Billy Joel's Allentown: What the Song Got Right, and Where It Was About

In nineteen eighty-two, Billy Joel released an album called The Nylon Curtain, and the lead track was a song called Allentown. It became one of the most recognizable American rock songs of its decade. It also became the source of a complicated local relationship that has never entirely resolved itself.

The song is about deindustrialization: the closing of the steel mills, the broken promises of the postwar economic bargain, the generation of working-class Americans who graduated into a world that no longer needed what their parents had built. The rhythm at the opening of the song was specifically designed to sound like a rolling mill converting steel ingots into structural beams, the sound that had echoed through the Lehigh Valley for over a century.

Here is the thing that everyone in the Lehigh Valley knows: Joel first called the song Levittown, then Bethlehem, before settling on Allentown. He had been reading about the decline of Bethlehem Steel, the second-largest steel manufacturer in the world for most of the twentieth century, which had been slashing jobs throughout the nineteen seventies and early eighties. By nineteen eighty-two, the Bethlehem plant had suspended most of its steelmaking operations after posting a loss of one and a half billion dollars in a single year. He changed the title from Bethlehem to Allentown because he thought Bethlehem carried too much religious weight, and he liked the rhyming possibilities of Allentown better.

So Allentown got the anthem for Bethlehem's suffering. The Lehigh Valley got the song at exactly the moment the song was true.

Because it was true here too. Allentown and Bethlehem were six miles apart and deindustrializing together. Mack Trucks had been reducing its Allentown workforce. The silk mills were gone. The cement industry had consolidated. By the time Joel's song hit the charts, thirty-two thousand people in the immediate region had lost manufacturing jobs in less than a decade.

The song asked: what did we work all our lives for? The Lehigh Valley was still working on that answer in nineteen eighty-two. In many ways, it is still working on it now.