Categories
Historic Sites

From Shipways to Runways: the Transformation of Hog Island, Part Two

Whether it was the poor conditions of the site or a tough winter or contractors’ graft, preparatory construction began to drag on interminably, leading Congress to investigate the goings on at Hog Island. By February of 1918, seven months after the issuance of Hog Island’s contract, a New York Times reporter touring the site was surprised to hear no sound of rivets on steel and only 12 of the planned 50 shipways completed.[1] The Shipping Board’s chief constructor had investigated the site a month earlier and cynically announced that it would be a wonder if the yard produced a ship “at all” in 1918. Compounding the frustration was the mounting cost of doing nearly anything on Hog Island, mainly the result of the cost-plus-profit contract system that placed expediency before oversight. Initially, the American International Corporation estimated the cost of the yard at $35,000,000. By the time the first ship came off the ways on December 3, 1918—almost a month after the Armistice—the cost of constructing the site had ballooned to $66 million. In their defense, the officers of the American International Corporation began to take a long view of the utility of the site. Perhaps not of great service to the war effort, Hog Island would be a boon to Philadelphia. At a meeting of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of the American International Shipbuilding Corporation promised postwar employment for 100,000 Philadelphians. Hog Island, he argued, would make Philadelphia the greatest shipbuilding center in the world.[2]

Despite the rancor surrounding the yard’s construction and operation, Hog Island only existed because of the backbreaking labor of nearly 30,000 workers laboring throughout the cold winter of 1917-1918. Before the canteens and the YMCA, there were rough accommodations and hardship. Steam injections softened the frozen ground before workers could excavate for sewer lines. Other workers waded into the cold Delaware to dig out the channels for the shipways. Simultaneous to the attention-grabbing headlines of mismanagement and corporate greed was the untold story of a unique identity forming among the “Hoggies”. They worked among their friends—blacks, Italians, Polish, Irish, and Germans—all under the glaring eyes of the foreman, the engineer, and the military policeman. And though they may have lived in barracks near where they worked, they brought their traditions, faith, and foods such as the bulky fortifying sandwich that took on the island’s name. On December 23, 1918, the boys band from St. Francis Xavier-Holy Name parishes played for a flag raising in the bitter cold. During their down time, the Hog Islanders squared off on the gridiron against the other military installations up and down the river. Much like the soldiers in the field, the “Hoggies” who worked the shipways during the war were forced to coexist and cooperate, drawing strength from the uniqueness of their difficult work.[3]

Although massive preparation time meant that the $66 million Hog Island Yard failed to produce a single ship during wartime, the yard continued its contract assembling 122 ships from prefabricated parts. Most of these sturdy utilitarian Hog Islanders saw action in World War II but suffered high losses. Despite assurances that Hog Island would turn Philadelphia into the Clyde of America, the shipways went silent in 1921 and the timbering and piers beginning to rot, vegetation growing up through the corduroy roads. In 1925, the City purchased land near Hog Island for a municipal airfield to handle the growing traffic in passenger planes. Eyeing the derelict Hog Island property to the south with its rail lines and shipways still intact, members of the Philadelphia Business Progress Committee began advocating for an air-marine-rail terminal on the site of the old shipyard. In 1930, the City paid $3 million for the flat, well-prepared Hog Island site. As the airport expanded, its runways devoured the entire Hog Island shipyard—one monstrous technological machine consuming another.


[1] “Senate Committee to Go to Hog Island, Piez Shows Big Financial Affiliations of the Corporation’s Directors,” The New York Times, 16 February 1918.



[2] James J. Martin, “The Saga of Hog Island, 1917-1920: The Story of the First Great War Boondoggle,” The Saga of Hog Island: And Other Essays in Inconvenient History (Colorado Springs, Co: Ralph Myles, 1977). http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/hogisle.shtml



[3] “Hog Island,” Philadelphia Record Photograph Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Although there are contrary claims, linguist William Labov has demonstrated that the lexical root of the word “hoagie” was “hog-“ or “hogg” after World War I. See William Labov, “Pursuing the Cascade Model,” 25 November 2002, http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/PCM.html. This is also borne out in Eames, Edwin and Howard Robboy. 1967. “The sociocultural context of an American dietary item.” The Cornell Journal of Social Relations 2:63-75, p. 4.

Categories
Historic Sites

From Shipways to Runways: the Transformation of Hog Island, Part One


Purchase Photo   View Nearby Photos
Soon after America declared war on Germany in April 1917, songwriter George M. Cohan released his jaunty, rousing call to arms “Over There”. But despite the popular fervor to take the fight to Europe, the U.S. did not possess the merchant fleet to make war “over there.” With only 430 cargo and passenger ships in its merchant marine, America relied on foreign ships for nearly 90 percent of its overseas trade.[1] Successful German U-boat campaigns in the early months of the war exacerbated the shortage.

With a meager merchant fleet unprepared to serve its troops overseas, the Wilson administration turned to the private sector for assistance. Eventually the government would run 132 shipyards spending over $200 million on ship construction. But no yard was more ambitious and controversial than Hog Island, where the Philadelphia International Airport is presently located. On 31 July 1917, under the aegis of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, the government lavished a multimillion dollar contract on a nebulous conglomerate, the American International Corporation, to construct a massive shipyard on boggy land a company subsidiary had advantageously purchased two months earlier. Paying twenty times the assessed value for the land, the American International Shipbuilding Corporation set its dredges to work. Ceaselessly throughout the summer and fall of 1917, the dredges bolstered the flat island with millions of tons of Delaware River spoil.[2]

From the perspective of the popular press, the process of turning the 860-acre tract “where formerly the song of the mosquito was the only sound to greet the ear of the surveyor or fisherman” into a teeming military industrial complex inspired the same pride in America as Cohan’s martial ditty. National Geographic called Hog Island a “wonderful industrial center” in September 1918. The Historical Outlook, a magazine for teachers published in Philadelphia noted where once was “a low lying unsanitary swamp—merely a strip of wasteland” stood forth the next summer “the greatest shipyard in the world.” In many ways, Hog Island was a projection of early 20th century American idealism—capital, technology, and scientific management in the service of progress.


Purchase Photo   View Nearby Photos

But in other ways, Hog Island was too big for its own good. The contractual obligation to supply “at least” 200 ships meant massive expenditures for site preparation and infrastructure were needed. Writers were fond of hyperbolic comparisons of the yard’s infrastructure to major American cities. Hog Island’s electrical power plant was sufficient to light the combined needs of Albany, NY and Richmond, VA. Its water system could deliver twice the capacity of the city of Atlanta. Its sewer system was equal to that of Minneapolis. With its 70 miles of rail lines sustaining twenty locomotives and 465 freight cars, 250 buildings, 3,000,000 feet of underground wiring, a hospital, trade school, 12 canteens and restaurants, hotel, 5 mess halls, and telephone traffic equal to a town of 140,000, comparisons to a small city were apt.[3]


[1] “Ugly Ducklings,” Time, 13 January 1941.

[2] James J. Martin, “The Saga of Hog Island, 1917-1920: The Story of the First Great War Boondoggle,” The Saga of Hog Island: And Other Essays in Inconvenient History (Colorado Springs, Co: Ralph Myles, 1977). http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/hogisle.shtml

[3] Ralph A. Graves, “Ships for the Seven Seas: The story of America’s Maritime Needs, Her Capabilities, and Her Achievements,” The National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, September, 1918.

“A Few Facts About Hog Island: the Greatest Shipyard in the World,” the American International Shipbuilding Corporation, 5 August 1918.

Categories
Historic Sites

Recreating the Philadelphia of 1776


Purchase Photo   View Nearby Photos
The preparations for the Sesquicentennial as well as all the events, activities, and buildings that were a part of the celebration required a large amount of organization and management. The administration of the Sesquicentennial was performed by a Board of Directors, an Executive Committee, and a variety of individual committees (including the Automobile Traffic Committee, Music Committee, and Publicity Committee) that managed specific areas of the Exposition.

Although the Board of Directors and various committees included female members, a separate Women’s Committee was also formed on October 16, 1925. The group originally included one hundred members appointed by Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick, the Mayor of Philadelphia and President of the Sesquicentennial, with Mrs. J. Willis Martin serving as leader of the Women’s Board. On February 8, 1926, the group decided to become a large general committee. This committee would eventually have over two thousands members and include over forty sub-committees.[1]

Among their many contributions, the Women’s Committee promoted the Sesquicentennial across the country, served as hostesses and greeters at several Exposition buildings, and established and maintained information booths at hotels, railroad stations, and other locations across Philadelphia.[2] The Women’s Committee, as well as many members of the Board of Directors and visitors to the Exposition, considered their greatest contribution to be the construction and management of High Street, a recreation of High Street (later known as Market Street) in Philadelphia in 1776 that included 20 houses, the Market Place, the Town Hall, and several gardens. Each house such as the Girard Counting House, Franklin Print Shoppe, and Jefferson House was maintained by a different women’s organization and decorated in a style consistent with the Revolutionary period.[3] Activities on the street included appearances by the town crier, daily marionette performances, and weekly pageants. High Street saw a large amount of visitors during the Sesquicentennial and one newspaper reporter wrote that “here is another place to linger, and many do linger.”[4]


Purchase Photo   View Nearby Photos

While High Street attracted many visitors, it also presented an idealized view of American history. Dirt, lawlessness, discord, and injustice did not exist in the reconstructed High Street. One hostess who spoke with visitors on High Street saw the reconstruction as a way to demonstrate that the country’s beginnings were dignified rather than chaotic and tawdry.[5] High Street at the Sesquicentennial was one of several living history museums and parks that were formed beginning in the 1920s. These institutions, such as Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village, would prove popular among visitors but also become the object of debate regarding the accuracy of their representations of history.

As an attraction at the Sesquicentennial, High Street showed the commitment of large numbers of women and women’s organizations to the Exposition. Although the Sesquicentennial did not achieve financial success and suffered from disorganization and low attendance, High Street proved to be a popular attraction according to the fair’s organizers who stated that it “was a source of renewed confidence in the deep foundations of American life, and as such it undoubtedly had a lasting effect on the millions who visited it.”[6]


[1] Austin, E.L. and Odell Hauser, Editors. The Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition: A Record Based on Official Data and Departmental Reports. Philadelphia: Current Publications, Inc., 1929, p. 153.

[2] Ibid., 157-158.

[3] Ibid., 161-162.

[4] The New York Times. “Sesquicentennial is Now Complete.” August 22, 1926.

[5] Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life: 1876-1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 241.

[6] Austin, E.L. and Odell Hauser, Editors. The Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition: A Record Based on Official Data and Departmental Reports. Philadelphia: Current Publications, Inc., 1929, p. 20.