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The Tidewater Grain Elevator: Wishful Thinking's Concrete Tomb
by Jessica Chiu
April 2004
Driving north along Interstate 95 into Philadelphia, you'll see the remains of the Tidewater Grain Co. elevator sitting on the city's southernmost tip, a giant block of cylindrical concrete silos packed together like a pipe organ. Upon its construction nearly a century ago, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company boasted that the Tidewater would stand “high above the flat lands which surround it … the first sign of Philadelphia's industry which presents itself to voyagers coming up the Delaware.” Today it towers two hundred and forty-seven feet into the air, with the golden hue of a thing grown quietly impotent. A former fortress of industrial might, it haunts the city's edge, its grandeur frozen around it. Once a technological marvel and a symbol of Philadelphia's dominance as a port, the elevator was built at the mouth of the Schuylkill, within yards of the main channel of the Delaware, where it could receive barges and rail cars by the hundred. Today, it stands inland, within weak reach of an economy at work. Two stray tugboats, the Tenacious and the Athena, are docked at its pier, which is slowly coming apart and sinking into the water.
The elevator may be my favorite structure in Philadelphia. For years, I've stolen glimpses of it driving into and out of the city. Its present abandonment and position at the helm of the city have always made the building seem mythic. Abandoned buildings like the Tidewater are a testament to city history; they are remnants of bygone energies and the efforts made by city citizens to keep up with an expanding, evolving global economy. Those efforts seem painfully clear in the spent shell of the elevator, erected in the twilight years of Philadelphia's grain trade. The plan recently announced by the building's current owners, Preston Ship and Rail, to wrap the elevator with oversized advertisements is merely the latest in a long line of attempts to turn loss into profit at Girard Point.
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The story of the elevator we see today begins in the late 18th century, when Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland were fighting to dominate the export of grain. Philadelphia experienced a stunning boom in agribusiness beginning in the late 1790s, but its hegemony over the American grain trade was to be short-lived. Flush with grain brought from the fertile land of Lancaster County and the southern reaches of Delaware, Philadelphia was a natural hub for the grain trade: in 1765, the city exported more than 360,000 bushels of wheat, three times the volume shipped from New York City. The terrain between farm and city was advantageously flat, and specially fashioned canvas-covered wagons routinely brought farmers' wares into the city, where grain was then loaded onto barges and sent abroad. Triangular trade, bringing foodstuffs from the United States and Europe to the slave colonies of the West Indies, saw the return of tropical products like sugar, for consumption or re-export from the northern ports. In the 1790s, Europe's sporadic military conflicts erupted into a full-fledged war in the wake of the French Revolution, crippling Europe's capacity for agricultural production and trade. The Mid-Atlantic states raced to meet the exploding European demand, and Philadelphia—along with rival Baltimore—suddenly became the international center of the grain trade.
In 1815, Philadelphia was twenty years into its international grain boom when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, and international demand for American grain subsided almost immediately. The victorious European monarchies were on the brink of a century-long peace, and they erected protective tariffs—such as England's restrictive Corn Laws, which prohibited the import of all grain, save for in times of famine—to support domestic farmers. By 1820, the grain trade in Philadelphia and Baltimore was in rapid decline. Both cities looked to the expanding American West for new markets, investing in turnpikes and railroads heading westward, hoping to remedy flagging demand. But these last-ditch efforts were also thwarted, this time by the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal. The canal, the first successful route between the Eastern ports and the farms of the Midwest, established New York state's control of the grain trade for the remainder of the century; by the civil war, Buffalo would emerge as the world capital of grain shipment, moving 50 million bushels annually.
By the 1850s, with the competition for grain leadership all but over, the privately held Pennsylvania Railroad Company had begun its acquisition of most of the state-run canal and railroad system. Many in Philadelphia, discouraged by the development of the Erie Canal and the declining fortunes of the local grain trade, were taking their money elsewhere—investing in the emerging manufacturing sector. But there were some who remained undeterred in their drive to return Philadelphia to the lead of America's grain trade, and in 1863, the Pennsylvania Railroad constructed its first elevator to process, store, and distribute grain at the foot of Washington Street in South Philadelphia. In 1881, long after the competition had left Philadelphia behind, the Pennsylvania Railroad built an even bigger elevator, this one at Girard Point, the site of the present Tidewater Grain Company elevator.
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Last summer, we set out to look at the elevator up close. R, D and I wore sneakers and carried cameras slung around our necks. D had been to the building before, on a trip with friends to see the place and write his name on the walls. He said he could get us near it by car, and then we'd have to walk. The mood in the car was happy, hopeful. It was summer and from Interstate 76, the building looked remote and unfailing with promise.
We ditched the car somewhere between Fort Mifflin and Island Avenue, and walked through a field of shoulder high grass and weeds. We shoved the grass back, walking in a line, our feet sinking into ground that seemed to have been swallowed by its own overgrowth.
Up close, the elevator is staggering in proportion—it is, quite simply, magnificent. The first elevator built on the site, in 1881, resembled a wooden pagoda—a step up from the flat-roofed bins that squatted throughout the countryside. The walls of the present elevator, built at the turn of the century, were poured soundly from cement and girded by steel. This is a building of function, aesthetically perfect and a testament to the will of engineers it has long outlived. Built to be completely fireproof, every storage bin of its more than one hundred cylindrical tanks is intact, despite a ragged black scar that runs down the lengths of four tanks, left from a 1990 fire.
Everywhere the air smelled of treated sludge from the nearby sewage plant. Near the elevator, the smell was rank, dense; we drew shallow breaths through our mouths as we came nearer. The structure's inside is as quiet as a corpse; the air is sulfurous and thick with methane, complicated by gases that seep from the building's moldering walls. D, being the first to clear the field and get inside, called to us as we approached the building. “Watch out,” he called. “The ground.” R and I, at the threshold of entering the track-shed, looked down. There, where rail cars had emptied their cargo down between the rails, lay a grid of rusting beams over an unforgiving drop into decades-old storage bins. Later, speaking to a police officer not too far from the grounds, we'd be told that those bins, the ones we had stood over, now housed legions of “dog-sized rats” last seen fleeing the elevator's 1990 fire in droves. R and I made our way gingerly across. D stood, hands on hips peering around the corner of the building into further wreckage. He was looking for a way to the roof.
It is easy to divine the outlines of the elevator's function from its exterior, which is still largely intact. But the workings of the inside—the scales and hoppers, the different bins, even the electrical winches that rotated railcars in and out of the lot out front—are hard to imagine. We had hopscotched our way around the track shed; now, coming through the shed into the main building, we saw that most of the overhead galleys and sorting machines once housed there had vanished. There wasn't a pulley in sight. The entire building was hollowed out and high in the rafters we could see the rusting mess of machine innards leftover from salvage. It was hard to imagine that a force of 180 men had once worked controls negotiating the steam and hiss of grain and rail cars into elevating legs for weighing, cleaning, sorting, storing; working the massive dryers, combating the natural enemies of rot, damp, and insects, turning the daily flow of grain into a stream of city revenue.
After reviewing lists of machinery that went into the Tidewater elevator at the time of its construction and poring over diagrams of modern grain elevators, I can still only guess at the precise mechanics of the building, but the basics are as follows: Rail cars carrying raw grain would rotate into the track shed to unload. Grain could be dumped into a basement storage pit, or sucked out of the top of a rail car, or from the hold of a ship, by means of an “elevating leg,” a system of pulleys and narrow flatbeds—imagine a series of buckets attached to a conveyor belt—resembling a metal chute. Once inside the elevator, the grain was sorted (by hoppers), weighed (by scale), and cleaned and dried—by mammoth rack dryers, large, perforated metal surfaces through which hot air was blown. The grain was lifted to the top of the elevator, where another system sorted it into the various cylindrical storage tanks to await further distribution. When it came time to unload the grain, it flowed down from the storage tanks into another underground storage bin, where it was lifted again to the top of the elevator and deposited, by means of a loading spout, into a waiting rail car or barge.
The first steam-powered grain elevator was built in Buffalo in 1842 by Joseph Dart and his engineer, Robert Dunbar. Until Dart built his first elevator, grain had been unloaded from ships by hand, using buckets; his “elevating leg” system could do the job more than ten times as fast. The invention of the grain elevator revolutionized the unloading, storage, and shipping of grain, and as Buffalo became the world's greatest grain port, elevators were built up and down its waterfront. The British novelist Anthony Trollope, who visited Buffalo in 1861, compared them to dinosaurs with “great hungering stomachs and huge unsatisfied maws.” “Rivers of corn,” Trollope wrote, “are running through these buildings night and day. The secret of all the motion and arrangement consists, of course, in elevation. The corn is lifted up; and then lifted up can move itself, and arrange itself, and weigh itself, and load itself.”
In the spring of 1881, the Girard Point Storage Company contracted the building of its new Girard Point grain elevator facility to two local vendors and one Baltimore company for a sum of under half a million. No longer a serious contender for domination of grain shipment, Philadelphia nevertheless continued to amass steady profits from grain. The new facility was to have two elevators built to receive grain by rail and water. Rails ran straight up to the building, and ships could be filled with grain by docking within reach of distributing spouts attached to the storage bins. The masonry foundations were laid by Smith and McGow, of Philadelphia, for $40,000; the local firm of Cofrode and Saylor built platforms for the elevator and pier, as well as the superstructure of the elevator: things like sheathing windows, shipping and storage bins, the engine room, shipping spouts, conveyers and gangways. Nearly half a year later, Master and Reaney of Baltimore began to install the machinery: boilers, chains, pulleys, gallows frames, main drying engines, receiving and weighing hoppers, scales, distributing gear, and elevating machines. Meanwhile, Cofrode and Saylor had been contracted by Girard Point to lay railway in hemlock and pine caps, secured with pine and bolts. Girard Point, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, would lay rails.
The elevators at Girard Point ran for near the expected life span of a wooden elevator—twenty years. Soon thereafter, they began breaking down. One elevator showed signs, early on, of duress in its “trestle legs,” and by 1900 one pier at Girard Point had rotted away, spilling the contents of a company warehouse into the river. By 1906 one of the two elevators had rotted through completely, and the entire facility was quickly growing obsolete in the face of changing technology: Rail cars had grown wider, making entrance into the facility difficult; boats, too, had bloated and necessitated wider wharves at which to dock; and grain traders everywhere were swapping their wooden storage bins for those made of iron. By 1911, the facility was shut down; officials decided to raze the building and construct a new one in its place—the elevator which still stands at Girard Point.
After a failed campaign to move the elevator to a new location, plans began in March, 1912 for a new elevator at Girard Point. The new structure would have an expanded yard for rail cars and a new working house with a bushel capacity twenty times that of the old elevator. Tracks would be laid to expedite train traffic, belt conveyers were to be installed with increased capacity, and the elevators would be reinforced with concrete. Finally, all parts of the facility would be operated electrically.
The scale of the Girard Point facility, when it was finally officiated July 1,1914, far outdid initial projections. The elevator was built for a cost of $1.2 million in a months-long rapid-fire round of contract hiring and construction. It was, as the Pennsylvania Railroad announced to the public, “expected to prove the most rapid plant ever built for transferring grain from rail to water.” The elevator was built 500 feet from a 900 foot-long pier, “on both sides of which vessels can dock” allowing three steam vessels to load or unload simultaneously. The elevator plant itself consisted of a working house for the machinery, a track-shed, storage house and converter gallery, pier, power house and four dryers—built by Morris Grain Dryer and Coolers—the largest in the country. Twenty-thousand bushels of grain, once sorted and cleaned, could be dried by these coolers each hour.
The facility contained 135 circular tanks, with a combined capacity of 1,100,000 bushels, and a forty-four tank storage annex. Scales and hoppers were state of the art, and track was laid to accommodate a record 400 cars at one time. The Morris machinery to clean and sort grain was touted to “bring [the grain] to the highest grade” and “re-establish confidence in Philadelphia inspected grain shipments among foreign buyers.” In total, the machinery would have a handling capacity of 200,000 bushels per hour. Three short years later, in 1917, Girard Point Storage Company, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad, paid the railroad a debt of $1.934 million by turning over the deed to the elevator; upon acquiring the facility, the Pennsylvania Railroad expanded it again. The final capacity of the facility nearly doubled to 2,225,000 bushels. When completely filled, the elevator held enough grain to keep Philadelphia's entire population fed for a month. The elevator ran without incident for nearly forty years. Soon, its gains in efficiency and ability were running far ahead of the Port of Philadelphia's investment in grain. The costs of running the facility were eroding profit. The center of the grain industry had gradually moved west—to Chicago and Minneapolis, nearer to where the power of the Mississippi could be harnessed by flour mills. Big companies like General Mills and Pillsbury were founded, and changed the scale of manufacturing and the patterns of grain distribution. Trucks, improved waterways, and highways rerouted traffic away from older ports like Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Railroad intensified its focus on manufacturing, steel, and coal, catering to Pittsburgh, now the center of the steel industry. Philadelphia's position in the grain market was increasingly peripheral; the city was a victim of regional specialization.
In 1958, a Pennsylvania Railroad official identified only as “JBJ” wrote a memo recommending the sale of the elevator to four potential buyers—including the Tidewater Grain Company, a Delaware-based outfit that had been involved in the local grain trade for a quarter-century. Despite having handled 16 million bushels in the previous five years, the elevator had only reaped a $111,000 profit after all charges had been deducted, and the facility had depreciated in value by over a million dollars. The building needed $156,000 in deferred maintenance and more than $475,000 worth of work to bring it into compliance with safety codes. Increased labor costs could not be offset by the combination of increased handling changes and electrical fees, and net operating income was practically zero. To make matters worse, the mechanical car unloader and dryer would have to be replaced within five years. The railroad stood to gain nearly a million dollars from the sale. “We do not consider it practical,” JBJ wrote, “to continue this facility as a railroad company operation.”
Agreeing to handle at least 20 million bushels a year, four private companies offered to purchase the Girard Point facility in a joint venture. But all except Tidewater Grain eventually withdrew their offers on what must have seemed then a ludicrous venture. At the time of the Girard Point sale, Tidewater was “the largest grain firm … of its type in the United States.” Raymond J. Barnes, President of Tidewater Grain, had worked his way up the company ladder, from “errand boy” to “expert in both grain quality and the purchasing and merchandising of grain” to president of Tidewater Grain—and its principal stockholder. He also held the seat of president of the North American Grain Export Association. The grain industry called management at Tidewater “able and progressive.” The elevator at Girard Point was as good as sold. The facility was purchased for $750,000 in the early months of 1965.
With help from the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp (PIDC), a nonprofit partnership between the City of Philadelphia and its Chamber of Commerce, Tidewater Grain secured enough financing to do extremely well its first few years in operation. In the first four months of operation under Tidewater, the facility handled almost as many bushels of grain as it had in the last full year before the acquisition. Confidence bolstered, the PIDC upped financing and allowed Tidewater to purchase a “new material handling system” in order to increase the capacity of the facility by sixty percent; within its first working year, the new system enabled the unloading of 1.1 million bushels of grain, the elevator's new record for a single day.
The last records I could find of activity at the Tidewater Grain Co. elevator date from February, 1980. Pointedly enough, it was a moment of global unrest that brought the Tidewater grain elevator back into the news. Philadelphia longshoremen were ordered by a federal court to load grain onto a Soviet-bound ship that waterfront unions had boycotted since January, in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Complying with the court, union workers filled the SS Ocean Valour with 35,000 metric tons of corn. Sometime soon after that, the facility was sold to Ferry, Inc., based out of King of Prussia. In the fifteen short years since the much-lauded purchase of the facility, Tidewater Grain Co. had gone bankrupt. Ferry, Inc. never operated the facility. The only public record found at City Hall that of Ferry Inc's ownership of the building is a suit that the company filed against the City of Philadelphia, to appeal a tax assessment. In May, 2002, Ferry, Inc. sold the facility to Preston Ship and Rail, of Lehighton, Pa.
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The unofficial goal of our trip had been to make it to the uppermost roof, to stand on it and take in what we could of the city. Instead, we found a staircase inside the hull of one of the storage annex's cylindrical tanks that would take us halfway up. The stairwell was airless, clenched with rust, fast with rot and wound upwards into more darkness. Without a word, R and D started climbing. I followed, blanching. Eventually, we were deposited into a large room, the first with any light or air; the stairwell verily exhaled into this space. It was laid in the thick pipe-work of bins and columns (conduits that may have once been the “interstitial storage bins” listed in Girard Point files); columns that sunk straight back down to the main level we'd just left. Square in the middle of the room hung a ladder that rose up to a sudden peal of light—a roof. It was not the roof we were looking for, the highest point, but it was, without a doubt, a roof. At the very least, we told each other, we'd get a view we'd never seen before. Suspended high over a clear drop, with the mid-summer sun coming into what seemed like the most tender, most breathable spot in the building, I was glad to have come. Once on the roof, we sat there, R, D, and I scoping out the water and the Girard Point Bridge that ran by us. We goofed around and took pictures, tried to make what must have seemed an incongruous picture—three dots of living atop a long derelict industrial elevator—more invisible to the freeway.
The city boasted of its position as a world grain leader well into the 1960s, a century after the fact. In those fading years, officials and investors poured thousands of dollars into maintaining a marvel of industrial age engineering, as if they believed that the size and mass of the building alone could secure their place in the global grain trade. But the effort did little to keep the grain flowing through Philadelphia's ports. Every owner either sold the building at a loss, or went bankrupt as the river of grain slowed to a trickle, and then disappeared. The current owners have their own plan—to take walls that have yellowed over from eight decades of weather, and fit them in a jacket of brightly dyed plastic. Visitors to Philadelphia will be greeted by entreaties for potato chips and cell phones, images of goods made elsewhere and sold elsewhere. In this way, the new owners may finally be able turn a profit on a ruin.
Jessica Chiu lives in Philadelphia. She wishes to thank Christopher Baer, of Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, who helped with the research for this article.
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