07/30/2025
Miss the old days…
Swell Bubble Gum Factory, Havertown, 1960s, colorized. Delco has manufactured just about everything under the sun. Even bubble gum. Enter the Swell Bubble Gum Factory in Havertown: a place that feels like a sugary time capsule of Delco’s industrious past.
Right in the heart of Havertown stood the Swell Bubble Gum factory, where for over 50 years the air along Eagle Road smelled like pure sugar. The building, home to the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Corporation, cranked out classics like Swell, El Bubble ci**rs, Cry Baby sour gum, and even NFL trading cards. With every shift, the faint aroma of fresh bubble gum would drift through the air in Havertown. Kids growing up nearby remember that sweet scent rolling through their car windows. You could tell what flavor of gum was being made by the smell in the air.
But like most things around here, it didn’t end clean. After Concord Confections bought the company and shut it down in 2003, the factory sat vacant until the township bought it and tore it down in 2011 to build a YMCA. That’s when things got... sticky. It was discovered the land was contaminated from years of industrial use, because of course it was. Turns out the site had a colorful history and a toxic one. Still, for many in Delco, that old gum factory wasn’t just a place that made candy, it was a landmark, a memory, and one more piece of our manufacturing past that’s gone but not forgotten.
