Steel Magnolia
“We worked with the Sands people from the beginning, saying we would like to have an arts campus around the blast furnaces,” Parks says. “We worked with Ed Rendell, who clearly knew what arts could do after what he’d done on Broad Street.”
Parks knows well the work of Richard Florida, whose notions on the needs of what he dubbed “the creative class” have created a new paradigm for how cities think of their various allures. “Every major employer who is recruiting employees at $100,000 or more brings them to SteelStacks,” he says.
THIS SPRING, CONSTRUCTION RESUMED on a half-mile elevated railway that once hauled iron ore to the blast furnaces, to transform it into a High Line-like walkway that will allow casino visitors to stroll unimpeded to the base of those furnaces and the SteelStacks campus (and get a primer on Steel’s history along the way). The Sands’ DeSalvio insists he won’t mind if some of his patrons actually leave the casino. He even welcomes an idea recently proposed by Philadelphia adman and cooking-show producer Steven Horn, who just moved production of his syndicated Chef’s Kitchen series out of Philly and into SteelStacks’s WLVT studios.
“I couldn’t believe what was going on up there,” Horn says. “It’s really impressive.” Horn saw an old empty plant building behind the WLVT studios and got the notion for a restaurant and food mini-mall based roughly on the Eataly concept. He has already brought in chefs Olivier Desaintmartin and Patrick Feury for a look.
New concepts have a much better chance since Bethlehem became one of two Pennsylvania cities eligible for yet another state tax incentive program, one that allows new companies moving here and creating jobs to get back almost all of their state liabilities (including sales taxes and personal income taxes of new workers) and use the money to pay off development costs. The hope is that a new, gargantuan Bass Pro Shops store in the remains of a former Steel machine shop will jump-start the process. Bass Pro represents a new market segment dubbed “destination retailing” — an anchor store builds its own hotel. Add an adjacent conference center, and the entire price tag goes to $106 million.
“I’m not by nature one for a great deal of retrospection,” says John Callahan. A private citizen for the first time in 16 years, he has joined the firm of the local lawyer and developer who bought part of the Steel site back in 2004. Among Callahan’s first projects will be two proposed retail-residential lots near Molinari’s. “The next phase,” he says, “is to really make this a 24-hour, seven-day residential and office location.”
That phase should begin soon. “When I did my final state-of-the-city speech,” Callahan says, “I realized there’s been $2.2 billion in new investment in Bethlehem, much of it on that old Steel site. I’ve seen the site change in such an incremental way. But when I bump into an old college friend who hasn’t been here in a while, they can’t believe what Bethlehem is like now.”
