Vision & Vitality: Bethlehem After The Steel

A vision of community development based on adaptive re-use of historic portions of Bethlehem Steel Corporation's industrial plant.

April 13, 2004

MARCH and Historic Bethlehem Partnership convened a day long workshop on March 27, 2004 in Bethlehem, inviting a wide range of stakeholders to formulate a shared plan for the adaptive re-use of 160 acres of the old Bethlehem Steel plant site. As a result of our deliberations, the group agreed as follows:

1. The workshop group constitutes the first core of a multi-organizational coalition dedicated to seeing the successful community-based redevelopment of the site. One of our first tasks is to broaden the coalition to include more groups and organizations that have a significant stake in the outcomes.
2. A strengthened public role in deciding the future of the 160-acre historic area should be assured so that the re-use of the site meets Bethlehem's community development goals.
3. Interpretation of the industrial heritage of Bethlehem can begin at once, even before the site is secured. Interpretation should address the fullness of industrial history, involve residents, visitors and local institutions in interpretive activities, and take place throughout Bethlehem and the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor as well as on the plant site.
4. The interpretive project can be pursued by multiple partners in stages over time, with all activity guided by a shared approach toward the collective vision. The organizing principles of the shared approach include building on the authenticity of places, including regional and national interpretive content, developing socially-oriented education at all levels, and promoting pervasive community involvement. Existing resources for interpretation, signage, programming, and education currently held by various members of the coalition, including the NMIH (in affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution), should be used to the extent that they address the project's organizing principles.

The renewal of the plant site is a celebration of this community's future, built upon the honoring of its past. Bethlehem can continue to build a sustainable economy and offer satisfying lives to its citizens through a rational, future-oriented embrace of adaptive re-use. Adaptive reuse has proven itself over and over, and we can demonstrate its effectiveness with peculiar power in Bethlehem's high-visibility setting. By embracing the centrality of industrial history to the city and region and adopting a strategic approach to adaptive reuse of the site, Bethlehem can multiply its sources of economic and cultural enterprise, strengthen its schools and neighborhoods, embrace its diverse population, and preserve its unique identity. Community development based upon adaptive reuse will replace the vulnerability of depending on a single major employer (whether a mill or a mall) with an innovative, resilient, educated community of enterprise.

Developed March 27, 2004 at a workshop sponsored jointly by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University/Camden, and the Historic Bethlehem Partnership (HBP), affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.

In addition to the sponsoring partners, participating organizations included: the City of Bethlehem, Save Our Steel Foundation, Steelworkers' Archives Project, South Bethlehem Historical Society, the National Museum of Industrial History project, Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor, National Canal Museum, South Street Seaport Museum, and Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark.