![]() One houses state-of-the-art studios for the Lehigh Valley’s public television station, WLVT the other is a multi-level visual and performing arts center called ArtsQuest, with several chic performance spaces (one is an amalgam of Philly’s World Cafe Live and New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center) and a two-screen art-house cinema. In the shadow of the furnaces now are two sleek modernist glass, steel and concrete cubes. One day he showed up at daybreak at those big blast furnaces, which have been preserved and repurposed (complete with a glowing LED light treatment) as the city’s largest art installation. More than 10 years after The Steel’s bankruptcy, the emerging answer gives John Callahan a story to tell. The city lost its namesake company, and a fifth of its taxable land devolved into an unused brownfield site, transformed almost overnight into a Rust Belt relic facing an existential crisis: What do you do with a huge plot (picture downtown Philly, Market to Spruce, river to river) of polluted land littered with industrial-era detritus? The company spiraled into bankruptcy and finally dissolution. As long as what locals called “The Steel” was working, so was Bethlehem.īut The Steel, reeling from foreign competition, plagued by myopic management and hamstrung by its unions, shut down the furnaces in 1995. For much of that century, into the 1990s, those belching furnaces - “convoluted structures that look like smoke-stained dinosaurs snorting into the sky,” in the words of one writer - delivered a daily reassuring signal to the city of 75,000. If he walked out the front door of Molinari Mangia, Callahan, who recently ended a decade as Bethlehem’s mayor, could peer toward the hulking 20-story blast furnaces that were once the hot heart of Bethlehem Steel, a premier industrial powerhouse of the last century. “I often tell people: This is not your grandfather’s - hell, it’s not your father’s - town of Bethlehem.” He spears an olive-oil-drenched nubbin of raw fish. “Who’da thunk it,” he says, with a rapid-fire wheezy chuckle. ![]() Fork poised, he considers the unlikelihood that he would be sampling such a dish in a swank new Italian restaurant on the main drag of the traditionally working-class ethnic enclave called the South Side in his hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. John Callahan, a 44-year-old natural salesman turned preternatural politician, looks down at the small plate of tuna crudo on the table. Not only was it instrumental in helping us move forward with a plan for… one of the most difficult sites you can imagine to develop but it also taught me… broader principles of planning and design that I’ve applied throughout the city.” Mayor Callahan served his last term in 2013 due to term limits, but his legacy project will stand the test of time for generations to come.Furnaces and fireworks for the Fourth of July. To the families, children and grandchildren of steelworkers whose labor went into Bethlehem Steel in its first life, seeing the second manifestation of their beloved site in a beautiful design that pays homage to and showcases the city’s industrial DNA can be an emotional experience.Įxpressing his complete satisfaction with the outcome of the project, Mayor Callahan asserted, “What MICD did for me was put in place some broad principles and some goals for how to redevelop site. Visitors often describe the view as surreal when they see the space lit up at night, basking in candy-colored lights, and filled with people from all walks of life. The four-story ArtQuest Center at SteelStacks offers a dramatic view of the plaza against the silhouette of the furnaces in the background. ![]() Today, the once-neglected brownfield site has been completely transformed into a vibrant public space with active programming of the contemporary outdoor amphitheater, the Levitt Pavilion SteelStacks, for arts and cultural events, community festivals, and live music performances. With many moving parts and stakeholders involved, MICD’s Resource Team helped steer the new mayor in the right direction, giving him pragmatic tools, ideas, and a clear strategy to move the project forward.
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