Postcard from Pennsylvania: a look back at motoring heritage of Philadelphia

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Philadelphia is hundreds of miles away from "Motor City" Detroit, but this great winter scene taught us that the city in Pennsylvania can provide its own healthy slice of motoring heritage.

The picture itself shows the corner of 13th Street and Market Street in central "Philly" and was taken after a snowstorm in the 1930s. That’s all we know about the photograph, but upon searching for some more information about the cars shown, we found that Ford had a factory in Chester, on the outskirts of the city.

It started life as an office in 1906 but became a Ford plant in 1925, producing 150 Model Ts per day. It lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War when the factory was used to manufacture helmets, body armour and machine-gun trucks as well as prepare tanks.

In Philadelphia itself there was Philco, which had become the world’s largest manufacturer of car radios in 1926. They soon signed an exclusive contract with Ford to manufacture the radios for their cars. When they went bankrupt in 1960, Ford bought the remnants and continued production. Last but certainly not least there was Budd, the Philadelphia coachbuilder, which received a contract from Dodge in 1916, making no fewer than 70,000 all-steel tourer bodies that year alone. John and Horace Budd would become quite famous for their all-steel bodies, which were fitted to cars as exclusive as Ruxtons and Cords and even the odd Peerless, Isotta-Fraschini, and Mercedes-Benz.

Words: Jeroen Booij
Picture: source unknown

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