USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 23
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50
Department of Commerce, "Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States," Volume 1, 1929, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1930; "Foreign Trade Survey of New England," U. S. Government Printing Office, 1931; "Statistical Abstract of the United States," 1929, U. S. Government Printing Office, 1930.
Division of Metropolitan Planning, Special Report, Massachusetts House of Representatives, No. 1130, December, 1925.
French, George, "New England - What It Is and What It Is to Be," Boston Chamber of Commerce, 1911.
Hart, Albert Bushnell, "Commonwealth History of Massachusetts," New York, 1930.
Leahy, William A., "A Compendium of Reports and Studies Relating to the Commerce and Industries of Boston," Boston City Planning Board, 1924.
Lincoln, William H., "The Trade and Commerce of Boston, 1880-1889."
War Department of the U. S., Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, "The Port of Boston - Port Series No. 2," U. S. Government Printing Office, first edition, 1922, revised edition, 1930.
Winsor, Justin, "Memorial History of Boston," James R. Osgood and Company, Boston, 1880.
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BOSTON -- THE INDUSTRIAL HEART OF NEW ENGLAND
By THOMAS F. ANDERSON
INTRODUCTION
Looking back over the past fifty-year period of economic change and industrial evolution, it will be found that Boston, as a manufacturing city, has continuously remained true to its traditions of progressiveness and adapta- bility. The proof of this is found in the fact that the value of our city's manu- factured products has made a fourfold gain and that Boston has not only retained the majority of its industries of 1880 but added vastly to their number and diversity. Even if we should go back a hundred years, the industrial atmosphere would not be wholly unfamiliar. There are still prospering in this community manufacturing concerns that were in existence a century ago.
Throughout the fifty years at present under consideration, the physical and administrative changes that have taken place in Boston industry have been nothing short of revolutionary; which is merely another way of stating that Boston manufacturers have kept step with the progress of the whole country. When Boston observed the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its settlement, in 1880, the manufacturing world was just passing the thresh- old of the new era in industrial power, and electricity, the mighty handmaiden of industry today, was then in its infancy, like the motive power inherent in the gas engine. With the yearly advance of these two important modern agents, manufacturing in Boston itself advanced step by step, and with the new power and lighting factors dawned the ambition to capitalize more efficient industrial methods to the limit; so that today Boston stands in the front rank of twentieth century manufacturing in all of its wonderful latter-day developments.
Feeding on this ambitious aspiration, the industrialists of Boston have gradually modernized their plants, scrapping old wooden or brick structures and replacing them with modern steel and concrete factories and equipping these with up-to-the-minute machinery and appliances and every time and labor saving device that inventive genius has created. Conservation of power, of operations and of human life and health has been foremost in the thoughts of these successors of the early Boston cordwainers and ropemakers - and Boston has itself increased in population and prospered in proportion.
The whole mental attitude of the present-day manufacturer is widely different from the prevailing outlook fifty years ago. He is keener to take advantage of more efficient methods of production, to devise the best possible methods of merchandising his wares, and to co-operate with his workers with a view to making their jobs more attractive to them and at the same time more remunerative to both parties, through the introduction of more modern ideas of control.
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These energetic manufacturers of New England's commercial metropolis have also done many other things to prove their right to carry on for their predecessors. For example, they have adopted scientific methods of financing, of salesmanship and of export outlet. They have even, in some instances, brought hither from the West and other sections outside of New England industrial experts who had made a reputation for themselves in these places, and whose broader vision has helped immensely to modernize and stabilize the local enterprises.
Even in the details of advertising, of welfare work for the benefit of their employees, and of closer relations with their competitors, Boston manufacturers have been giving a splendid account of themselves. It is difficult to think of any major duty or responsibility that these manufacturers have overlooked; even in the ultramodern movement of art in industry, Boston stands in the front rank.
THE CITY AS A WHOLE
In a survey of necessity so greatly compressed as this, it is, of course, impossible to present more than the mere highlights of the subject, and even the eloquent statistics of industrial Boston in 1930, as compared with 1880, must be rigidly restricted.
Making proper allowance for the effects of the 1930 general business depression, the latest official statistics (those issued by the Department of Labor and Industries of Massachusetts for the year 1929) may be taken as giving a fair picture of existing industrial conditions in Boston.
From this report it appears that the total annual value of product of Boston's 2,700 manufacturing establishments is approximately $615,000,000. The value of stock and materials used in such manufacture is about $291,000,000, the difference between these amounts representing the value added by the various manufacturing processes. The average number of wage-earners employed in these establishments during 1929 was something over 76,000, approximately one-tenth of the population, and they earned in wages about $107,000,000, or more than $1,400 each.
Boston, of course, holds first rank as a manufacturing center among the municipalities of Massachusetts. It produces about eighteen per cent of the aggregate value of manufactured products in the state, its percentage of the wage-earners being about fourteen per cent.
We find that the city has forty-six lines of manufacture turning out products valued at more than $1,000,000 in each case, and that among these there are thirteen lines, the value of whose product runs from $10,000,000 to $81,000,000. There are also thirty-one different lines, the total value of whose product ranges from $100,000 to slightly less than $1,000,000. Naturally, there is an impressive amount of capital invested in these industries, the total being around $380,000,000.
It is, however, difficult to visualize the true picture of Boston's manufac- turing status unless there is included therein its natural background, Metro- politan Boston.
The State Department statistics for the year 1929 show that in this busy and densely populated area, comprising fourteen cities and twenty-six towns
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included within a radius of about fifteen miles from the State House, Boston, there were 4,795 manufacturing establishments, credited with products valued at $1,352,000,000. The average number of wage-earners employed in these plants during that year was 177,000, with a total pay roll of $240,721,000. These manufacturing establishments in Metropolitan Boston constituted forty-eight per cent of the 9,952 establishments in the entire state, and repre- sented thirty-nine per cent of the manufactured products of the Commonwealth.
Considering Boston as a metropolitan entity, our city today ranks fourth among the industrial communities of the United States, with a total invested capital of approximately $900,000,000.
In Boston itself the business of printing and publishing takes first rank, with a total value of product in 1929 of $81,000,000. The other industries with value of product of more than $10,000,000 annually rank as follows: Women's clothing, $33,527,000; foundry and machine shop products, $30,- 777,000; boot and shoe cut-stock and findings, $27,841,000; men's clothing, $27,668,000; boots and shoes (other than rubber), $24,811,000; confectionery, $23,339,000; bread and other bakery products, $22,526,000; electrical machin- ery, apparatus and supplies, $19,916,000; coffee and spices, roasting and grind- ing, $15,059,000; patent inedicines and compounds, perfumery and druggists' preparations, $13,249,000; furniture, $12,328,000, and wholesale meat packing, $10,470,000. All of the foregoing statistics are based on the 1929 official figures.
There are a multitude of other important Boston industries, too numerous to itemize here, that probably should be included in any complete picture of Boston as a manufacturing city. It is a community of endless variety in factory, shop and inill products.
One industry that has been created and brought to perfection in the fifty years under consideration is the manufacturing of buttonhole machines. In the output from this plant there are machines that make 300 shapes and sizes of buttonholes, and one of these machines enables a single operator to make 8,000 of these buttonholes a day.
Another outstanding local industry which was not even dreamed of half a century ago is the manufacture of safety razors and blades, a product which is now sold throughout the world. The plant of the company in question covers fourteen acres of floor space and has turned out more than 20,000,000 safety razors a year.
There also has been a vast development during the past fifty years in the local production of ventilators, blowers and other air-moving machinery.
One of the most romantic of Boston's industries (from the view of the onlookers at any rate) is the vast fishing business of the port that has expanded with mushroom growth during the past twenty-five years. Within this period we have acquired the imposing Fish Pier in South Boston as a part of the remarkable development of that part of our waterfront, and today Boston ranks as the chief fishing port of the United States, with New York second and Gloucester third. The city's modern Fish Pier is the largest in the world; it has a capacity of 15,000,000 pounds of fish in freezers at one time. Boston at present handles approximately 80,000,000 pounds of fresh fish annually, and in this industry maintains a formidable fleet of sailing and auxiliary vessels
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and steam trawlers. It is believed that no Boston industry has a more promis- ing outlook for future expansion than our fish business.
The manufacture of confectionery is another outstanding business here, Boston being one of the leading cities in this trade, if not the actual leader. The value of its annual output is approximately $25,000,000 and it employs about 4,000 wage-earners. This does not include the historic chocolate and cocoa manufacturing industry of the city, whose annual output runs to large figures.
The innumerable foundry and machine-shop products and other manu- factures of metal play a large part in the industrial prestige of Boston, and this city accounts for about $30,000,000 worth of such products, giving employment to 4,600 workers.
Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the fairly long list of manufactured products that have been continuously inade in Boston for one hundred years. These products include chocolate, jewelry, gas, drugs, soap, leather and shoe findings, hollow spars, brushes, trunks and bags. Under the same head fall such industries as type founding, music publishing, industrial distilling, coffee and spice grinding. Iron foundries have existed here since 1810, and clocks have been manufactured since 1840.
The fabrication of electrical and textile machinery has for a long time figured among the important Boston industries, but the city "missed out" in connection with the manufacture of automobiles, radios, airplanes and one or two other of the inore modern industrial developments.
Strange as it may seem, Boston takes a modest place in the annual sta- tistics of farming. In Hyde Park (annexed to the larger city in 1912) and in West Roxbury there are a number of farms whose owners derive a worthwhile income from them, and in Suffolk County (which is pretty largely Boston) there is rural property valued at more than $1,000,000, on which substantial crops are grown and considerable livestock is maintained. In the years to come Boston is not likely to compete very strongly with the West as an agri- cultural unit, but there is every reason to believe that a number of its present manufacturing industries, including the fish business and the production of boots and shoes, will materially increase.
As to its general future in manufacturing, it is perhaps sufficient to state here that in 1930 more than two hundred new manufacturing industries were started in Metropolitan Boston, many of these within the confines of the metropolis itself.
The part that power, and especially electrical power, has played in the upbuilding of Boston industry during the past fifty years constitutes in itself a most striking episode. Indeed, the development of the electrical industry, in which Boston has played such a conspicuous role, has been well character- ized as one of the marvels of the world. It was on October 21, 1879, that the magic genius of Thomas A. Edison produced the electric incandescent lamp, giving to the world an improved method of lighting that in mills and factories is only second in importance to electric power itself.
According to the records of the Edison Electric Light Company of New York, the first commercial installation of electrical lighting in Boston was
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made in 1882 at the Hotel Vendôme, with an eight horse power generator, supplying current for fifty lamps in the dining room and ten in the offices. From that point onward the expansion of electric lighting and its mighty partner, electric power, in Boston, developed in a manner that forms a most impressive chapter in local industry.
New and more modern generating systems succeeded older ones, until in 1903 a station was erected in South Boston having an initial installation of 75,000 horse power, equipped with turbines, and having facilities for storing 100,000 tons of coal. By 1925 the growing demands upon the Edison Com- pany for light and power service had so greatly increased that it was necessary to create the huge new generating station at Weymouth, opposite the Fore River plant of the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation. Ultimately this plant included the installation of new 10,000 kilowatt high-pressure turbine generator units, the first of these to be installed being at the time the largest commercial installation of a high-pressure unit in the world.
Heat, light and power, basic needs in industrial operation, are supplied in no part of the country under better conditions than in and near Boston. At the present time the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston furnishes the electric power, as well as the light and a large part of the steam heat, with which the industries of Metropolitan Boston are operated. The company operates over an area of more than 650 square miles, and continues to grow in the territory in which it originally operated as well as through the acquisition of suburban territories.
It is important in this connection to record that the power companies of New England increased their production of electrical energy nearly thirty per cent between 1925 and 1930. In the latter year there were as many as one hun- dred and four of these power companies in New England, from not a few of which Boston industries can draw their power supply, if necessary. We can indeed go one hundred miles or more afield for this modern manufacturing impulse.
While electric power has been making such gigantic strides in our city, the power potentialities of gas have likewise greatly multiplied, so that the gas engine, as an economic and important factor in local manufacturing, has held its own valiantly with the electric generator and the direct-attached motor. It is particularly useful in the various industrial arts, so important in the economy of Boston.
While the telephone is a service rather than an industry, it can by no means be left out of the industrial history of Boston, for it has been, as everywhere, a factor of tremendous importance in the upbuilding of our community. There are no statistics available covering the City Proper, but in 1880 there were only 2,000 telephones in all of Metropolitan Boston. By December 31, 1905, the number had increased to 70,467, and by October 31, 1930, to 445,594. The total investment in the telephone plant in Metropolitan Boston today is approx- innately $120,000,000.
While Boston has lost its historic shipbuilding industry, as typified by the late Donald McKay, its ropewalks and a few other of its old-time staple lines, it continues to be the leading shoe and leather, wool and fish market of the country.
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THE VARIOUS DISTRICTS
Boston is geographically a collection of "districts," the result of frequent annexations of adjoining towns. Some of these brought with them, and have partially retained, a somewhat distinctive industrial development. It may be of interest to analyze briefly the industrial complexion of the city from the point of view of its component units.
The districts or sections making up the modern Athens are the City Proper, East Boston (the ancient Noddle's Island), Charlestown (the most historic of these annexed sections), Brighton, Roxbury, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, Dorchester (also of historical significance) and South Boston. One or two of these districts have still their own characteristic industries, but in the main they reflect the manufacturing activities of the more central part of the city. Some of them have grown in a manufacturing way during the past half-century by reason of the filling in of tidewater areas and the development of what formerly were waste lands.
In the main part of the city itself, where commerce, industry and shipping go hand in hand, practically everything that is fabricated in Massachusetts itself, with the exception of textiles, is produced; so that Boston is veritably a cross-section of the state in this sense.
As already suggested, Boston holds high rank as a center of the leather and footwear industries, for it contains more than a thousand warehouses, factories and offices devoted to the manufacturing, merchandising or storage of the many articles that enter into the complicated process of modern shoe- making. Literally billions of pairs of shoes have been shipped from Boston to every part of the country in the world in the past one hundred years, and the city remains the great market, clearing house and financial center for the entire New England shoe manufacturing industry, whose factories every working day in the year produce more than 300,000 pairs of shoes and slippers, or over 100,000,000 pairs in the twelvemonth.
The pungent odors of leather, hides, roasting coffee, wool and fish, are, so to speak, among the industrial "trade-marks" of Boston, and have been for many a year. Visitors in the vicinity of Broad and Milk streets will always recall the fragrance of the coffee that daily is treated to the roasting process in that part of the city, just as he who visits Dorchester Lower Mills, four or five miles distant, will as vividly recall the evidences of chocolate manufac- turing. The candy factories sweeten the air in their vicinity. On the edge . of the Italian quarter in the North End is a large building devoted to the manufacture of a less odorous food-product, macaroni.
To list even the more outstanding of Boston's other manufactured products would be to reprint the local business directory. They include jewelry, art goods of every kind, machinery for innumerable purposes, and machine tools and parts; confectionery, clothing, bakery products, photo-engraving, picture frames, elastic goods, electrical products of all kinds, blackings and polishes, musical instruments, umbrellas, dies, stamps, badges, stationery, sashes and blinds, cutlery, moving picture supplies, furniture, patent medicines, copper, tin and sheet-iron products; radio apparatus, automobile equipment, and two of the original manufactures of ancient Boston, cordage and sails.
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If this list is not sufficiently impressive, one might add awnings, electro- plating, dyestuffs and extracts, men's and women's clothing, canning and preserving, paper and wood boxes, paints and varnishes, paper goods, models and patterns, pottery, leather goods, knit goods, hats and caps, hardware, gas and electric fixtures, window shades and fixtures, trunks and valises, cigars and other tobacco manufactures, printing and publishing (there are more than two hundred and seventy-five of these concerns), rubber goods, statuary (another specialty of the Italians), signs, machine screws, showcases, stereo- typing, electrotyping, structural ironwork, and steam fitting and heating apparatus.
East Boston, one of the four "shipping sections" of the city (the others being Boston Proper, Charlestown, and South Boston, and these possibly to receive the addition of the Dorchester Bay region in the future), is also a manufacturing district of considerable importance. Time was when its waters received many a newly-launched square-rigged sailing vessel, among them the far-famed products of Donald McKay's shipyard; but this is now only a memory, as the "square-rigger" itself has almost become. However, the building of boats and yachts has for several generations continued to be a leading East Boston industry.
The filling-in process that has transformed so much of Boston's waterfront during the past seventy-five years has added much to East Boston's factory area, and there are still great possibilities in that direction. The manufacture of machinery of all kinds, notably that required by modern steamships, is an outstanding activity of this section, and the production of boilers, sheet-metal, electric welding and rigging are among its other assets. Cotton manufacturing also is carried on here, since the discovery, made some years ago, that the particular air conditions necessary to this branch of the textile industry are ideal in East Boston. The district's long existing reputation as a terminal point of ocean transportation (it was the original terminus of the pioneer Cunard Steamship Line) is the factor that has set apart East Boston in the public mind more than any other.
The Charlestown district, most historic of all of Boston's annexed sections by reason of its memories of Bunker Hill, and long the site of the United States Navy Yard and the resting-place of the immortal "Constitution," likewise has its share of industrial activity. Charlestown manufactures chemicals, refrig- erating equipment, hoisting and excavating machinery, harness, awnings, brake linings and other necessaries of modern life. It has excellent dock facilities for ocean shipping and corresponding railroad connections.
In considering the Brighton district one naturally first thinks of its abattoir and dressed meat industry; but the section also boasts ironworks, electrical supplies, sheet metal, food products, machinery and upholstery among its industries.
The Roxbury district, which in late years has undergone a notable trans- formation, has several of the city's prosperous shoe factories and its only tannery. It seems strange that Boston, which in its earlier days supported several small tanneries, should not have developed as a leather manufacturing city in the same degree that it has as a shoe center; but somehow the tanning trade became
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established in outside centers, like Salem, Peabody, Woburn and Winchester, much of whose finished leather is, however, to be found in the warehouses of South street, Boston. The manufacture of drugs and surgical instruments may properly be mentioned in a brief summary of Roxbury's industries, but its old-time breweries, like the clipper ships, are now merely a memory.
The adjoining district of West Roxbury thus far has remained essentially a residential section, and it is in this area that most of the surviving agricultural industry of Boston is to be found today.
The most recent acquisition to Boston is the Hyde Park district. This was noteworthy as the scene of several successful manufacturing industries long before it voted to give up its separate existence, and it still continues to produce textiles and a variety of air machinery and other products of the mill and factory.
Coming next to the Dorchester district (the largest in population of any of the annexed sections), we find that, though this is primarily a Boston "bed- room," it nevertheless supports a considerable number of flourishing manu- factures. The most historic and interesting of these is the chocolate industry, which for more than a century and a half has been in operation at the Lower Mills on the banks of the Neponset river. Dorchester also possesses one of the country's most famous yacht building concerns, formerly, for many years, located in South Boston; and its other industries include machinery, boiler works, rubber products, insulated wire, glue, awnings, wood products, pianos, refrigerators and cans. Dorchester still has a large area of undeveloped land suitable for industrial purposes.
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