PHILADELPHIA — Crescentville looks like a neighborhood from the 1950s, except for all the “For Sale” signs. This blue-collar section of northeast Philadelphia is filled with rows of tidy, two-story brick homes with metal awnings and an occasional ceramic squirrel. Children spin Hula-Hoops on the street and run through the misty rainbows of lawn sprinklers.
But the troubles of the 1990s have arrived within the ill-defined boundaries of Crescentville, where the residential neighborhood bumps against a ghostly industrial area with empty warehouses, closed manufacturing plants and a boarded-up supermarket.
Of all the corporate closings, the one with the most emotional punch is coming at the end of this month, when Mrs. Paul’s Kitchens, the frozen-seafood company that has been a Philadelphia institution for decades, will shut its doors and take 504 jobs to Omaha, Neb.
“It feels bad,” said Thomas Matthew, 49, a city employee who lives in Crescentville, noting that many of his neighbors had spent their entire working lives at Mrs. Paul’s and felt betrayed.
In recent years, the recession and corporate consolidations have cost several thousand Crescentville residents their jobs at the Pathmark supermarket, Sealtest Foods dairy-processing plant, the 3M Co. plant, Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Exide Battery. And the neighborhood got a bad scare earlier this year when the Pentagon recommended that a naval supply depot at the northern edge of the community be shut down. But the federal base-closing commission recently gave the station and its 4,500 workers a reprieve.
Philadelphia has seen its once-strong manufacturing base shrink as the city’s economy has become more dependent on service industries, including health services. In 1950, 1 in 3 workers held manufacturing jobs; now that ratio is 1 in 10 and dropping.
The closings in Crescentville have rocked the neighborhood, shuttered some nearby shops and encouraged urban blight, which is creeping inexorably closer to Philadelphia’s outlying neighborhoods from the inner city. Even city services are declining, contends the Rev. Peter D. Burke, pastor of St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church.
“Trash collectors don’t always come,” he said, “and people who are moving in aren’t voters, so they don’t call their council people and complain.” Each month, he said, about 25 families of Irish and German heritage leave his parish and are replaced by Asian and Hispanic families, who, he added, are less likely to complain about the decline in services.
He said widespread unemployment and an increase in the number of minimum- wage jobs had cast a “whole depression” over the people of Crescentville.
Residents say they never thought that Mrs. Paul’s would close, especially since the plant was refurbished just last fall after a fire.
The frozen-seafood business grew from a concession in a local bar into a national brand name, and in the process, the company and its founder, Edward J. Piszek, became Philadelphia institutions.
Piszek, who sold the business to the Campbell Soup Company in 1980, said in a recent interview that he started out in 1946 with $350 and a recipe for deviled crab cakes.
Sales for what Mrs. Paul’s advertising calls its “crispy, crunchy, breaded” fish products peaked in 1985, then declined 5 percent to 10 percent each year as diet-conscious consumers began eating less fried food, said Elizabeth Hanlin, a spokeswoman for Campbell’s.
In February the company announced that it would close the Philadelphia plant and move its operations to Omaha as part of a consolidation program that would cost the company $300 million.
Workers say that Campbell Soup pays a good wage, from $8 to $14 an hour, and — until it announced the closing of Mrs. Paul’s — was a good employer.
John and Nancy McGlynn live a few blocks from the plant, and they work different shifts so they do not have to hire a baby sitter for their three small children.
“I’ve worked there 13 years, since I got out of high school,” said McGlynn, who is 31 and operates a packaging machine. “We live from check to check, and the couple thousand in severance pay won’t last long. I don’t know how we will pay the mortgage with minimum-wage jobs.”
