The Queen City: Allentown's Nickname and Its Meaning

Cities acquire nicknames the way rivers acquire tributaries, gradually, from different sources, not always by plan. Allentown's most enduring nickname, the Queen City of the Lehigh Valley, arrived sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, and its exact origins have always been a little uncertain.

One account holds that the name emerged from a competition organized by the Allentown Chamber of Commerce, with Queen City submitted as a winning entry. Others suggest it grew organically from the city's position as the commercial and manufacturing anchor of a region that by nineteen hundred included Bethlehem, Easton, and a dozen smaller towns all orbiting the valley's largest city. The precise record, if one ever existed, appears not to have survived.

What is not uncertain is what the name was meant to convey. Allentown in the early twentieth century was thriving in a way that demanded a title. The silk mills were running. The cement plants were shipping. The railroads had made the city accessible to markets in every direction. The population was growing fast enough that new neighborhoods were being platted every few years. The PPL Building was still decades away, but the city's sense of itself as something substantial was already well established.

After the Second World War the nickname got a second wind. Returning veterans and their families fueled a population surge that filled in the city's edges and spread into the surrounding townships. Allentown was the Queen City, and for a generation it seemed the crown was secure.

Then came the nineteen seventies and eighties, and the industries that had made the crown possible began to close or leave. The nickname endured. Cities often keep their aspirational names long after the conditions that inspired them have changed. Allentown is still the Queen City of the Lehigh Valley, and it is still the largest city in the region, though the industrial foundations of that title are largely gone.

The precise origin of the nickname remains single-source: the Chamber of Commerce competition account appears in local histories but has not been independently documented. Take it as a likely story rather than a confirmed one.