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The Morning Call: Bethlehem at 275: A city of reinvention
June 14th, 2016 | In The News
Written by Nicole Radzievich for The Morning Call
The view from the Hill-to-Hill Bridge tells Bethlehem’s story.
To the north, the Central Moravian Church belfry rises from a cluster of pristine, Colonial-era buildings, the quintessential symbol of the city’s beginnings as a religious mission.
To the south, rusted and long-dormant blast furnaces pierce the sky, industrial cathedrals recalling the city’s past as a manufacturing powerhouse that helped build the nation’s infrastructure and win two world wars.
Two monuments: one quaint, the other gritty.
Just like Bethlehem.
Bethlehem is both the Christmas City and Bethlehem Steel’s hometown. It’s known for the Bach Choir and Musikfest, lovefeasts and the Sands Casino Resort, Main Street boutiques and an outlet mall, marshmallow Peeps and I-beams.
As it is poised to turn 275 years old this year, Bethlehem is celebrating a legacy that is constantly changing, saving the best of its past and recasting itself for the next generation.
“I think Bethlehem’s legacy is reinvention,” said Kassie Hilgert, president and CEO of ArtsQuest, the nonprofit behind Musikfest and other cultural programs.
“You had the Moravians who reinvented themselves when they came over here. They were creating a whole new world. Bethlehem Steel reinvented the city again… taking a small sleepy town and reimagining it into a world powerhouse. Then Bethlehem went through the loss, like so many other cities, with its single biggest employer, and we are reinventing ourselves again as a destination.”
The city traces its roots to the 18th century, when a group of German-speaking settlers, the Moravians, were searching for a place to build a planned community, part religious mission and part social experiment.
In a log structure the Moravians quickly built above the banks of Monocacy Creek, the settlers welcomed their spiritual leader, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a Saxon nobleman, on Christmas Eve 1741. They sang a hymn with the powerful lyrics “Lowly Bethlehem ’twas that gave us Christ to save us,” inspiring Zinzendorf to give the settlement its name.
Bethlehem.
In that little town, settlers worshiped together and converted nearby Native Americans to Christianity as they built a new economy in the rugged acreage about 60 miles north of Philadelphia. By 1760, the Moravians developed 50 industries including metalworking, tanning and brick-making, according to Richmond E. Myers’ 1981 book “Sketches of Early Bethlehem.” In 1762, the Moravians built one of the best engineering innovations of its time, the Waterworks. The structure, now restored, gave rise to the first municipal water pump system in America.
This early community was accomplished through a social contract in which church members gave a day’s labor in exchange for clothing and shelter.
Jorgen Boytler, one of the Danish scholars who helped get a Moravian community in Denmark on the World Heritage List, said Bethlehem’s Moravian community is important for its “architecture, history and the idea that a town can be built on an ideal.”
But that’s not to say that Bethlehem was disconnected from other colonists. It played an important role during the Revolutionary War. The Moravians were not soldiers, but they lent their support Dec. 3, 1776, when the General Hospital of the Continental Army was moved to Bethlehem by order of “his Excellency General Washington.”
Battle-worn soldiers, including a slightly wounded young French Marquis de Lafayette, were treated in Bethlehem. One of the largest mass graves of the war is across the Monocacy on a high bluff known locally as Mount Lebanon.
Meanwhile, early Bethlehem settlers contributed to other pursuits like education and music. The Moravians emphasized education for boys and girls, leaving behind institutions that eventually grew into Moravian College, a liberal arts college where 1,805 undergraduates and 205 graduates now go to school.
Moravian Church, where music played a large part in their worship, produced accomplished musicians and composers like John Antes, the son of the man to whom Bethlehem’s original settlement, was deeded.
Bethlehem would later capitalize on its Moravian roots, marketing itself in 1937 as “Christmas City USA,” to attract holiday shoppers, and lighting a star atop South Mountain. The festivities grew to include tours of the decked-out city, Christkindlmarkt, Christmas putz programs and more.
By the 1960s, city leaders set the stage to preserve its Moravian buildings and began amassing land from the original settlement, part of which had turned into a junkyard. A nonprofit later restored some of the buildings.
Bethlehem became the first city in 1961 to use a new state law that allowed it to regulate changes to its old buildings, down to the color of the doors on Main Street and surrounding neighborhoods. Today, part of that historic district is now a National Historic Landmark District, a designation shared by New Orleans’ French Quarter.
But that’s only part of Bethlehem’s story.
In the 19th century, a little startup company built an iron foundry and later a steel mill across the river from the Moravian community. Bethlehem Steel eventually rose to become the second biggest steel producer in the world. The company’s ingenuity produced a variation of the I-beam, which helped usher in the era of the skyscraper, and employed generations either at the 1,800-acre plant along the Lehigh River or later corporate offices 3 miles away in the 21-story Martin Tower.
“Bethlehem Steel [and its forerunners] provided the opportunity for people to come to this country, giving people jobs whether it was working in steel, zinc or the railroad,” said Frank Behum Sr., who worked at Steel for 32 years. “It started the middle class of the Lehigh Valley. Bethlehem Steel in 1942 signed its first union contract, showing they could work for the betterment of everyone.”
Steel became a beacon of opportunity for immigrants chasing the American dream and an emblem of the labor movement. It gave rise to Lehigh University, where entrepreneurs like auto executive Lee Iacocca went to school, and St. Luke’s University Health Network, founded in Fountain Hill in 1872 as a local hospital that cared for the workers at the steel foundries.
Along the outskirts of the South Side, industrial tycoons built ornate homes near Fountain Hill, and closer to the plant, there were enough speakeasies and brothels during the 1920s that the little town of Bethlehem became a weekend hangout for mobsters.
Steel fielded a championship professional soccer team, buying the best players of the era, and its executives helped shape the community. The colorful Bethlehem Steel Corp. chairman, Charles Schwab, was a city planning commissioner, and Archibald Johnston, a former Steel president, was elected the first mayor of a city consolidated from South Bethlehem, Bethlehem and West Bethlehem in 1918.
Artists were taken by the industrial part of town. Depression-era photographer Walker Evans took an iconic image of St. Michael’s Cemetery. In the background, it showed the Steel plant where people worked, the row homes where they lived and the cemetery where they were buried, illustrating a steelworker’s life from cradle to death.
During an economic downturn in the 1980s, Bethlehem inspired a Billy Joel song and, after Steel closed, the empty industrial plant attracted Hollywood crews to film the opening sequence of “Transformers 2.”
But even that is only part of Bethlehem’s story.
Sometime between the Moravians’ social experiment and Steel’s ascension to become a pinnacle of capitalism, a community of butcher and tailor shops, breweries, churches, silk mills and schools emerged along both sides of the Lehigh River.
In the 1950s, civic leaders planned large complexes of business to the north — Lehigh Valley Industrial Park I, home to the likes of Bosch Rexroth, Service Tire and Fuller Co.
When Steel finally went cold in 1995, that LVIP template was later used to remake 1,000 acres of the old plant, diversifying the regional economy. Technology and other startup companies emerged around the South Side, inventing everything from rapid HIV tests to Goblies hand-thrown paintballs.
The turning point in the remaking of Bethlehem came with help of an unlikely catalyst, the Las Vegas Sands. The Sands built an $800 million casino on top of the old Steel ore pit, driving millions a year into the city’s skimpy coffers.
But what to do with the rest of the plant and the 225-foot blast furnaces that had been part of the city’s skyline for nearly a century? Those furnaces stood in the path of a 126-acre swath along the river that the city was eager to get back into use.
“Some said that Bethlehem Steel should be demolished, but some recognized the historic value,” Mayor Robert Donchez said. “Bethlehem has built its reputation on historic preservation.”
The Sands listened to the preservation advocates, lighting up the blast furnaces at night and donating the land around the iconic structures to nonprofits for an arts and cultural campus.
Arts cinemas, a cabaret-style concert hall, PBS39 broadcast studios, an outdoor stage and visitors center now wrap around grassy parks and public plazas in an area known as SteelStacks. An elevated walkway spans the Hoover Mason Trestle, an old rail that moved ore to the blast furnaces, providing visitors with breathtaking views of the old plant and what Bethlehem has become.
At the foot of the blast furnaces, more than 800,000 people a year now come to see Jerry Seinfeld and Rusted Root shows, gather to cheer on the U.S. women’s soccer team in the World Cup on a big screen or take in a David Bowie tribute.
Meanwhile, people continue to pack Main Street, partaking in historic walking tours, dining al fresco at the cafes and browsing the shops in the downtown that grew from the banks where Bethlehem was founded.
“I think that Bethlehem has this je ne sais quoi — this special feeling, a spirituality — and I don’t mean religious,” said Charlene Donchez Mowers, president of Historic Bethlehem Museum and Sites.
“Bethlehem has been able to preserve its history, yet that hasn’t stopped economic development in the community. It’s a combination of historic preservation, this fabulous ambience and economic development all together.”
Perhaps, that’s Bethlehem’s story.
Quaint. Gritty. Resilient.
