The Last Union Town

When laborers in Philadelphia organized themselves, they didn’t just feel strongly about work; they felt strongly about brotherhood. About language, and tradition, and Catholicism. And so when American industry rose and fell, shaping and shattering unions in other cities, Philadelphia’s unions only turned inward, and tightened their ranks.

“They would bring their children and nephews into the apprenticeship programs, into the unions,” Licht says. “They could control their membership and keep extraordinary loyalty.”

The unions found invincibility through homogeny. As long as their neighborhoods stayed true to their blood — stayed Irish, and Italian, and Polish — they could survive.


THE PURPOSE OF all that ethnic solidarity isn’t ethnic solidarity itself. That’s just a means of existence. And so the opposite — ethnic diversity — isn’t, in itself, the death of unions. No, the greatest threat, the one lurking behind ethnic inclusion, and the one wielded by City Council, is the threat of non-union competition. To understand the scale of devastation — the wreckage — a single non-union project can inflict on a union, we don’t have to look so deeply into the city’s past. The history of trade unions in Philadelphia reached a pivotal, defining moment in the early 1970s, with the violent saga of J. Leon Altemose.

In the summer of 1972, Altemose won a contract to build one of the largest developments in the region: the Valley Forge Plaza, a 24-acre hotel, office and retail complex that would cost $18 million — a whopping figure, at the time. Altemose believed in a variation of the “open shop” policy, in which his workers were free to choose whether they wanted to unionize. Philadelphia unions were as strong in the suburbs as they were in the city back then. They wanted a “closed shop” — union members only — and Altemose offered a split: 70 percent for union workers, the remaining 30 percent for his regular crew.

The offer enraged Tom LeGrand, a former boxer and plumber, and then head of the area’s Building Trades Council. “I don’t represent 70 percent of nothing,” he told a television crew.

Altemose installed a mile-long chain-link fence around his work site, and proceeded without the unions. He started carrying a pistol, which he practiced shooting while wearing his coat and tie.

He and his workers received threats — such as acid in their kids’ faces — if the work continued. Altemose installed a device on his car so he could start it by remote control each morning in his driveway.

In June, a thousand union men showed up in Valley Forge, wearing hard hats. They trampled over the chain-link fence and began what the state Supreme Court later called “a virtual military assault,” using color-coded smoke bombs to designate targeted areas, along with firebombs and — incredibly — hand grenades.

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