Nicetown-Tioga: Philadelphia's Steel Neighborhood

The neighborhood of Nicetown-Tioga takes its name from Hans te Neues, a Mennonite who purchased land here in sixteen ninety-nine. For most of its early history it was farmland. The arrival of the railroad changed that, drawing factories that would make this corner of North Philadelphia a center of American industrial production.

Midvale Steel, whose roots go back to eighteen sixty-seven, made steel and ordnance here. The Budd Company manufactured railcars. Both plants ran full tilt during World War Two.

After the war, deindustrialization hollowed the neighborhood out. Midvale closed in the nineteen seventies. The factories are gone, but Nicetown's name endures as a small, accidental memorial to a Dutch Mennonite farmer who could not have imagined the steel mills that would replace his fields.