It comprises the remaining four blocks of one of the last industrial neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and encompasses eight contributing buildings built between 1889 and 1927:[2] It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

Only the western half of the 1100 block (now American Cigar) was given over to intensive industrial development - a cotton and woolen mill in a building demolished before 1900.

By 1900 the John Williams Cotton and Woolen Mill occupied the 3-story brick building at Carpenter and 12th Streets, and six years later it expanded to the west end of its block in a six-story high loft.

The National Licorice Company built its modern reinforced concrete plant in 1927-28) at 13th and Washington Avenue, completing the group of industrial buildings begun thirty eight years earlier.

The overwhelming scale of these manufacturing buildings underscores their impact on their community, which provided the thousands of workers that wove cloth for John Williams and C.J.