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<\/a><\/div>\nWhether it was the poor conditions of the site or a tough winter or contractors\u2019 graft, preparatory construction began to drag on interminably, leading Congress to investigate the goings on at Hog Island.\u00a0By February of 1918, seven months after the issuance of Hog Island\u2019s contract, a New York Times<\/em> reporter touring the site was surprised to hear no sound of rivets on steel and only 12 of the planned 50 shipways completed.[1]<\/sup> The Shipping Board\u2019s chief constructor had investigated the site a month earlier and cynically announced that it would be a wonder if the yard produced a ship \u201cat all\u201d in 1918.\u00a0Compounding the frustration was the mounting cost of doing nearly anything on Hog Island, mainly the result of the cost-plus-profit contract system that placed expediency before oversight.\u00a0Initially, the American International Corporation estimated the cost of the yard at $35,000,000.\u00a0By the time the first ship came off the ways on December 3, 1918\u2014almost a month after the Armistice\u2014the cost of constructing the site had ballooned to $66 million.\u00a0In their defense, the officers of the American International Corporation began to take a long view of the utility of the site.\u00a0Perhaps not of great service to the war effort, Hog Island would be a boon to Philadelphia.\u00a0At a meeting of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of the American International Shipbuilding Corporation promised postwar employment for 100,000 Philadelphians.\u00a0Hog Island, he argued, would make Philadelphia the greatest shipbuilding center in the world.[2]<\/sup><\/p>\n \n Despite the rancor surrounding the yard\u2019s construction and operation, Hog Island only existed because of the backbreaking labor of nearly 30,000 workers laboring throughout the cold winter of 1917-1918.\u00a0Before the canteens and the YMCA, there were rough accommodations and hardship.\u00a0Steam injections softened the frozen ground before workers could excavate for sewer lines.\u00a0Other workers waded into the cold Delaware to dig out the channels for the shipways.\u00a0Simultaneous to the attention-grabbing headlines of mismanagement and corporate greed was the untold story of a unique identity forming among the \u201cHoggies\u201d.\u00a0They worked among their friends\u2014blacks, Italians, Polish, Irish, and Germans\u2014all under the glaring eyes of the foreman, the engineer, and the military policeman.\u00a0And though they may have lived in barracks near where they worked, they brought their traditions, faith, and foods such as the bulky fortifying sandwich that took on the island\u2019s name.\u00a0On December 23, 1918, the boys band from St. Francis Xavier-Holy Name parishes played for a flag raising in the bitter cold.\u00a0During their down time, the Hog Islanders squared off on the gridiron against the other military installations up and down the river.\u00a0Much like the soldiers in the field, the \u201cHoggies\u201d who worked the shipways during the war were forced to coexist and cooperate, drawing strength from the uniqueness of their difficult work.[3]<\/sup><\/p>\n \n Although massive preparation time meant that the $66 million Hog Island Yard failed to produce a single ship during wartime, the yard continued its contract assembling 122 ships from prefabricated parts.\u00a0Most of these sturdy utilitarian Hog Islanders saw action in World War II but suffered high losses.\u00a0Despite assurances that Hog Island would turn Philadelphia into the Clyde of America, the shipways went silent in 1921 and the timbering and piers beginning to rot, vegetation growing up through the corduroy roads.\u00a0In 1925, the City purchased land near Hog Island for a municipal airfield to handle the growing traffic in passenger planes.\u00a0Eyeing the derelict Hog Island property to the south with its rail lines and shipways still intact, members of the Philadelphia Business Progress Committee began advocating for an air-marine-rail terminal on the site of the old shipyard.\u00a0In 1930, the City paid $3 million for the flat, well-prepared Hog Island site.\u00a0As the airport expanded, its runways devoured the entire Hog Island shipyard\u2014one monstrous technological machine consuming another.<\/p>\n \n <\/br> Whether it was the poor conditions of the site or a tough winter or contractors\u2019 graft, preparatory construction began to drag on interminably, leading Congress to investigate the goings on at Hog Island.\u00a0By February of 1918, seven months after the issuance of Hog Island\u2019s contract, a New York Times reporter touring the site was surprised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historic-sites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n[2] James J. Martin, \u201cThe Saga of Hog Island, 1917-1920: The Story of the First Great War Boondoggle,\u201d The Saga of Hog Island: And Other Essays in Inconvenient History<\/span><\/em> (<\/span><\/em>Colorado Springs, Co: Ralph Myles, 1977). http:\/\/tmh.floonet.net\/articles\/hogisle.shtml<\/a>
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\n[3] \u201cHog Island,\u201d Philadelphia Record Photograph Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.\u00a0Although there are contrary claims, linguist William Labov has demonstrated that the lexical root of the word \u201choagie\u201d was \u201chog-\u201c or \u201chogg\u201d after World War I.\u00a0See William Labov, \u201cPursuing the Cascade Model,\u201d 25 November 2002, http:\/\/www.ling.upenn.edu\/~wlabov\/Papers\/PCM.html<\/a>.\u00a0This is also borne out in Eames, Edwin and Howard Robboy. 1967. \u201cThe sociocultural context of an\u00a0American dietary item.\u201d The Cornell Journal of Social Relations<\/em> 2:63-75, p. 4.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"