3/30/2023 0 Comments Steel stacks bethlehem paAt the height of its success and productivity, the company was a symbol of American manufacturing leadership in the world, and its decline and ultimate liquidation in the late 20th century is similarly cited as an example of America's diminished manufacturing leadership. For most of the 20th century, it was one of the world's largest steel producing and shipbuilding companies. The Bethlehem Steel Corporation was an American steelmaking company headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. For the Brooklyn based indie rock band, see Bethlehem Steel (band).ġ899 (Bethlehem Steel Company, original company)ġ904 (Bethlehem Steel Corporation, new company)īethlehem Steel Company and Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation For the USL soccer club formerly known as Bethlehem Steel FC, see Philadelphia Union II. “So I’m kicking off the show, doing a little welcoming speech.For the early 20th century American soccer club, see Bethlehem Steel F.C. Someone was playing it by jumping up and grabbing onto them. “The harp was these giant bands that came off the ArtsQuest building. “This one Sunday,” Callahan recalls, “we were having sunrise yoga under what they called an ‘earth harp.’” He lets out his characteristic chuckle. The whole area is called SteelStacks, and it’s just a short walk from Bethlehem’s real game changer: a nearly $1 billion casino, hotel, shopping mall and events complex that began operating five years ago as the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem. On a landscaped plot of grass hard against the furnaces is a concert pavilion designed by Philly architecture firm WRT it looks like an unfolding piece of origami. 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. Furnaces and fireworks for the Fourth of July.
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