
The products created at SCI Phoenix and other Pennsylvania prisons are sold to government agencies and government contractors under the Big House Industries brand. Nationally, some major corporations, including Walmart, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, have used products made by prison industries in the past, but most have stopped the policy when media outlets have reported on it.
In some cases, prison manufacturing has been seen as a way to “reshore” manufacturing--that is, to manufacture goods that might otherwise be imported from outside of the country. But critics of prison labor point out that Black and Latino Americans are disproportionately incarcerated and that their labor is a kind of modern American slavery.
By the middle of the 20th century, the Delaware River waterfront continued to be a place where Philadelphians lived and worked, but it was also a place that middle-class and wealthy white people began to look at from afar and get ideas. Ideas about how to “save” the neighborhood, and how to save Philadelphia in the process. These would-be saviours would not ask Nettie McCrae what kind of city she wanted to live in. To the extent that the city planners, philanthropists, and historic preservationists thought of someone like Nettie McCrae--a young Black mother with an absent husband--at all, they likely thought of her with pity, if not contempt. Yet learning about the lives of Nettie McCrae and the Mortons and the Wilsons gives us an essential frame of reference for the industrial era in Philadelphia--a time in which the city’s built environment and its racial makeup both radically changed. The residents of #135 will also give us needed perspective on the events that would follow.
In the next episode we will talk about housing, so-called urban “decay,” and elite philanthropy.
ENYA XIANG:
History is a group effort! This episode was researched, written, and narrated by Ted Maust, with research and editorial assistance from Isabel Steven and Joe Makuc. Special thanks to Alanna Shaffer for contributing significant research on the pearl button industry in Philadelphia.
This episode drew heavily on the work of the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, especially entries by Christina Larocco, Walter Licht, and James Wolfinger, as well as the Goin’ North Project, assembled by West Chester University students in 2014 and 2016 under the guidance of Charles Hardy and Janneken Smucker.
TED MAUST: I’d like to personally thank Holly Genovese and Joana Arruda, as well as the staff of Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, past and present, for educating me about inmate labor and prison industries.
Thanks to Enya Xiang, who narrated the front and back matter for this episode.
ENYA XIANG:
See the episode page at elfrethsalley.org/podcast for a transcript and a complete list of sources.Our theme music is the song “Open Flames” by Blue Dot Sessions from the album Aeronaut, used under Creative Commons license.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! Be sure to join us next week for Episode 6.
Thank you for supporting the Elfreth’s Alley Museum by listening to this podcast! If you are able to make a financial gift, you can do so at elfrethsalley.org/donate
Thank you and take care!