Bethlehem Works: Where America Was Built

Those five rust-brown towers you can see from the highway are all that remain of one of the most consequential industrial sites in American history. This is Bethlehem Works, the main plant of Bethlehem Steel, and for nearly a century it was the second-largest steel company on earth.

The story begins in eighteen fifty seven, when Lehigh Valley investors founded what became the Bethlehem Iron Company to supply rails for the railroads spreading across Pennsylvania. Within a decade they were pouring steel, and within two decades they had caught the attention of Charles Schwab, one of the most aggressive industrialists of the Gilded Age. Schwab took over in nineteen hundred and one and immediately pushed the company into territory no American steelmaker had attempted.

His most consequential innovation came in nineteen oh eight: a new rolling mill that produced the wide-flange structural beam, a deeper and stronger shape than anything previously made at scale. The wide-flange beam made the modern skyscraper possible. The structural steel holding up the Empire State Building came from right here. So did sixty-eight thousand tons of steel for the Golden Gate Bridge, and the girders for Rockefeller Center.

Then came the wars. In World War One, Bethlehem Steel supplied more artillery shells and naval guns to the Allies than any other single source. In World War Two, its fifteen shipyards launched one thousand one hundred twenty-one ships, more than any other builder in the country, employing one hundred eighty thousand people at the peak. At the Bethlehem plant alone, more than thirty-one thousand workers kept the furnaces running around the clock.

The five blast furnaces you see today, the tallest reaching two hundred thirty feet, last made iron on November eighteenth, nineteen ninety-five. By then, cheaper imports from Japan, South Korea, and eventually China had gutted the American steel industry. The company filed for bankruptcy in two thousand one and dissolved two years later, ending a hundred and forty years of production. Tens of thousands of workers in the Lehigh Valley lost their jobs, and the plant sat empty for years.

Today the site has become SteelStacks, a ten-acre arts and entertainment campus built in the shadows of those furnaces. The blast furnaces themselves are preserved as monuments, lit up at night, their forms as dramatic as any ruins in America. The Hoover-Mason Trestle, the elevated walkway that once carried raw materials to the furnaces, is now a public promenade with views over the whole site. It is a strange and moving place: the hardware of an industrial age left standing as a reminder of what this valley made, and what it lost.