NEW WATERFRONT PARKLAND

This is the result of the “most complex” economic development transaction in the history of the city.

In order to satisfy all parties, PIDC purchased 40 acres of the Frankford Arsenal property for $12 million from Hankin. It provided an easement across that property so the Fish & Boat Commission can access the boat berth on the waterfront. It ceded some city-owned parkland adjacent to the Fish & Boat parcel. This required the approval not only of the city but also of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the National Park Service.

In exchange, PIDC transferred to the city an industrial parcel it owns on the waterfront edge of the Philadelphia Coke Co. site. That parcel, which will now come under the control of the local Dept. of Parks and Recreation, will become part of the trail that the city hopes will one day stretch the length of the Delaware River from the northern city line to the mouth of the Schuylkill.

“In the end what you’ll end up having is three green facilities along the river of some scale,” said Tom Dalfo, describing the Fish & Boat property, the new trail space adjacent to Cokies, and a boat launch further north in Tacony as a string of pearls that will connect with trail space on the Central Delaware.

In addition, Dietz & Watson got 22 acres to expand its facility, and PIDC ended up with an additional 18-acre parcel that it plans to market to other industrial clients.

Dietz will pay PIDC roughly half of the $12 million it spent to purchase the property from Hankin. In addition, the state has kicked in $2 million in the form of a Pennsylvania First grant and a $125,000 for workforce training. Dietz can also apply for up to $12.25 million in state loans from the Machine and Equipment Loan Fund, the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority, and a grant through the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP).

“It works out as a win/win/win, and that’s why we fought so hard to try to make it work,” Dalfo said.

But the Cokies property still sits vacant, lined on most sides with residential houses. Though the property is still zoned for residential use, officials said its owner, National Grid, is now marketing the property to industrial clients. Henon and PIDC are involved in that endeavor.

“My constituents need to fit into this—I represent them,” Henon wrote in an email. “The Coke site is a great example. It’s a huge, abandoned and blighted property that’s been in search of a solution for years. It can’t remain empty, and the community needs to be a part of the process of what happens with it.”

Mike Cooper said the hardest part about attracting industry to the city is convincing both companies and residents that the city can handle industrial uses alongside residential and commercial ones.

“The perception that Philadelphia can’t do both is what we constantly try to keep educating folks about,” Cooper said.

“People don’t believe that,” he added.

Cooper and Henon both said that the Planning Commission and community groups should be involved in deciding what happens to the Cokies site down the line. The Planning Commission has slated the North Delaware for a future district planning process through part of the Philadelphia2035 citywide remapping.

“You can’t have a site this big [Cokies] in a city as densely populated as this sit vacant permanently,” said Cooper.

ARSENAL OF LUNCHMEAT

In 1942, a Bulletin reporter wrote a story about 19 grandmothers who were employed in the cafeteria at the Frankford Arsenal making lunch for thousands of workers.

“One way of looking at it,” the story began, “the sandwich is as mighty as the monkey wrench.”

The final stop on the tour was Dietz & Watson. In a conference room on the second floor we met CEO Lou Eni, who’d agreed to show us around the plant. Since the Jersey plant was destroyed last September, Dietz has been storing extra product at the Philadelphia site. The space is overloaded, Eni said, and the company needs to expand. Its new development on the arsenal properties will bring 110 new workers to the city.

I couldn’t bring my camera or notebook into the plant, but I took these notes as soon as I got home.

We suited up in blue lab coats, hairnets, beardnets, and mesh shoe covers and our tour guide took us down to the plant. We began at the end of the process, in a room where boxes were being pushed across conveyor belts to be labeled. When we walked in, I was reminded of a job I worked briefly in college at a suburban grocery store, particularly of unloading delivery trucks with a mechanical pallet mover. It was the faint smell of meat and cure, salt and vinegar that reminded me.

From there we moved into a room where beef roasts were being removed by hand from the bags they were cooked in, covered in a spice mixture. The meat, top round beef cuts, was pushed onto a conveyor belt to be vacuum sealed, labeled, and sent to delis for slicing to order.

Then there were hot dogs being removed from their casings and vacuum-packed for sale. Through a door—the floors between each room are covered roughly with a cleaning agent to kill bacteria that might otherwise travel between rooms and cross-contaminate raw food and cooked food—we came into a room full of hot dogs, sausages, and other forcemeats hanging in long strings from portable shelves. These links were in synthetic casings; elsewhere there were hot dogs and sausages in natural casings.

Eni’s voice quickened here as he pointed us to the process of removing the synthetic casings from the links. Each long string of links, carrying probably two dozen links apiece, was dumped onto a tray, one at a time. Then a worker fed the first link into a machine that uses tiny razor blades to peel the casings off the links. As the machine started working, the pile of links flew quickly off the tray where it was resting, like a coil of rope racing off the deck of a boat after someone drops the anchor. This is Eni’s favorite part of the process.

Onto the blast chillers, rooms set at 15 degrees fahrenheit where meat was stored immediately after leaving the oven, in order to stop the cooking. Like a chef dunking vegetables in ice after blanching them to maintain the color, Eni said. He then showed us hams being glazed by hand with a mixture of cinnamon, cardamom and other spices.

Then, through a puddle of antibacterial, to the raw room.

Dozens of red briskets sat in piles in plastic carts. Hams marinated—ham upon ham in a mixture of salt, water, spices and nitrates—in giant open-air drums. I have never seen so many hams. One worker was cranking a wheel to open the valve of what looked like a giant cement mixer, releasing hundreds of hams streaming into a cart. The mixer was used to massage the hams. If you picture a hundred hams sliding out of a cement mixer, you are picturing this correctly.

Then a machine that sliced ham thin and laid the slices in weighted piles, passed them down a conveyor to be packaged, and passed the packages onto a giant robot that sucked them up and laid them neatly in cardboard boxes.

We saw how sausage is made. Large cuts of meat chopped up in a giant blender and set off in piles to be forced into their casings.

There were also carts full of gray-brown hot dog mixture, a slurry of meat so finely processed that it looked like puddles of melted ice cream or wavy piles of unrisen bread. In fact the word Eni used to describe the mixture was “dough.”

Finally we walked through a room used to store spices in secret mixtures and out into the parking lot, overlooking the half-demolished Frankford Arsenal.

When we got outside, Holly Reagan, a staff member in Councilwoman María Quiñones-Sánchez’ office, who had joined us on the tour, which spanned parts of the 7th District as well as the 6th, said something like, “I thought I would be grossed out by that, but I still kind of want to eat a hot dog.”

So did I.