Bethlehem, Pennsylvania —
On a recent cloudless afternoon on a plaza outside this city’s industrial history museum, a small crowd has gathered to soak up some sun, drink beer and listen to Robbie Lawrence and the Steelworkers, a local polka band.
“I come from Bethlehem and I’m proud of it, Bethlehem is my home,” Lawrence sings as an accordion player wheezes out a jaunty melody over his right shoulder. “I come from Bethlehem and brag about it, no matter where I roam.”
Behind Lawrence’s band towers a former Bethlehem Steel office building, long vacant but slated to become apartments. Across a parking lot to the north, the rusting blast furnaces of the defunct Bethlehem Steel plant form a dramatic backdrop to the sangria festival happening on the street below. And on a hillside eight blocks west, a railroad magnate’s 1865 mansion is now a boutique hotel.
Wherever you go in this handsome city, the past is never far away. Settled by Moravians in the mid-1700s, it was made famous two centuries later by the booming steel industry, which attracted thousands of immigrants from around the world to work in the mills, build churches and import their colorful food and culture – including polka music.
Bethlehem Steel ceased production here 31 years ago, doomed by cheaper competition from overseas. But Billy Joel’s hit 1982 song about a dying steel town no longer applies. After some lean years, Bethlehem has rebounded, buoyed by a picturesque Main Street, a thriving festival scene, its appeal as a twinkly Christmastime destination and its status as home to the United States’ newest UNESCO World Heritage site.
Bethlehem lies in the Lehigh Valley, a fast-growing slice of eastern Pennsylvania roughly 90 minutes by car from both New York City and Philadelphia. It sits halfway between neighboring Allentown to the west and nearby Easton, a bustling smaller city on the Delaware River’s border with New Jersey.
Split by the Lehigh River and punctuated by rolling hills and farmland, the Lehigh Valley is sometimes called a microcosm of the US for its mix of urban and rural cultures and its bellwether politics. The valley hosts wineries, acclaimed restaurants, America’s oldest continuous open-air farmer’s market and the nation’s largest free music festival, a 10-day event each August that attracts more than a million people.
And Bethlehem, at its center, feels like heartland America at its best: industrious, unassuming and friendly.
“A lot of people foresaw the potential of this area, and they didn’t want it to die with the steel” industry, says Lawrence, 32, whose Lehigh Valley roots go back six generations. “I’m seeing a lot of positivity … as we continue to progress into the 21st century. So, yeah, I think it’s a nice place to check out. There’s so much to do. I’ve never heard anyone say there’s nothing to do around here.”
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Few places in America evoke a specific industry more than Bethlehem, whose steel town identity shaped the city for most of the last century. Founded in the 1800s as an iron company, Bethlehem Steel produced rails for the nation’s expanding railroad network and eventually became the second-largest steel producer in the country after Pittsburgh’s U.S. Steel.
Steel from Bethlehem transformed skylines across the country and helped build an impressive roster of American landmarks, including the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. The company also became a key contributor to US war efforts, famously building 1,127 ships for the armed forces during World War II, by which time Bethlehem Steel was the largest private shipbuilder in the world.
At its peak in the 1940s the company employed some 30,000 workers in Bethlehem alone – roughly half the population of the city. Its crumbling former complex sits on the south bank of the Lehigh River, down the hill from Lehigh University.
Much of this story is on display at the city’s National Museum of Industrial History, located in a former Bethlehem Steel repair shop. The museum holds hundreds of artifacts and machines, including a working steam engine.
“If you talked to one of the old guys who worked here, he’d tell you that the US won World War I and World War II because of Bethlehem Steel,” said museum docent Mahesh Vyas, who spent 36 years with the company as a research engineer. An archival photo in the museum shows Vyas sitting at a primitive computer. “Bethlehem Steel was Bethlehem,” he added. “It was a very good job.”
For a more immersive experience people can tour the rusting hulks of the company’s towering blast furnaces, which for decades heated molten iron ore to 3,000 degrees to produce steel girders, ship hulls and other industrial products.
Visitors aren’t allowed to get too close to the plant’s ruins for safety reasons. But an elevated walkway, completed in 2015, runs for 1,650 feet alongside the furnaces, with signage at various points explaining how the steel was made. Known as the Hoover-Mason Trestle and similar to New York City’s High Line, the landscaped walkway runs 46 feet above the ground over a former railway that once ferried iron ore to the blast furnaces.
The long-term future of the abandoned plant is unclear, however. As one guide explained on a recent tour, many of the remnants of the steel plant are rusting away. “See it while you can,” he said.
For now, however, the jagged skeleton of the former plant rises 230 feet and dominates the Bethlehem skyline. The adjoining property has been redeveloped as SteelStacks, a cultural space that hosts festivals, concerts and other outdoor events, all with the blast furnaces – illuminated at night – serving as a unique backdrop.
And three decades after production shut down for good, Bethehem’s steel legacy endures across the valley. A mile to the east of SteelStacks sits Wind Creek, a cavernous casino, outlet mall and event center whose sign is mounted on a former Bethlehem Steel ore crane. And the local minor league baseball team, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, take their name from “pig iron,” a product used to make steel.
When it comes to long-running Bethlehem history, though, steelworkers have nothing on the Moravians, early Protestants with 15th-century roots in what is now the Czech Republic. Moravian missionaries from Germany established a settlement here in 1741, naming it Bethlehem during a service on Christmas Eve.
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Enterprising and ahead of their time, the early Moravians built colonial America’s first pumped municipal water system and supported education for all, regardless of gender or economic status.
The Moravians’ civilizing influence helped make Bethlehem a refuge for colonists traveling from New York and Philadelphia — including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette, who spent several months here recuperating after being wounded in a Revolutionary War battle.
The Moravian community in Bethlehem has endured for almost three centuries and spawned Moravian University, a private four-year school. The settlement’s historical significance was affirmed in 2024 when UNESCO added it, along with three Moravian settlements in Europe, to its list of World Heritage sites.
Some of the Moravians’ early homes and houses of worship remain, along with a colonial industrial quarter that includes a mill, a tannery and a blacksmith’s shop. UNESCO describes the cluster of well-kept stone buildings as “the first permanent, best-preserved, and most important Moravian Church settlement in North America.”
Today’s visitors can tour the Moravian Museum, housed in Bethlehem’s oldest building, attend services at the 1806 Central Moravian Church or stroll through the Moravian cemetery, known as God’s Acre, whose uniformly flat headstones symbolize equality before God.
A festive Main Street
Bethlehem’s Moravian settlement also straddles the city’s Main Street, which has become a destination in its own right. Lined with restored buildings, cafes and unique shops, it was just named the No. 1 main street in America by readers of USA Today.
“I’ve never seen a Main Street like it,” said Lauren Kachmarsky, a heritage concierge at Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites. “We’re very dedicated to preserving it … to keeping that colonial and Victorian charm.”
Its anchor is the Hotel Bethlehem, a grand, century-old establishment that underwent a major restoration in the late 1990s, reinvigorating the city’s downtown. The walls of its elegant lobby are lined with photos of the hotel’s many famous guests, including Amelia Earhart, Winston Churchill and Muhammad Ali.
The surrounding blocks feature everything from a brewery taproom to a European home decor shop to a tapas eatery to a venerable bar & grill to the Moravian Book Shop, which dates to 1745 and bills itself as America’s oldest bookseller.
“It’s a good mix of cultures,” said Malik Lovell, manager of Donegal Square, a Main Street store selling items from Ireland and the UK. “And it sounds corny … but it’s a super tight-knit community.”
During the holidays, the street becomes a festive winter wonderland in keeping with Bethlehem’s nickname as the “Christmas City.” By early November, visitors encounter elaborate sidewalk light displays, horse-drawn carriage rides and traditional, European-style outdoor markets – including one at SteelStacks.
And an enormous illuminated star, evoking the biblical story of Jesus’ birth, shines over the city each night from a 900-foot hilltop across the river from downtown.
“The festivities begin early here,” said Karen Dodge, manager of Dear Santa, one of two Christmas-themed stores on Main Street. The store’s owner, Tom Dubreuil, doubles as Bethlehem’s official Santa Claus every year – no fake beard needed.
“It’s magical,” Dodge added of the atmosphere downtown. “It’s like living in a snow globe or a Hallmark movie.”
Bethlehem residents cite this cheerful community spirit as one reason they love the area.
Just listen to Lawrence, the bandleader, who learned polka music from his German and Polish grandparents — some of them steelworkers — and teaches music at a nearby elementary school.
Polka may be a niche music genre in the US, but Lawrence said he and his band keep busy. They played some 50 gigs last year.
“I’m very well rooted here. I think you can tell I like the history of it,” he said of his hometown. “It’s not like any other place in the country … it has a little bit of everything .”
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