Quaker Lace
The Quaker Lace Company of Philadelphia, whose lace designs and samples inspired the designers and artists featured in this exhibition, was regarded for over a century as the producer of America’s most desirable lace goods. The company began life in 1889 as the Bromley Manufacturing Company, founded by three sons of John Bromley – an English carpet weaver who immigrated to Philadelphia in the 1840s and became the patriarch of one of the city’s largest textile enterprises. One of the first major endeavors in America to produce machine-made lace, the Bromleys relied on the profits of their carpet business to let them import expensive lace looms from Nottingham, England, and the skilled weavers to run them. Becoming the Lehigh Manufacturing Company in 1894, the company moved into a vast factory complex at 4th Street and Lehigh Avenue in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood and later opened another factory at 22nd and Lehigh, said to be the largest in the world. Finally incorporated as the Quaker Lace Company in 1911, the firm quickly led the nation’s lace industry through its savvy marketing of machine-made lace as a stylish accoutrement for middle-class homes and women’s fashions. In its heyday in the early 20th century, Quaker Lace even competed on the international stage, threatening the preeminence of Nottingham, from whence they had gathered their looms, weavers, and designers. As one of the firm’s marketing brochures declared: “America has taste and individuality that should find expression in an American lace industry. Why not try to develop here a more perfect lace than that produced in Nottingham and Calais, the lace markets of the world?”
The success of Quaker Lace depended in part on their ability to meet their middle-class customers’ desires for both luxury and durability. As the mechanization of lace-making offered average Americans the novel opportunity to adorn themselves and their homes with what was previously a luxury item, the firm’s marketing materials focused on instructing potential buyers in the styles and designs “appropriate” to different settings, and offering their female consumers specific advice on how to utilize lace trims to create stylish fashions. There was, in fact, “no part of a woman’s wardrobe which may not be beautified by the use of Quaker Laces,” and a 1913 brochure offered suggestions for incorporating lace into gowns, coats, hats, lingerie, bridal wear, and maid’s uniforms, as well as lamp shades, pillow cases, curtains, and table linens. The firm also touted the “originality, authoritativeness and timeliness” of their designs, created by designers lured away from the English and European industries, such as Frederick Vessey. Yet the firm also recognized their buyers’ demand for practicality, and brochures emphasized the technical features of Quaker Lace nets which allowed their curtains to resist pulls, stretching, and distortion after washing, without losing that essential quality of transparency. Even as architectural styles and interior design tastes began to shift away from lace curtains in the second quarter of the 20th century, Quaker Lace fought the trend, demonstrating examples of “correct curtains for modern architectural types,” and arguing that “a window unadorned remains just a ‘hole’ in the wall.” As the market for lace curtains continued to decline, the firm turned to producing utilitarian goods like camouflage and mosquito netting for the military for the war effort, while tablecloths, first produced in 1932, became their best-known product of the post-war era, even adorning a table in the Eisenhower White House.
Quaker Lace was not immune to shifts in the textile industry, however, and in the late 1980s, the Nottingham looms at the 4th and Lehigh factory fell silent, as manufacturing moved to plants in Lionville (Chester County), Pa., and Winthrop, Maine. The Philadelphia mill continued to be the center for bleaching, dying, cutting, and packaging of the world-famous Quaker Lace tablecloths and curtains, and many Kensington-area residents, including the neighborhood’s new Puerto Rican immigrants, worked there for decades. Innovative marketing helped the firm weather the decade, including licensing deals to reproduce early lace patterns for the Smithsonian and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the firm’s development of a chemical process that allowed their tablecloths or curtains to withstand dozens of launderings without losing their shape also contributed to their continued survival. The closure of many of the department stores that retailed the Quaker Lace products, however, proved too much for the firm, which finally declared bankruptcy in 1992. The name and patterns were purchased by Lorraine Linens, which continued to market Quaker Lace tablecloths and curtains until its own bankruptcy in 2007. The massive 4th street plant, abandoned after the bankruptcy, was destroyed by a devastating eight-alarm fire on September 19, 1994 which also forced hundreds of residents from their homes. The arson was ordered by drug dealers to end police surveillance from the structure, and was succeeded briefly by the creation of a “tent city” of displaced residents on the site. In 2003, the Julia de Burgos Middle School arose from the ashes to be the neighborhood’s new defining monument.
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