A ship launching at Sun Shipyard c.1925
NOTE: A look back on Delaware Counties first big growth period from
100 years ago. Please read a lot was happening
DELAWARE COUNTY IS RICHER BY MILLIONS
War Contracts, New Industries and a Rise in Real Estate Values the Principal Factors in Producing the Result – Local Builders Very Busy
Delaware
County, always rich and always peaceful, is from $45,000,000 to $50,000,000
richer because Europe went to war.
These
figures are not alone an estimate of the industries that war has brought to the
banks of the Delaware River below Philadelphia.
They are partly that and partly the real estate development that has
resulted from those industries.
While
everyone has heard how industries have sprung info life along the Delaware
since the war began, the effect of these industries has been overlooked. Here is the effect:
Every
village, hamlet, town and city in the eastern end of Delaware County has scores
or hundreds of brand-new houses for the assessors’ books. Builder and contractors are overworked and
refusing to take more jobs. For this
development is just at its height, and
the assessors’ books already show an increase that will add $10,000,000 to the
county’s assessed valuation this year.
And that isn’t half of what will be added by next year.
New
houses have sprung up everywhere in the eastern townships. Villages have become towns, fields have
become suburbs, waste lands have become factory sites, vacant lots and ball
fields in cities have become rows of houses, the river shore has become a line
of smokestacks. And, most of all, this
has happened in the last two years and is happening now.
Out in
the Media court house, where all is still and quiet and characteristic of the
old Delaware County, they are tabulating the triennial assessment, made in
February by the local assessors. Part of
the story is in these untabulated figures.
For
these figures incomplete as they are, show that the assessors found almost
$10,000,000 to add to the real estate values of the county last winter before
this wonderful summer building began.
And next year – well, the assessors hesitate to think of what the
increase will be.
Chester,
the very center of that new Delaware County, is no longer quiet or
peaceful. Here is where the new wealth
that the war brought is centered, and here you can find a man who estimates
that the new industrial wealth of Delaware County’s riverfront is about
$36,000,000.
This is
the man who knows about it, too, for he is T. Woodward Trainer, secretary of
the Chester chamber of commerce, and of the Chester Board of Trade, thru whom
most of the land that these new industries use was secured.
And if
the Media visit and the Chester call don’t convince, take a trolley ride around
the county and look into those places you hardly know the name of villages or
crossroads once, now thriving, newly-painted towns and suburbs.
All
this wealth made since the war broke out.
And it is so big that no one can count it and every estimate is no
better than a guess. But it is wealth,
nonetheless.
Take
Chester’s real estate development for a guide, for here, at least, actual
figures are available. This is a city
that the old-timer remembers as the place of great waste tracts. Time was when every other block in Chester
was a vacant lot. Not so now. They need the vacant lots now.
CHESTER
DOUBLES BUILDING – Building permits issued since January 1, 1916, in Chester, show
that 330 buildings of all kinds are built or building in Chester at a cost of
$1,579,430. This is twice as much as was
spent during the whole of 1915, when 290 buildings were erected, at a cost of
$746,815.
In
1914, a record year, the city spent $1,221,200 for its new buildings. Chester, at this rate, expects when all the
summer building is on records to have more than $2,000,000 invested in new
houses and other structures.
The
most remarkable thing about these six months of 1916 is that the bulk of the
money has not been spent for industrial buildings, but for dwellings of
different kinds. The total amount spent
for these dwellings will be $477,500.
An
eight-story office and bank building accounts for $400,000 and the new
buildings of the Sun Ship Building Company, the most recent of the new
industries, will cost $250,000. Sixteen
of the structures are to be used for stores, an unusual number to be added in
Chester.
These
are the Chester records, and are conclusive.
They include building operations, such as that of Brigadier General
William G. Price, Jr., now on the border with the Philadelphia brigade of the National
Guard. General Price has a $500,000
project under way at Twelfth and Potter Streets, Chester. About fifty houses, all of high grade, are
under construction.
An old
baseball field is being developed into a residential district. The Chester Shipbuilding Company, which is
spending $2,000,000 in reviving the Delaware shipbuilding industry, at Chester,
is also doing a little bit for real estate with a development of 100 houses
costing about $250,000 at Sixth and Pennell Streets.
VACANT
LOTS DISAPPEAR – All over Chester the vacant lots are being filled with small
projects of from two to a dozen houses.
Real estate men are so busy you can’t find them for a talk about
business. Everybody has a hand in
it. Irvin Taylor and Samuel Bell are making
the most extensive and widespread operations Mr. Taylor, who has built up a
great part of Ninth Street in Chester, is now adding scores of houses in other
sections of the city.
But the
big wealth that has come to the county is found along the river front, where
Mr. Trainer, the secretary of the Chester chamber of commerce, estimates that
$36,000,000 has been or will be invested.
Here are some of the real estate purchases and contemplated expenditures
of the new and old industries:
Sun
Shipbuilding Company, Chester, sixty acres expects to spend $8,000,000, employ
5000 men and turn out ships 900 feet long.
Chester
Shipbuilding Company, Chester, eighteen acres, six ships on the way, three more
way under construction, the first ship, 450 feet long, about to be launched,
1500 men at work and expenditures of $2,000,000 contemplated.
Stewart
Distillery Company, making industrial alcohol, on a twenty-acre tract. Spending about $1,000,000.
Commercial
Box and Envelope Company, fifteen acres, spending $750,000.
Beacon
Light Company, Chester, bought twenty-one acres for $75,000, building turbine
power plant, with 120,000 kilowatt capacity, spending $3,000,000.
The
Westinghouse Electric and Machine Company, with a purchase of 600 acres in
Tinicum adjoining Eddystone, will spend $8,000,000, it is said in equipping a
plant to make supplies and equipment for the Delaware shipbuilding industry.
The
expenditures in Eddystone at the Baldwin plant, the Remington Arms and Eddystone
ammunition plants, are given in round figures as about $10,000,000, and here
alone 28,000 men are working, and in need of homes.
MARCUS
HOOK SHARES PROSPERITY – In Marcus Hook, below Chester, more of this wonderful
riverfront development has added to the already big industrial investment of
the American Viscose plant and the oil companies.
The
General Chemical Company, with sixty-five acres, and an investment of nearly
$2,000,000 and the Benzol Products Company, which is working out the aniline
dye problem on a thirty acre tract, in a $1,000,000 plant, are the big ones.
Marcus
Hook has spread out. A hundred new
houses are going up and nearly another hundred have been built in Linwood
Heights. Twenty more are under
construction, and two more farms, containing eighty acres, are to be developed by
Chester men.
Next to
the Chester and Marcus Hook development, the greatest building has been going
on in the last two years in Upper Darby Township. Here Drexel Hill has developed from a few
houses to a community with 250 voters.
Collingdale has become a thriving town of industrial workers, with
nearly 3000 inhabitants, and the third school building is going up. Highland Park, with its neighborly communities of Observatory HiIl and Kirklyn, are growing
into a suburb of several hundred houses.
A. Merritt
Taylor is developing Springfield, and already about thirty-five houses have
been built in an attractive substantial suburban residential community. Near Sixty-Ninth Street John McClatchy is
developing another tract. Bywood,
another suburb, has grown up in a year and more houses are under construction
this summer. Clifton Heights is so big
now that it is getting ready to float a bond issue of $90,000 to buy asphalt streets,
sewers and a disposal plant.
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