Industrial Site for Urban Manufacturer - Allentown, PA

From time to time, AEDC will spotlight properties that are particularly appropriate for urban manufacturers.

The building at 1130 Hanover Ave in Allentown, PA is an excellent site for light manufacturing in a dense urban environment. It features over 12,000 square feet of manufacturing space and offices for support staff. Two tailgate height dock doors and great access to US-22 and I-78, make this a great location for a successful manufacturer shipping a lot of product. Parking is available for approximately 20 cars, but with a dense neighborhood the right urban manufacturer may find that they can field a  staff of more than 20 without filling the lot. Manufacturing executives making frequent trips overseas to meet with export clients will find amazing access to Lehigh Valley International Airport as well. The building is in a neighborhood with a very high walk score, with many amenities for employees within a quarter-mile.
For more information about this site, see NAI Summit's website.

Manufacturing in Pennsylvania

Last week, Pennsylvania’s Industrial Resource Center Network issued a report titled Pennsylvania’s True Commonwealth: Manufacturing. You probably didn’t know because the Morning Call did not report on the story, despite the Lehigh Valley being a historically significant manufacturing center for both Pennsylvania and the nation. The report serves both as an overview of manufacturing’s contribution to our state economy and as a recommendation for future decisions related to strengthening that sector.


The report is the product of a research team led by the excellent Ned Hill of Cleveland State University (featured here in a great podcast from Smart City Radio). His team found that manufacturing is still competitive in Pennsylvania, but that it needs guidance to remain a force in the next economy. Even after the recent recession, manufacturing is responsible for almost 14% of the state’s industrial output, far more than any other industry, and employs over 600,000 Pennsylvanians, ranking it #4 among largest state employers. Pennsylvania manufacturing firms that did not shrink their workforce between 2006 and 2008 either employed 20 to 99 people or 250 to 499 people. Perhaps most importantly to the future, Pennsylvania manufacturers employ 22% of all “technology” jobs in the state. Locally, the team reported that most of the Lehigh Valley manufacturers operate in industries that are not very technology-intensive, principally electrical equipment manufacture and “other” transportation equipment manufacture.

Not surprisingly, given its sponsors, the team recommends continued investment in Industrial Resource Centers (IRCs) in Pennsylvania. They suggest that manufacturers must undergo enterprise transformation if they wish to remain competitive, and that the best tool available is the expertise offered by the state’s IRCs. These centers are funded in part by the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program of the National Institute of Science and Technology. Locally, our IRC is the Manufacturer’s Resource Center (MRC). They offer manufacturers an opportunity to learn new manufacturing techniques critical to improving productivity and competitiveness, including lean manufacturing.

Obviously, AEDC understands the importance of manufacturing to Allentown and our nation’s cities. AEDC’s Urban Made initiative is an additional support to the goals of the MRC. Urban Made is a way to promote our existing urban manufacturers and to communicate the benefits of manufacturing in dense urban environments. We think cities are a great home to those smaller manufacturers (employing from 20 to 99 workers) and that they are the best place to innovate. Cities make great environments for cost-conscious companies and force a manufacturer to think lean. Best of all, cities are great idea incubators and the collaborative environment facilitates new product development, another critical consideration for firms hoping to escape commoditization.


As a footnote, check out the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program's recent report on accelerating advanced manufacturing. What do they recommend? Investment in research (resource) centers.

ASGCO Manufacturing, Allentown Business of the Month

ASGCO's Allentown Plant

ASGCO Manufacturing, Inc., was recognized as the February 2011 “Business of the Month” at a press conference held at their downtown facility, located at 301 W Gordon Street.

The Business Recruitment and Retention Committee of Allentown Ahead selected ASGCO in recognition of their 40 years as a manufacturing leader in Allentown’s Center City and for their continued investment in the City of Allentown. ASGCO employs over 85 engineers, technicians, welders, material handlers and warehouse staff from an urban campus well integrated into the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. “ASGCO Mfg. Inc. is comprised of people who care about their jobs, spend the attention to detail that is necessary and above all we are full of talent and smart working Americans. We have Quality People and it takes that to manufacture quality products. Allentown has been our home for over 40 years and we want to continue in that tradition,” said Todd Gibbs, President of ASGCO.

ASGCO provides complete conveyor solutions to a variety of industries, including power generation, aggregate mining, paper production, and shipping. Their manufactured products include belts, belt cleaners, conveyor belt accessories, and safety equipment. Additionally, ASGCO has a large service division and provides engineering solutions to material conveyance.


ASGCO is a locally-owned and family-operated business with a manufacturing history spanning to 1970s. Founded by Alfred Gibbs in 1971, the company is currently managed by his son Aaron and Aaron’s son Todd. Todd was recently appointed President of ASGCO with Aaron maintaining his role as CEO.


The company has grown over the years by diversifying its products and expanding its service offerings. ASGCO takes care of the customer with “great quality products and exceptional service.” They can attribute their growth to making substantive productivity improvements for their clients, large and small.


Like other Allentown businesses, ASGCO is a great example of the quality of urban manufacturers and their importance to the local economy. ASGCO was chosen as an Allentown Business of the month for its commitment to Allentown and for being a model among urban manufacturers. Urban manufacturers provide excellent jobs to city residents that can reach the plant on foot or by bicycle, keep innovation native to America by continuing to produce things here, and are really the greenest of companies by continuing to invest in existing buildings rather than building anew. “Urban manufacturers, like ASGCO, are the future of the Lehigh Valley and Pennsylvania’s economy,” said Scott Unger, Executive Director of the Allentown Economic Development Corporation.


"The Business Recruitment and Retention Committee created the Business of the Month program because we believe outreach to and recognition of the extraordinary businesses in the City is one of the best ways to retain businesses in the City and encourage new ones to move here. As this program moves forward we plan to recognize businesses of all sizes and types and hope that community members will nominate other worthy recipients,” said Jack Gross, Committee Chair and Partner at Gross McGinley LLP. The Business Recruitment & Retention Committee will continue to review nominations for the award. Please send nominations to businessofthemonth@allentownahead.com along with a brief description of how the business exemplifies excellence.

Innovation in Urban Manufacturing

Our friends at the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation recently passed us a story from the New York Times that lamented the loss of manufacturing and the subsequent impact on innovation in the United States. At Allentown Economic Development Corporation, we are acutely aware of manufacturing’s importance to local economies, and are working to strengthen urban manufacturers and communicate the benefits of urban environments to manufacturers.


The article discussed the loss of entire industries in the United States with the recent closure of certain plants. When a Sherrill Manufacturing plant in upstate New York closed last year, it shuttered the US flatware manufacture industry. The story then tied the loss of such manufacturers to an overall trend of companies using imported components and to an industrial policy that diminished American innovation. It sprawls around a bit, but the final point is solid: that there is a link between our innovative capacity and our ability to make things.


Allentown and the Lehigh Valley have a long history of innovation, most notably the production of the transistor at Western Electric, but also seen through the patenting activity of companies like Air Products, Lutron, and the various iterations of LSI. Central to this history of technical improvements is our manufacturing base, and the quality of its output. We believe that as we continue to stimulate existing manufacturers to invent new ways of doing things, we will help the region start to lead again.

Manufacturing Space in Allentown

To that end, we have focused the efforts of our Bridgeworks Enterprise Center Small Business Incubation Program on manufacturing. We converted a 60,000 square foot former Mack Trucks plant into a multi-tenant industrial building with manufacturing suites ranging in size from 1,200 square feet to over 6,500 square feet. All of the manufacturing environments have space appropriate for small, creativity-driven industries and our entire organization is focused on helping those producers to be successful. From operating low-interest loan funds to providing technical assistance, AEDC is preparing itself to be an asset to urban manufacturers.


We have also pledged to promote urban environments as ideal locations for the next generation of entrepreneurial manufacturer. Urban environments offer a multitude of benefits to people who make things, but for the purposes of this post, consider the creative collaboration opportunities that come from chance encounters. When we have an agglomeration of manufacturers in a dense population, the opportunities to connect at the local bar or restaurant increase. These connections should result in increased joint ventures, supply chain improvements, and a community that draws other creatives in from around the world. These collaborations are the building blocks of innovation. Imagine where the possibilities could lead this region.


Rather than read stories about the loss of the next industry, let’s write stories about the creation of the next industry here in the Lehigh Valley. We’ll start small and with a lot of innovators buzzing together in close proximity to one another. They will live close to where they work and make a high-quality product in an old building in a dense urban environment. They will sell outside of our borders and attract other people like them as well as capital. Support our efforts to make this happen.

Job Creation and Entrepreneurial Development

On Friday we asked some questions about what type of entrepreneurs and companies would be targeted by a Lehigh Valley entrepreneurial development initiative. This stemmed from a group discussion hosted by Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation that covered a wide range of topics related to stimulating entrepreneurial activity and startups in our region. 


The group also asked itself about the relative merits of helping companies that create a lot of jobs locally versus companies that stay small and outsource the bulk of its activities. Many economic development organizations measure their success on job creation and are evaluated by the communities that they serve by the same metric. All economic developers understand that government/economic developers do not directly create jobs, but our efforts can facilitate the creation of jobs by private industry. The most visible way to do that is to recruit existing firms to the region, such as when Olympus America moved its North American headquarters to the Lehigh Valley. Another way is to assist existing firms with growth that requires them to bring in new employees. Growing companies like Eastern Surfaces in Allentown, benefit from low-interest loans to fund growth.


Another significant way to facilitate job creation is by helping early-stage entrepreneurs and startups get off the ground.

Industrial cluster focus or growth-concentrated strategy?

Today, AEDC participated in a group discussion focused on the development of programs and strategies to attract talent to the Lehigh Valley, retain our existing and future entrepreneurs, and assist the startups that will bring us a diverse workforce. We covered a range of important topics, from job creation to networking, and we want to share some of our thoughts here. The whole discussion is worthy of multiple blog posts, so we will tackle these topics over the course of the next few weeks.


To this point, the focus of most of the entrepreneurial development in the Lehigh Valley has been in the South Bethlehem Keystone Innovation Zone (KIZ). Dovetailing the efforts of the State's Department of Community and Economic Development with the existing competencies and research priorities of Lehigh University, the KIZ invested in companies from a group of targeted clusters with great success. As entrepreneurial development initiatives expand beyond the shadow of Lehigh, the focus will shift. The group--which included entrepreneurs from the KIZ and from Allentown's Bridgeworks Enterprise Center--suggested spending time with growth entrepreneurs of all industries, rather than targeting particular industries.


You've read about these clusters here before: life sciences, financial services, healthcare, technology intensive manufacturing. Those clusters are industries in which the Lehigh Valley should have a competitive advantage over other national and global regions. Our region should be driving innovation in those fields and should have increased productivity as a result of the clustering. Most importantly to this discussion, the presence of those clusters should stimulate new firm development. Although not all of those clusters are central to the economic vitality of Allentown, we are not so sure that as a region we should back away from a focus on entrepreneurial development within those industries. We are competing with every other region in the country and the world for the talents of entrepreneurs. Every place would like to see more high-growth companies decide to locate within its borders. We need to be flexible in our efforts to stimulate firm creation by all entrepreneurs in the region, but we should not abandon the industrial clusters in which we have a competitive advantage.


The discussion will bear this out, but we think that the focus should remain on our industrial clusters, but that we should make sure that the efforts toward improvement can benefit entrepreneurs of all stripes. Infrastructure improvements and network improvements will help connect our future startups to the necessary resources that they need to launch.

Urban Manufacturing Site Availability

AEDC will sometimes use this blog to highlight properties that would make good candidates for investment in the City of Allentown. In most cases, we will feature properties that could host urban manufacturing and discuss the benefits of those sites.


One of Allentown's historic manufacturing districts is situated along Sumner Avenue, north of Tilghman Street. This area includes a variety of existing manufacturers and wholesale suppliers occupying buildings constructed during Allentown's boom years. With a labor force of over 10,000 people and great access to markets, this neighborhood is a great location for urban manufacturing.

One site in this neighborhood is 713 N 13th Street. This building is the former home of George Humidac Sr.'s Mechanical Services Company. George was one of the great innovative minds of the Lehigh Valley, contributing to the development and manufacture of a wide range of products. The manufacturing site is home to a 19,200 square foot, 2-story building with a single drive-in door. Being in the city, power and water are plentiful, with 3-phase electric service and City Water and sewer. A nice feature of this property is a paved parking lot for out-of-town employees, but with so many employable people within walking distance, the lot may not be needed for parking. The site is also walkable for a variety of services, and just down the street from Bellisimo Ristorante and Rookie's Restaurant, making a great place for lunch and a great spot for an after work beer. Finally, the site is only 1.6 miles from US-22, making shipping and receiving no problem.


This site is a great location for companies interested in being part of Urban Made, focused on urban manufacturing. For more information, contact Hawley Realty.

What We've Learned While Stimulating Collaboration

When AEDC first started exploring the idea of creating collaborative workspace in the Lehigh Valley, we looked at it from the perspective of our space. As we have planned, we have significantly shifted our thinking about Hive 4A.


We manage the Bridgeworks Enterprise Center, a 60,000 square foot former Mack plant that we converted to a 45,000 square foot multi-tenant building in 1988. The intent of the renovations was to create space suitable for hosting a light manufacturing business incubation program, which we have done for over 20 years now. Over the past few years, in part as a result of the recession, we have seen two of our units remain totally empty with no prospects. These two spaces, totaling almost 6,000 square feet have some limitations that make them poor fits for manufacturing businesses, and we struggled to lease them.


At the same time that we explored creative ways to lease space in our building, we also started thinking about the core mission of the incubation program. We have to create jobs, and one of the greatest ways to do that is to help new businesses get started. It was clear to us that we needed to stimulate entrepreneurship.


So when we read an article talking about the rise of tinkering amid the crisis, we saw it as an opportunity to fill our space and stimulate entrepreneurship with one initiative. Thus began our effort to create makerspace in Allentown. As we proceeded thinking about this type of organization, we also learned about coworking space and added it to our to-do list.


But during planning, we have learned a very important lesson: collaborative workspace is SO much more about the collaborators than it is about the space. Don't think for a second that we want to present second-rate space, but as we've talked to entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs, job-seekers, and independent professionals, we have seen that this is going to be about the individuals that make up the space. We've met with some really talented people with exciting ideas and we really look forward to seeing all of those individuals working together and growing their businesses.


If you are interested in this process, please join us at the space to learn more about how you can be part of this community.

Urban Manufacturing and Natural Resource Protection

AEDC's goal of promoting urban manufacturing gives advocates of cities and economic development a lot to wrap their arms around, but it should also appeal to those tasked with the preservation of land and nature.


Firms that choose to operate in urban environments build on the industrial legacy of cities, while protecting our natural resources. For over 50 years, developers have built industrial parks and commerce parks in greenfields in a misguided attempt at stimulating economic growth at the expense of economic development. The construction of these parks sparked unhealthy patterns of exurban sprawl that exacerbated the threat to our natural environments. At the same time that American manufacturing began to control its air and water emissions, suburban development erased the gains presented by those controls by damaging new sectors of ecological resources. Capping off all of the problems of suburban manufacturers is the car-dependency of the facilities, increasing the vehicle miles traveled in the communities with an overabundance of this type of development.


Now, as firms that expand or relocate consider their next building, many should consider urban environments. The availability of manufacturing facilities in cities eliminates the need to further build in our country's rural areas. In some cases, those existing buildings need rehabilitation, but an investment in rehabilitation in an already dense, urban environment is also an investment in natural resources. In many cities, there are brownfield sites available as well, presenting the developer with opportunities to build modern buildings on land that has already been environmentally impacted. Lehigh Valley Industrial Parks recently found its right note with LVIP VII, built on former Bethlehem Steel in the heart of the City of Bethlehem.


Firms locating in cities have a huge opportunity to protect air and water quality by not impacting watersheds in the country. A new industrial building in a suburban environment creates acres and acres of new impervious surfaces that invariably impact rivers and streams. In cities, those buildings already exist and redevelopment efforts using sustainable architecture can improve upon them, reducing their impact. Furthermore, with most of manufacturing workers living in cities, reducing their vehicle miles traveled reduces emissions, thereby improving air quality.

So the promotion of urban manufacturing makes AEDC a natural partner of organizations like Wildlands Conservancy with a mission to

preserve, protect, restore, and enhance the land, water, ecological, and recreational resources of the Lehigh Valley and the Lehigh River valley.

Startup America and the Lehigh Valley

Yesterday, White House announced the launch of the Startup America Partnership, which will act as an independent private-sector alliance intended to dramatically increase the development, prevalence and success of innovative, high-growth U.S. firms.

The partnership's core goals will be to increase the number of firms creating economic growth, celebrate entrepreneurship and inspire a diversity of communities and individuals to build companies. They will focus on three key areas:
Acceleration and Scale, as they replicate successful programs with an emphasis on mentorship and large-company partnerships.
Education in entrepreneurship.
Commercialization, as they tap academic innovation resources to spur economic growth.

At its core, the effort seeks to educate future entrepreneurs, to make sure that those entrepreneurs have the capital that they need to start up, and to lower the barriers to commercialization. We face similar difficulties in the Lehigh Valley, and AEDC is working with its partners to ameliorate that situation.

The Bridgeworks Enterprise Center in South Allentown has housed an incubation program for small businesses and light manufacturing since 1988, with support from Ben Franklin Technology Partners and the City of Allentown. That program has helped launch over 30 businesses employing over 300 people in the Lehigh Valley. Along the way, it has stood as a leader in entrepreneurial development in our region, hosting educational programs for entrepreneurs and providing a necessary network node for fledgling companies.


Work on coworking space and makerspace as part of the Hive 4A initiative is the next step for AEDC's entrepreneurial development efforts. The makerspace will serve as informal science space for a certain community and a laboratory for innovative experimentation among future Lehigh Valley entrepreneurs. Our coworking space represents the future of work, with independent professionals coming together to exchange ideas and build the next economy.

All the while, AEDC will continue to be part of the conversation and drive innovation in the region, through forums offered by Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation; area colleges like Muhlenberg, LCCC, and Lehigh; and Ben Franklin. There are still significant hurdles to entrepreneurship in the Lehigh Valley, including a lack of significant capital resources, that we have to resolve before we can be a truly innovative and entrepreneurial region.

As always, the feedback of our existing entrepreneurial community is hugely important, and we hope to share what we learn here on the blog.