Biking into Baltimore History: Part 2 – The Bottlecap Capital of the World
In anticipation of Saturday’s May Day Roll, co-sponsored by Baltimore Brew and Baltimore Bicycle Works, here’s a sketch of our second destination.
Crown factory at dusk (Photo by Mark Reutter)
by MARK REUTTER
Like so much of old Baltimore, it’s a bit ghostly, especially when the evening sun reflects off its opaque windows and casts a weird rosy glow above a neighborhood it once called its own.
But imagine what this brick behemoth rising over today’s Greektown used to be like – a factory employing 5,000 people bent on making a product that nearly everyone touches and twists while hardly giving it a second thought … bottlecaps.
Before it closed in 1958, the Crown Cork & Seal plant was the biggest bottlecap factory in the world, capable of producing 40 billion bottlecaps a year.
“Crown City”
The plant was the brainchild of William Painter, a Baltimore businessman who in 1892 had invented a flanged metal cap that could keep beer and other carbonated drinks (such as newly created Coca-Cola) fresh and fizzy in a bottle.
Calling his invention “the crown cap,” Painter formed Crown Cork & Seal. The company quickly outgrew its first manufacturing plant on Guilford Ave., and in 1904, bottlecap operations were relocated to the far end of Eastern Ave., then a dirt road in Baltimore County.
Painter was succeeded by another Baltimorean, Charles E. McManus, who invented a composite cork that provided a better lining for the bottlecap. McManus organized the New Process Cork Co. and merged it with Crown Cork to produce a true colossus of caps.
[slidepress gallery=’2-bottlecap’]
The facility on Eastern Ave. grew into a maze of buildings interconnected by conveyor belts, pipes, and even an in-house railway. So many people were employed at the plant that the area we now call Greektown was then nicknamed “Crown City.”
The recipe: cork, steel and low-paid women workers
McManus, who ruled the company from 1927 until his death in 1946, made sure that CCS controlled every facet of production. Bales of raw cork from cork-oak forests in Spain and Portugal were shipped to Baltimore, where they were ground, mixed with adhesive binders, held in storage bins to season, and manufactured into thin wafers.
The plant had its own steel mill where semi-finished “black plate” was reduced to the exact thinness and temper (hardness) needed for fabricating into crown shells.
Shells by the hundreds of thousands were brought on overhead conveyors to assembly machines, which applied a special adhesive to permanently stick the wafer of cork on the metal shell.
Since nearly 95 percent of all bottlecaps were decorated with colors, the plant had its own art department to design caps and lithographing presses to apply the artwork.
Loading bottlecaps into boxes. The factory shipped out 24 railway cars of bottlecaps a day. (Enoch Pratt)
Like the textile mills in Woodberry, Crown Cork depended on low-paid female employees. Women visually inspected the finished crowns as they rushed out of the assembly machines, and they also sorted and graded cork. Men tended the machines and handled the steel-finishing and packing sides of the enterprise.
Abrupt Shutdown
Employment boomed, with a payroll reaching 5,000, until 1958, when the plant was abruptly closed. A year before, a Philadelphia business group had staged a boardroom coup and taken over the company, which had racked up large debts.
Corporate headquarters were moved to Philadelphia, and cap-making duties were transferred to a decentralized network of plants around the country and overseas. A machine shop and warehouse operations continued until the 1980s.
Isolated today from Eastern Ave, which bypasses the main building in an open cut between Haven and Lehigh streets, the plant has been partitioned into small units.
There a group of blue-collar pioneers — ranging from artisan coffee roasters to cabinet makers and welders — work among the cavernous halls and now-silent sorting rooms of post-industrial Baltimore.
TOMORROW: “In Baltimore Town the Boys are Rough” – The Waterfront Strike of 1936.
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Links to the full series: BIKING INTO BALTIMORE’S HISTORY
Part 1 (4/28/10): Born by the Falls
Part 2 (4/29) : The Bottlecap Capital of the World
Part 3 (4/30): Conflict on the Docks