Freihofer Baking Company

The Nicetown complex stood at Twentieth and Indiana streets, at what is now 3001 N. 20th Street. ^[2] A rail spur ran beneath West Clearfield Street across the full width of the property and continued over North 20th Street into adjoining land the company held, feeding flour, sugar, and yeast directly to the ovens. ^[2]

The wagons carried heated metal to keep loaves hot in transit, delivering warm bread to doorsteps at a time when most city residents walked to a neighborhood bakery. ^[2] Drivers made a pre-dawn bread run and returned later in the day with cakes, raspberry pies, and fresh-ground coffee. Home delivery ended on January 22, 1972, when the last routemen retired. ^[2]

Expansion and the second generation

In March 1913, William, Edwin, and Frank Freihofer opened a plant in Troy, New York, a venture that grew into the company’s center of gravity. ^[2] By 1914 the firm employed close to a thousand people across its two main locations. A third Philadelphia-area plant followed in the 1920s at Fifty-second and Florence streets in West Philadelphia, extending distribution to Chester and Wilmington. ^[2]

William handled the financial side and pursued institutional accounts aggressively, landing supply contracts with prominent city restaurants including those in the Reading Railroad Terminal; he also served as president of the Northwestern Trust Company at Ridge and Columbia avenues. ^[2] His son Stanley joined the company in 1916 and took on management responsibilities. ^[2]

The Liberty Loaf

During the First World War the company introduced the Liberty Loaf, formulated to meet federal wartime ingredient restrictions while retaining enough dairy to keep the taste customers expected. ^[2] Freihofer’s promoted it as the only bread carrying a War Department endorsement and built a newspaper and magazine campaign around a voluntary conservation pledge, framing the purchase as a contribution to the war effort. ^[2]

Closure, reuse, and demolition

Postwar, the company’s plants in New York, New Jersey, and Delaware outproduced Nicetown, and operations and headquarters consolidated at Troy. ^[2] By 1956 the nearly fifty-year-old complex was considered obsolete and, boxed in by a dense industrial neighborhood, had no room to expand; it closed that year and was sold two years later. ^[2]

A local textile firm took the building in 1959, filling the floors with sewing tables and hundreds of workers, and it changed hands again in the 1970s. ^[2] By the 1990s it held arcade machines for rent and sale, then served as a storage warehouse; the supermarket chain Kelly’s Korner was the last tenant before the building was abandoned in 2003. ^[2]

In 2008 the ruin appeared as a murder-scene location in Law Abiding Citizen — a fitting turn given that Sigmund Lubin’s Lubinville studio, one of the country’s earliest film complexes, occupied a square block directly across the street from 1910 until it burned four years later. ^[2] The Nicetown buildings were demolished over the fall and winter of 2022, with the site cleared by April 2023. ^[2]