↓SUGGEST CORRECTIONS↓ TheFactoryWorkers.com (The Fac­to­ry Workers) Live Venues — TheXFactory.com Webcrawled Links Con­tent retrieved from: TheFactoryWorkers.com THE FACTORY WORKERS opened its doors in 2013 as a mak­er­space cre­at­ed using sal­vaged machin­ery and equip­ment from fac­to­ries and shops that had closed down or gone out of busi­ness in the Philadel­phia region. But this whole thing start­ed long before that. My fam­i­ly start­ed their own busi­ness, Mar­che­t­ty Machin­ery, the year I was born. They ser­viced indus­tri­al machin­ery for all the fac­to­ries in Philadel­phia in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Dur­ing this time, more and more of the fac­to­ries Mar­che­t­ty Machin­ery served were going out of busi­ness due to the rise of for­eign trade. When those fac­to­ries went out of busi­ness, my fam­i­ly would pur­chase the old machines, fix them up and resell them to small­er com­pa­nies that were just start­ing off. Over the years, more and more shops and fac­to­ries con­tin­ued to close in this region, and an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple were com­ing to us to pur­chase machines for the oper­a­tions they’d moved to oth­er coun­tries. I got tired of see­ing these great old machines sent abroad and not being used here in the Unit­ed States, so I decid­ed to do some­thing about it. I bought an old fore­closed movie the­ater, fixed it up, upgrad­ed the elec­tri­cal, and moved machin­ery into the build­ing. That build­ing became The Fac­to­ry, New Jersey’s largest mak­er­space. Now, we’ve also built office and stu­dio spaces to help oth­er kinds of work­ers, from illus­tra­tors to tech star­tups to music teach­ers. The Fac­to­ry Work­ers is a ded­i­ca­tion to all the men and women who lost their jobs. Peo­ple come to The Fac­to­ry to access those machines we saved to build and make their dreams into a reality.