Rust Belt - Coastal Cities
With Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore based early and firmly on commerce and the financial exchanges it stimulated, these ports and their satellites began to accumulate population long before manufacturing became dominant in the U.S. economy. Although manufacturing was drawn to the eastern coast by the promise of matchless local markets, tremendous labor supplies, and easy access to water transportation, the economies of most of Megalopolis's cities maintained a distinctly professional character.
New England was the exception by developing manufacturing at the same time that its ports were growing. Shipbuilding industries thrived along the coast and generated countless subsidiary manufacturing operations needed to supply such a complex industrial undertaking. When factory industry began to grow in importance elsewhere in America, New England had several advantages that kept manufacturing significant, the most important of which was the ready availability of power in the area's small but abundant rivers.
Boston, as the regional capital of New England, characterizes many of the changes in this portion of the continental core. Boston's apparel and leather industries, as well as shipbuilding in nearby Connecticut, are remnants of an earlier period, but most growth in the last 50 or so years has occurred in electronic components and machinery. The harbor and the facilities found there remain excellent, but industry in New England now ships most of its products by land, either to markets in the rest of the United States or south to New York for export through Megalopolis's primary port.
Given New York's primacy among American harbors, manufacturing industries found proximity to this mode of international commerce and the population cluster around it to be very advantageous. So strong was this pull that New York's industrial mix became extremely diversified. Many industries were located on Manhattan until after the beginning of the 20th century. The increasing demand for space by the even more space-intensive office businesses gradually pushed the heavier industry to the very margins of lower Manhattan or beyond the island's confines into the New Jersey tidal marshes across the Hudson River.
The New York metropolitan economy has been dominated for some time by office industries. These are the headquarters for activities of dozens of companies and corporations, the banking and insurance cluster, publishing houses, and all the other service and control centers that require a worldwide information network and the facilities to transmit their responses rapidly.
Philadelphia and Baltimore, so different in industrial inheritance and urban character, have shown indications during recent years that they may be becoming more alike. Philadelphia's manufacturing base is almost as diversified as New York's, although there is a greater emphasis on food-processing industries and on shipbuilding and ship repair.
The growth of Philadelphia's industrial base suffered somewhat from the presence of New York's better harbor and superior access to the interior only 120 kilometers to the north. But Philadelphia's better access to the coal and steel regions of western Pennsylvania, its respectable port facilities, and its heritage as an early political and cultural center in the United States have maintained the Philadelphia metropolitan region's growth within Megalopolis. Baltimore, on the other hand, has always been on the periphery of the Manufacturing Core region. Like Philadelphia, its port possessed good rail connections with the coal and steel regions of the interior, and Baltimore's industrial mix reflects this. The manufacture of transport machinery is also important in Baltimore.
Two additional industrial sectors--metals fabrication and chemicals--are well represented in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and they emphasize the coastal connections of these regions with the heavy industrial interior.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
