The Tacony Iron & Metal Company/ Dodge
Steel Company
By Louis M. Iatarola
Passing by the vacant site along the easterly side of State
Road, south of Magee Avenue, a newcomer to Tacony may wonder
what once stood on this large waterfront parcel of land now
strewn with bricks, dirt, and industrial debris. Anyone who
has lived in Tacony for ten years or less would likely tell
the newcomer that an old, abandoned factory named "Dodge
or something" once stood there and that it continuously
deteriorated until its demolition in October, 1994.
Anyone who has lived in Tacony forty
or so years would probably say that on this site once stood
a respected leader in the worldwide steel casting industry
known as the Dodge Steel Company. This one-time major participant
in the industrial development of the Philadelphia area made
it possible for such vital products as valve bodies, pump
and turbine parts and railroad, marine, and automobile castings
to find their way to factories all over the world.
Anyone fortunate enough to have lived
in Tacony eighty-five or more years would likely say that
on this site most recently stood the Dodge Steel Company,
but originally stood the Tacony Iron & Metal Company,
whose claim to fame was fulfilling the contract to construct
the mammoth iron statue of William Penn which adorns the tower
atop Philadelphia's City Hall. What he or she may not tell
the newcomer are the fascinating details concerning this site's
history, such as providing the impetus for various inventions
and the backdrop for two movies.
In the fall of 1891, when Magee Avenue
was known as Salter's Lane, the Tacony Iron and Metal (see
photo below) Company, under the direction of its president,
uncle of the world famous inventor and prominent Taconyite
Frank Shuman, had already secured the contract to cast the
iron work for the tower of Philadelphia's new City Hall. Under
Mr. Schumann's supervision, the 120' x 60' building was finished
being constructed by early 1892, complete with a special high-bay
roof and three custom made tanks whose sizes were determined
by the largest of over forty castings comprising the 37' high,
55,348 pound statue.
The construction of the statue of William
Penn was not publicized at the time, so few crowds gathered
at the Tacony Iron & Metal Company site. However, according
to Dr. Edward Schumann, son of Francis, interviewed in 1939
by the Evening Bulletin, the statue's casting provided some
unique thrills to some lucky Tacony residents. Said Dr. Schumann,
"Usually, on a Sunday morning employees' wives and children
would watch the work, which was cast in sections. Children
at one stage of the construction could be seen running around
on the hat or perched on the hand. In a 1984 Philadelphia
Inquirer interview, long time Taconyite Miriam Broughton confirmed
this fact. "For most kids," recalled Mrs. Broughton,
"the biggest delight was walking on the brim of William
Penn's hat...In later years there were stories of someone
going up on the tower and pedaling a bicycle around the brim,
but I know by where the brim turns that it just wouldn't be
possible."
In the aforementioned 1939 Evening Bulletin
article, long time Taconyite Mrs. Joseph Tomlinson recalled,
"My husband's favorite story was that he drove the team
that hauled the statue's parts downtown. He often told how,
one rainy day, Billy Penn's hand, extending out over the driver's
seat, protected him from the rain." It required teams
of sixteen horses to haul single pieces of the statue downtown.
A one time employee of Tacony Iron and Metal Company, Fred
Melsch, recalled in the same article, "As an iron-fitter,
I worked on the tower. At the time those workmen who could
were having souvenirs made out of the bronze left over from
the statue. I have to this day a fancy wall ornament and pins
for keeping score on a cribbage board, made from the same
batch of metal of which the statue was molded."
Needless to say, the casting of William
Penn's statue was the most significant accomplishment of the
Tacony Iron and Metal Company. In addition to the statue,
all the metal work on the 547' tall City Hall Tower, including
the figures and eagles, was cast at the Tacony site. The polygonal
steel structure on the dome was an original design by Francis
Schumann. So widely recognized as a leader in its field was
the Tacony Iron and Metal Works that the building was featured
on the cover of the October 22, 1892 issue of Scientific American,
complete with a lengthy article on the use of electro-plating
in architecture.
Unfortunately for Tacony and its Iron
and Metal Company, the casting of William Penn's statue was
not enough to ensure financial stability as it went out of
business by 1910. After the Tacony and Iron and Metal Company
closed its doors for the last time, the building was virtually
abandoned. At the time, Philadelphia was considered a great
motion picture center. The city was the source of profound
innovations in movie making and served as headquarters for
studios in five states and Berlin. This was due primarily
to film pioneer Siegmund ("Pop") Lubin, who was
viewed on the same level as Thomas Edison when it came to
the development of movies as a skill and art.
In 1914, Mr. Lubin chose the abandoned
Tacony Iron and Metal Company building as the site of a film
titled "Gods of Fate." The film was described as
"an Epic of Labor with an Appealing Love Theme of Unusual
Character," and was expected to satisfy the public's
demand for bigger, better, and more realistic spectacles.
The movie company asked permission to stage a small fire along
the north side of the building. The scene was to show the
stars being rescued. As a precaution, Engine Companies #38
and #52 were on hand at the scene.
William H. Batezell, Jr. one of a crowd
of curious spectators, recalled in a letter to a local editor
in April, 1967, "...No one figured on the dry timbers
in the building, which was three-quarters of a block long.
And then it happened! The building went up like a box of matches.
The stars already at the windows would not jump, as per script,
and our Philadelphia fire fighters got into the act by staging
the real thing...I saw one cameraman making a very close escape.
How he missed being killed could only be explained by the
'God's of Fate.' " Later in that year, the Lubin Manufacturing
Company's film storage facility at 20th and Indiana Avenue
also burned to the ground. Several years later the Lubin Company
was to go out of business.
Although the "Gods of Fate"
fire rendered the former Tacony Iron and Metal Company site
a skeletal reminder of what once was, Tacony was to see yet
another prominent industrial player in the worldwide economy
establish firm roots in this still suburban-like community.
In 1919, the Dodge Steel Company was founded by Kern Dodge
and Associates in a building comprising approximately 21,000
square feet. With a mission statement promising to manufacture
the best quality steel castings that good workmanship and
science can produce, the Dodge Steel Company became a respected
leader in the steel casting industry by the late 1930s.
Through expansion in its physical facilities
which eventually amounted to over 100,000 square feet, plus
a wider acceptance for its castings and an accelerated shipbuilding
program started in 1940, Dodge Steel's production rose from
50 tons per month in 1926 to a peak of 648 tons per month
during World War II. By 1950, castings with the "DS"
trademark were considered among the best in the world.
The best known subplot to emerge from
the existence of the Dodge Steel Company is probably that
of steelmaker Albert A. Schmid. Mr. Schmid, at the age of
21, left his family, girlfriend, and the Dodge Steel Company
to sign up for military service on December 9, 1941, two days
after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Eight months after leaving
his job working a gas-fed torch and cutting and scraping steel
castings, Al Schmid found himself manning a machine-gun emplacement
with orders to hold the all-important post protecting Henderson
Airfield on the Tenaru River at Guadalcanal. According to
a Marine Corps report, although a grenade explosion blinded
Al Schmid and one partner was dead while the other wounded,
Schmid singlehandedly held his position and fought off his
Japanese aggressors for over four hours. Of nearly 1,200 Japanese
soldiers who reportedly tried to cross the Tenaru River that
night, eighteen were wounded, two captured, and the rest killed.
Hollywood soon recognized that Schmid's
story was one of which movies were made. A feature film which
proved very popular at the time titled "Pride of the
Marines" was released in the mid-1940's starring John
Garfield as Al Schmid and Eleanor Parker as Ruth Hartley,
Schmid's girlfriend and eventual wife. Parts of the movie
were filmed at Al Schmid's Fillmore Street home and at the
Dodge Steel Company. Much furor was raised in Frankford and
Tacony as local residents swarmed around the film sites to
get glimpses of the movie making.
By the 1960's and 1970's, the only headlines
made by the Dodge Steel Company were those of labor unrest
involving primarily the International Molders & Allied
Workers Union. Many a labor strike interrupted production
at the factory over such issues as union shop classes, wage
increases, and incentive pay disputes caused by machinery
which did not meet production expectations.
Mounting cash flow problems, caused by
decreasing demand of its products and wage hikes which saw
the hourly rate increase from $2.83 per hour on average in
1970 to $8.10 per hour by the mid-1980's, led to the ultimate
closure of the Dodge Steel Company in 1986. Although a small
group of the company's seventy of so employees tried to save
the company bay taking over from a Chicago lawyer name Morris
Coff (who had little or nothing to do with the company's day-to-day
operations), the group found itself capital-short when it
came time to avoid foreclosure on a $1.5 million dollar load.
Over the course of its sixty year existence,
the Dodge Steel Company's progress was virtually mirrored
by American society. All phases of modern American history
can be traced through the development of this factory. The
excitement of World War I followed by the depression of the
1930's, prosperity of the '40's and '50's was reflected in
the growth and inner workings of the Dodge Steel Company and
its employees. Accordingly, the civil rights and labor disputes
of the 1960's and 1970's followed by the corporate merger-mania
rampant in the 1980's led to the company's ultimate demise.
Not long after the factory was abandoned,
the site surrounding the factory as well as the building itself
became an illegal dumping ground. Discarded tires, construction
debris, and industrial waste, mostly unrelated to the Dodge
Steel operation accumulated on the waterfront site.
In 1992, local artist Brian C. Moss chose
the abandoned factory site as the subject of a photographic
installation titled "What Helps Dodge Helps You."
With the help of a New Forms Grant through the Painted Bride
Art Center in Philadelphia, the artist used materials present
on the site to construct a functional sculpture in the form
of a giant pinhole camera. The camera was then used to make
10' square photographs of the factory and surrounding grounds.
Following is an excerpt from Mr. Moss's project description:
I have always been drawn to vacant buildings
as modern archaeological sites because they reveal a lot about
our culture, priorities, and values...When I began this project
my intention was to create art while drawing attention to
the problems of industrial decay and its effect on our cities...
As I spent more time exploring the decaying factory, my interests
expanded not only into the history of the site, but that of
the workers and the neighborhood...I began to wonder: Who
was responsible for this mess? What were the effects of the
closing on the employees and the community? Imagine the energy...thought
and worry that was expended during the course of this once-thriving
enterprise. Where does that energy go when a factory closes?
And does it disappearance sap the energy of a neighborhood
as well?
"What Helps Dodge Helps You"
was received favorably during its photographic installation
at the Painted Bride Gallery from September 2nd to the 16th,
1993. In addition, the work received attention from Fox-29's
"The Ten O'Clock News" as it was featured by Gerald
Kolpan on September 17, 1993. Mr. Moss' pinhole camera and
several photographs were also a prominent exhibit in the 1993
Tacony History Day Parade and Disston Festival.
The attention drawn to the former Dodge
Steel plant by Brian C. Moss did not deter illegal dumpers
from continuing to deposit unwanted items at the site. This
problem, compounded by gang activity and occasional brush
fires, continued to plague the site until the ultimate demolition
of all the surrounding structures and environmental remediation
in late 1994. The site now remains conspicuously vacant, as
described in the opening paragraph, a faint reminder of what
once was and what may someday be.
What will occupy the site once home to
the Tacony Iron and Metal and Dodge Steel Companies is a matter
of public debate. Some feel that recreational use would best
maximize the sites amenities and would help significantly
in re-connecting Tacony to the banks of the Delaware River.
Some feel that a shopping center or a related commercial use
would maximize the economic productivity but attract new residents
to the area as well. Others, meanwhile, feel that the site
would make an ideal restaurant/entertainment complex on the
waterfront which could be developed in conjunction with proposed
riverboat gambling.
Nevertheless, the one thing nearly all
Taconyites agree upon is that industrial usage of the site
would not be feasible, not now and not in the future. The
Tacony Civic Association and Historical Society of Tacony,
along with state and federal officials are committed to see
that future development of this site is responsive to the
changing completion of the waterfront from that of industrial
port to host of pleasure craft and serene riverside portraits.
Keep a close watch over the former Tacony
Iron and Metal/Dodge Steel site, Taconyites. Because what
was for almost ten years a Tacony eyesore may yet prove to
be one of its greatest assets.
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