Steel Magnolia

WHILE THE CASINO and SteelStacks get most of the attention, what’s going on around them may be equally important to Bethlehem’s rejuvenation. Lehigh Valley Industrial Development Inc. was founded in the late 1950s after a long and bitter steel strike got some farsighted locals interested in diversifying Bethlehem’s economy. It now operates seven industrial parks around the city — including a 1,000-acre park on the old Steel site — with a range of businesses from small manufacturing to warehousing and distribution. “There are 22,000 jobs in all our parks,” says the industrial parks’ president, Kerry Wrobel, “and no one industry is dominant.”

The industrial parks don’t have a lock on diversification. The best known new local tech company is OraSure, which began in an incubator affiliated with Lehigh University and now markets an over-the-counter HIV test using a simple oral swab. OraSure employs more than 200 people in a headquarters near SteelStacks.

And in addition to supplying a steady stream of gamblers from the New York metro area to make the Sands among the top-earning casinos in the state, Interstate 78 has spawned a colony of distribution centers. The most prominent on the old Steel site “campus” belongs to the Crayola crayon company. It seems a somewhat strange transformation from making I-beams to special swabs, or from shipping out the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge to shipping out cartons of crayons (which are actually manufactured in nearby Easton), but in many ways, it’s working.

“I’ve always felt that Bethlehem in particular and the Lehigh Valley in general is a great unknown story,” says Don Cunningham, a steelworker’s son who was Callahan’s predecessor as mayor and now runs the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation. “As much as Steel drove the economy of Bethlehem, it has become an overall healthier economy and a better place since Steel closed. We’ve been able to diversify the industrial base, build downtown restaurant districts, and focus on cultural arts. All this stuff would not have happened if the steel company had still been here, dominating. Nobody would have ever expected that we’d be better off without Steel. But we are.”

In 2012, a Federal Reserve Bank report on the economic conditions of 13 small cities in the Philadelphia region — places that once had manufacturing bases that employed more than a quarter of their p?opulation — told of “daunting challenges” for a collection that included basket cases like Camden; threatened, still-shrinking towns like Wilkes-Barre; and surprising success stories like Bethlehem, which is at or near the top of many measures of economic and social health. Its population is actually above the level of its putative 1950 heydays. The city has the highest home prices, the lowest percentage of citizens on the public dole, the highest per-capita income and the second-best-educated residents of all 13 cities. “When that report came out,” says Jeff Parks, “I considered it the report card for my career.”

Parks, a 65-year-old Bethlehem native, is a slim man with a sly sense of humor. He graduated from Penn Law in 1973, came back to town, and carved out an unusual role as a performing-arts czar and local tourism booster, founding ArtsQuest. He has called himself Bethlehem’s brand ?manager.

In 1984, soon after one of the first rounds of big layoffs at Steel, Parks founded Musikfest, a summer festival with mostly free concerts spread around the Colonial-era streets of Bethlehem. In 1993, he started a holiday crafts market, called Christkindlmarkt, to bolster Bethlehem’s decades-old branding of itself as “The Christmas City” as a lure for the bus-tour crowd. (The town was founded on Christmas Eve 1741.) “All of it,” he says today, “was about economic revitalization. That’s my passion.”

Musikfest alone, Parks says, draws up to a million people from 30 or 40 states and six or eight foreign countries: “The branding of the city as a place where culture is alive has been extraordinarily successful.”

In 1998, Parks opened a community arts center in a former banana storage house. Dubbed the Banana Factory, “It was,” he says, “the first symbol that the South Side here could be like South Street, to use a Philadelphia reference — a cool, funky place where people would want to come and hang out.” (Okay, he may be a little behind on his Philly references.) “The Lehigh Valley was desperate for that.” On a trip a few years later to Germany’s Ruhr Valley, Parks saw retired steel mill blast furnaces adapted into a performance space, setting the template for SteelStacks.