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A couple of people mentioned the Pennsylvania RR as part of Philadelphia's history, which is true of course. The railroad headquarters were in Philadelphia.
However, the Pennsylvania railroad once went westward to St Louis and Chicago, eastward to New York, Long Island and the Jersey Shore, southward to Washington DC and the Delmarva peninsula, and northward to Buffalo, Rochester and northern Michigan. So the history of the Pennsylvania RR is not just Philadelphia's but a whole range of other cities and towns.
Philadelphia also had the Reading RR and also the Baltimore and Ohio, one of the country's oldest railroads. Boston had the Boston & Maine, the New York, New Haven & Hartford and even a branch of the New York Central.
A couple of people mentioned the Pennsylvania RR as part of Philadelphia's history, which is true of course. The railroad headquarters were in Philadelphia.
However, the Pennsylvania railroad once went westward to St Louis and Chicago, eastward to New York, Long Island and the Jersey Shore, southward to Washington DC and the Delmarva peninsula, and northward to Buffalo, Rochester and northern Michigan. So the history of the Pennsylvania RR is not just Philadelphia's but a whole range of other cities and towns.
Philadelphia also had the Reading RR and also the Baltimore and Ohio, one of the country's oldest railroads. Boston had the Boston & Maine, the New York, New Haven & Hartford and even a branch of the New York Central.
Yeah no doubt. As you said it was expansive by the end. However, that's like saying NYC isn't important because JPMorgan has different office locations spread across the nation even though they are headquartered on Park Ave in Manhattan. Usually we state the importance of something by where the money changes hands. Maybe we shouldn't view things that way, but we definitely do it on this site. Money rules the world.
Beyond the Railroad though, Philadelphia's industrial history runs deeper than that.
Quote:
From roughly 1880 through the 1920s, Philadelphia's industrial districts supported an array of mills and plants whose diversity has scarcely been matched anywhere in the history of manufacturing. When the U. S. Census charted some three hundred categories of industrial activity, surveys of Philadelphia showed firms active in nearly ninety percent of them. No city had a wider range of textile products, for example, as Kensington, Germantown, Frankford and Manayunk churned forth laces, socks, carpets, blankets, rope and cordage, men's suitings and women's dress goods, silk stockings, upholstery, tapestries, braids, bindings, ribbons, coverlets, knit fabric and sweaters, surgical fabrics, military cloths and trimmings, draperies, and yarns of every description. At the turn of the century, roughly seven hundred separate companies operated in textiles alone, employing some sixty thousand people. Yet this immense workforce amounted to only one quarter of the city's industrial workers. Unlike New England centers that often focused on a single sector (for Massachusetts, textiles in Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River and New Bedford, paper in Holyoke, shoes in Lynn), Philadelphia could and did do nearly everything across the spectrum of transforming materials into products.
Philadelphia was so diverse that it actually ended up being a bad thing when the economy began to change. The city didn't have a Carnegie or a Rockefeller to lean on to when the times got tough.
By the way, I absolutely have nothing against new England or Boston. The reason I used such strong language in a couple of my posts was because people on here tend to completely write off Philly. Boston is world class! Philly is trash! Well in my opinion, in 2015, the best 48 miles of Philadelphia can stand up to Boston. We have the history, the economy, the universities, the landscape, transportation, etc. It is here and more people need to come and see with their own eyes.
Last edited by thedirtypirate; 04-06-2015 at 08:47 AM..
Yeah no doubt. As you said it was expansive by the end. However, that's like saying NYC isn't important because JPMorgan has different office locations spread across the nation even though they are headquartered on Park Ave in Manhattan. Usually we state the importance of something by where the money changes hands. Maybe we shouldn't view things that way, but we definitely do it on this site. Money rules the world.
Beyond the Railroad though, Philadelphia's industrial history runs deeper than that.
Philadelphia was so diverse that it actually ended up being a bad thing when the economy began to change. The city didn't have a Carnegie or a Rockefeller to lean on to when the times got tough.
By the way, I absolutely have nothing against new England or Boston. The reason I used such strong language in a couple of my posts was because people on here tend to completely write off Philly. Boston is world class! Philly is trash! Well in my opinion, in 2015, the best 48 miles of Philadelphia can stand up to Boston. We have the history, the economy, the universities, the landscape, transportation, etc. It is here and more people need to come and see with their own eyes.
Philly is pretty much the Mid-Atlantic version of Boston, no? History, economy, culture and all. Quakers VS Puritans would be the main difference IMO. Philly has plenty of schools, as well.
If Boston had been placed at the same location, I can't imagine how different it would've been. Philly is always overshadowed by NYC, while Boston gets to claim capital of New England. That's the difference most of the time. Even down to the larger minority population, I'd say if Boston was a bit further South, there is no way it wouldn't have received a larger share of the "Great Migration".
Philly is pretty much the Mid-Atlantic version of Boston, no? History, economy, culture and all. Quakers VS Puritans would be the main difference IMO. Philly has plenty of schools, as well.
If Boston had been placed at the same location, I can't imagine how different it would've been. Philly is always overshadowed by NYC, while Boston gets to claim capital of New England. That's the difference most of the time. Even down to the larger minority population, I'd say if Boston was a bit further South, there is no way it wouldn't have received a larger share of the "Great Migration".
I think that's a fair assessment. Outside of cultural nuances, there are many attributes that are eerily similar in both cities/regions. The two major differences that I see between both cities/regions is the greater coastal integration in the Boston area, and how it has been enormously successful using its many universities to create an extremely competitive knowledge sector (and thus quicker and more pronounced deindustrialization). Philly is definitely trying to take a similar approach as Boston in terms of better tying its higher ed assets to economic growth, but it is more of a work in progress.
As an aside, there was a time, arguably, where Philadelphia and New York were competing for being America's economic "big dog." Even though Philly was the birthplace of the first US stock exchange, it seems that New York's emergence as a more dominant international trading hub allowed the NYSE to take off. Had the Philly stock exchange taken a different trajectory, though, it's interesting to think about how the city would be different today.
Philly is pretty much the Mid-Atlantic version of Boston, no? History, economy, culture and all. Quakers VS Puritans would be the main difference IMO. Philly has plenty of schools, as well.
Digby Baltzell thought that was a material cultural difference. It is an interesting fact that Boston had a university more than a century before Philadelphia. It's also interesting that the driving force behind the establishment of the University of Pennsylvania was a native Bostonian who had grown up in the Yankee/Puritan protestant ethic as opposed to the Quaker ethic.
The famous Lincoln Steffens description of Philadelphia has lived down through the years. I think it no longer applies, at least in the sense I mean "corrupt," as in decaying. (I won't necessarily vouch for the political climate, although the Nutter years seem to have been relatively clean.) For too many years the city was content to allow many wonderful institutions to decay. It was worse than contented, it was so pessimistic that it did not do much to counter this downward spiral. Now, there appears to be a broader optimism that expects the city to get better and to compete. While I see this in many cities, it does seem to be quite pronounced in Philadelphia. There was a tremendous legacy from earlier generations that was dying, but is being revived. I think Boston suffered less from tis, or at least combated it earlier.
I think Boston suffered less from tis, or at least combated it earlier.
Boston suffered immensely from political corruption and general ethnic/religious turmoil from the late 1800s to, really, the 1970s - when ethnic and religious turmoil was superseded for a miserable few decades by racial an "class" turmoil. A lot it goes back the Mayor Curley's election in the early 1900s - he is the Curley of "Curleyism" - basically the practice of ruling the sole benefit of a particular group. In his case, it was the Irish catholics. The old Yankee republicans were pretty enlightened on a lot of issues - catholicism was not one of them. For about 80 years give or take, the Yankees actively sought to segregate the Irish newcomers from "polite society" and shut them out of the political process altogether. As the Irish started to gain political clout, this rigid political separation loosed, but social intermixing didn't occur. Curley grew up in this environment and once he attained office, he went about unabashedly reversing the traditional politics and doing everything thing in his power to drive the Yankees from power and replace them with Irishmen. This had the effect of driving most of the wealth held by the old 'Bostonians' from the city, and imperiled businesses as no one wanted to invest in a system that heavily centered patronage and under the table dealings. Combined with macroeconomic forces (i.e. cheap labor in the South), Boston and New England industry collapsed and never really recovered until the advent of the service economy.
The tide started to turn during the Hynes and White administration in the 50's-70's under the "New Boston" slogan - though had the notorious stain of urban renewal as the primary method of modernizing Boston. I'd argue though that 'optimism' isn't really a trait of New Englanders - we're more cynical, 'don't expect anything good'-kind of people, it would follow that Philly has a more tangible sense of 'things are getting better'.
You are wrong about Philadelphia and slavery though, and you shouldn't lump PA/NY (Rural Folk were very openly racist) with the city of Philadelphia. The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, hated slavery. They attempted to sway opinions when the Declaration and Constitution were being written to have the slave trade abolished before the creation of the new nation. Southern plantation colonies had too many votes, and they aligned themselves with the New Englanders who were making immense profit off of the new industries. Technically Pennsylvania was the first state in 1780 to abolish slavery and was followed 3 years later by Mass and NH. However, as Pennsylvania's rural population ballooned in the early 19th century with the rise of the coal industry, so did the power of other parties outside of the city. In 1837, in an incredibly awful move, PA removed the voting rights of Blacks, who prior to had been able to vote since William Penn deemed it his land. Pennsylvanians have probably been at war with each other more so than nearly any other state..
Fair point about lumping the hinterlands in with Philly, very different places. Remember I'm not saying that abolitionism advocacy wasn't as sincere or fervent in Philly as in Boston, I'm saying that the Quaker pacifism and general ambivalence in New York (even back then, New Yorkers though they were too cool to care) meant that a hard "no more slavery" stance was more preeminent in New England, or at least more virulent and aggressive - I mean Garrison was calling the Constitution a deal signed with the deal and advocating for all sorts of wild things by the standards of the time.
As for the slave trade - it's complicated. The majority of slaves brought to the US were done so by New Englanders, and in particular Rhode Island. After the hiccup in commerce brought on by the Revolutionary War, something like 80% of American vessels sailing to the slave ports in Africa were from Little Rhodie. And to add that the only area in New England that ever developed anything close to plantation-style slavery was in South Country, RI. That being said, there was general agreement that slavery was wrong in New England the promise to end the slave trade by 1808 was adhered to without complaint. New England economies certainly benefit from slave cotton, but the big commercial enterprise was actually the other way around. Slave plantations generally specialized in just one crop and one crop only, that meant that everything from food to basic instruments for 19th life had to come from elsewhere. New England held almost a monopoly on this trade, called the "provisioning trade". This is why salt cod/salt fish is a traditional food in many Caribbean countries, even though cod isn't native to those waters - all the food came from New England, which in turn used the molasses from the slave colonies to make rum. And we made a lot of ****ing rum. At the time of the Revolution the two most important exports in NE were rum and cod.
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Philadelphia: No longer corrupt or contented?
