From Steel to Slots

Casino Capitalism in the Postindustrial City

Chloe E. Taft

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780674660496
• eBook ISBN: 9780674970243
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was once synonymous with steel. But after the factories closed, the city bet its future on a new industry: casino gambling. On the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant, thousands of flashing slot machines and digital bells replaced the fires in the blast furnaces and the shift change whistles of the industrial workplace. From Steel to Slots tells the story of a city struggling to make sense of the ways in which local jobs, landscapes, and identities are transformed by global capitalism.

Postindustrial redevelopment often makes a clean break with a city's rusted past. In Bethlehem, where the new casino is industrial-themed, the city's heritage continues to dominate the built environment and infuse everyday experiences. Through the voices of steelworkers, casino dealers, preservationists, immigrants, and executives, Chloe Taft examines the ongoing legacies of corporate presence and urban development in a small city—and their uneven effects.

Today, multinational casino corporations increasingly act as urban planners, promising jobs and new tax revenues to ailing communities. Yet in an industry premised on risk and capital liquidity, short-term gains do not necessarily mean long-term commitments to local needs. While residents often have few cards to play in the face of global capital and private development, Taft argues that the shape economic progress takes is not inevitable, nor must it always look forward. Memories of corporations' accountability to communities persist, and citizens see alternatives for more equitable futures in the layered landscapes all around them.

1

Order in the Landscape

DAVID AND MARILYN LAMBERT live on the north side of the Lehigh River, just west of downtown Bethlehem in a modest home next door to their daughter. They moved to Bethlehem in 1956 when David took a professorship at Lehigh University. On his first interview for the position, the man whom he would replace took him on a tour of the city’s South Side where the university and the steel plant are situated. David, now in his eighties, chuckled as he recalled his first impressions of the smoke, the blackened snow, and the tightly clustered double houses on the hilly streets rising from the plant’s main gate. “I told Marilyn when I got back, I said, ‘It’s a good job, it’s a good university and so on. But it’s a terrible town!’ ” After much debate over this predicament, David accepted the position and took his wife with him on a second visit that May. This time, “we came in the north part of the town, which I hadn’t seen.” Across the river from the Steel, the North Side is the site of the city’s original Moravian founding, still evident in the preserved stone buildings, the cream stucco Central Moravian Church, and the neatly kept homes. “Marilyn thought I had been kidding her all this time!”

The Lamberts pointed out for my benefit what has been obvious to Bethlehem natives and visitors since the eighteenth century. The Lehigh River not only splits the city geographically. A cultural and historical rift is embedded in the city’s landscape and the meanings residents attach to its two sides. The division, which has ongoing implications for urban development in the city, was first institutionalized with the Moravians’ arrival in 1741, when they founded Bethlehem as a religious communitarian settlement. Through the Moravians’ influence, the heavy industry that evolved into the steel plant in the following century was kept separate, relegated to the opposite bank. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this industrial divide became one of class and ethnicity as well. New immigrants and steelworkers who settled near the plant were perceived by wealthier and more established North Siders to be inferior.

But a 1,800-acre plant in the heart of the South Side could not be ignored. As the Steel gained economic and political clout during the twentieth century, the corporation increasingly shaped the city’s social and cultural landscapes in addition to the physical terrain. The company’s involvement in city planning and development projects ordered the built environment, while clearly defined workplace structures added a predictability to local employment that could be both stifling and appreciated for its stability. Separate neighborhoods, schools, and social clubs—often built with the Steel’s money—put wealthy executives and blue-collar workers in their appropriate places. Particularly after the union gains and enhanced corporate profitability that followed World War II, many employees, from those on the shop floor to white-collar professionals in the offices, planned their lives around the social and economic benefits that came with a career at Bethlehem Steel. Even if short-term volatility in the industry meant frequent layoffs, the goal of secure retirement remained attainable.

Bethlehem Steel’s long and slow decline beginning in the 1970s, however, undermined many of the social protections and economic guarantees that workers and residents had come to expect. The corporation ultimately shut down local operations in the 1990s and filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Through this process the Steel abandoned its pension and health care obligations, leaving workers and their families angry and betrayed. As the Steel’s management prepared to close the Bethlehem plant, it nonetheless invested in preserving the corporation’s legacy through a plan to convert the central parcel of the plant into a heritage tourism and entertainment destination. Rather than walk away from the plant and mark it as a site of postindustrial rupture, as corporations that razed factories in many other manufacturing towns did, Bethlehem Steel, local developers, and city politicians looked for opportunities to tie the industrial landscape to a different economic future. Many residents in the postindustrial city likewise seek ways to move on in a less stable and predictable climate by drawing on memories of a time when social expectations could literally be mapped out and corporate presence in the community, if not always positive, was constant.

Economic development agendas have remained a driving force in ordering, and disordering, community life and expectations since the Moravians first arrived. What the Lamberts saw in the dirty snow of the steelworker neighborhoods and their pleasant surprise at the North Side’s stone buildings was the outcome of decades of economic and political decisions made visible and durable. In this landscape in which geographic, social, and cultural divisions have for centuries split the city, competing visions of Bethlehem’s postindustrial community and who it should include have remained difficult to reconcile.

A History of Division

The Moravians founded Bethlehem in 1741 as their church’s first permanent North American outpost from which to evangelize Native Americans and other European settlers. Also called the Unity of Brethren, this Protestant sect traces its origins to the fifteenth century in what is now the Czech Republic. After being persecuted and driven into exile, the Moravian Church was revived in eastern Germany under Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf in 1727 and quickly extended its reach throughout the Atlantic world. The renewed faith emphasized fellowship and a “religion of the heart” focused on emotional, and almost mystical, surrender to Christ rather than theological particularities. Moravians’ fervent evangelism was a function of their ecumenism—a belief that true Christians existed among all peoples.¹ In time, the Moravians became known for their devotion to education and music as well.

Zinzendorf christened the Pennsylvania settlement with the name Bethlehem during a visit on Christmas Eve 1741, affirming the town’s spiritual origins and purpose. But from the beginning, Bethlehem’s mission also was economic. The town initially organized as a communitarian settlement where residents contributed to a common “Oeconomy” based around artisanal work and trade. Residents did not receive wages, but rather pooled their labor and resources to advance the local community and its missionary outreach, as well as that of the church headquarters in Germany.² By 1758 the Moravians had erected more than seventy buildings in Bethlehem and maintained dozens of Church-owned industries, including pottery, carpentry, and hat-making shops, as well as a black smithy, tannery, gristmill, and house for boiling soap.³

The Moravians were careful town planners. While many of the group’s industrial works were located near Monocacy Creek, which branched north from the Lehigh River, community buildings were clustered up the hill around a central square. Residents lived in buildings organized by age, gender, and marital status, or “choirs.” All unmarried women, for example, lived and worked together in the Single Sisters’ House. As with most of the original buildings that remain standing and in use today, the choir houses were constructed in native limestone with brick accents and a strictly symmetrical design.⁴ After its completion in 1806, Central Moravian Church with its intricate belfry became Bethlehem’s dominant landmark. The church was designed to hold 1,500 congregants, even though the settlement was home to less than 600 people at the time.⁵

Bethlehem’s unique communal economy and choir systems dissolved within a generation, and the community allowed for private enterprise and family living. The settlement and the church’s farmland across the river to the south nonetheless remained closed to non-Moravian ownership or leases. Visitors, however, were welcome. Outsiders noted that the North Side community appeared to be set apart from the rapidly changing world around it. A tourist from Philadelphia remarked in 1790 on the quaint regularity of the Moravians’ stone buildings. “There is an air of dignified simplicity remarkably exemplified through these several structures,” she wrote. “The greatest order and unanimity is preserved in Bethlehem.”⁶

North Bethlehem

In this 1798 view looking north across the river at the Moravian settlement (top), the South Side is mostly forest and farmland. The stone masonry architecture of the original Moravian buildings, which still stand in Bethlehem’s North Side downtown and have remained in continuous use, include the Bell House (1746) and Single Sisters’ House (1744) shown here in 1937 (bottom). (Isaac Weld, Travels Through the States of North America, vol. 2, 1800, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Ian McLaughlin, 1937, Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.)

By 1844 the settlement had a population of about 1,000, with numbers growing in the surrounding area. That year, the church began to allow non-Moravians to lease buildings and land, and South Side farms were sold, largely to pay off debt.⁷ The Moravians took care, however, to maintain a distinction between their traditional way of life and the noise and dirt of the factories that soon dominated the other bank.⁸ During the pervasive industrialization of the nineteenth century, visitors’ nostalgic renderings of North Bethlehem intensified, increasingly painting the Moravian settlement as a cherished relic of the past. In 1881, a book describing the rise of manufacturing in the Lehigh Valley elaborated on this then-established distinction:

The traveler who arrives after nighfall [sic] will be startled by the angry tongues of furnace flame, shooting athwart the sky. He will catch momentary glimpses of active groups of half-naked men through the arched walls of the iron and steel works, and note the sickly hue of sulphurous fires at the zinc works beyond.… It is fortunate, however, that these great industries and railroad depot, together with a prosaic borough of workmen’s houses are placed altogether upon the southern side of the river, leaving the old town opposite undisturbed in the possession of its richness of antiquated Moravian landmarks.⁹

Primary among these South Side industries was the Saucona Iron Company, founded in 1857. Easy access to the anthracite coalmines in the Lehigh Valley, coupled with the boom in railroad transport, helped the enterprise grow into the Bethlehem Iron Company and later, in 1899, into the Bethlehem Steel Company.

As in other industrial towns in the United States, the needs of the Bethlehem plant—as well as cement mills, quarries, mines, cigar factories, and silk mills in the region—brought thousands of immigrants, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, into the community during these formative decades. The population of South Bethlehem, where almost all of the new workers settled, increased nearly sixfold between 1870 and 1910, from 3,500 people to close to 20,000, 58 percent of whom were either foreign-born or children of immigrants.¹⁰ The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act effectively ended the influx, but its impacts were lasting, and the area gained a reputation as being overtaken by foreign customs and vice. In 1927 the city’s mayor declared: “Over 95 per cent of the crimes committed here take place on the South Side. It is there we have a preponderance of foreigners. In fact there are no less than forty-eight nationalities represented among the labor element on [sic] this city. It is among them that practically all the law violations occur.” Meanwhile, other outsiders fueled the fire. Throughout the 1920s, weekend excursionists from New York City and New Jersey headed to the South Side for prohibited liquor, women, and gambling.¹¹

As the operations and smoke of the steel plant reinforced perceptions of noise and grime then associated with foreigners, higher-ranking employees and executives at the Steel distanced themselves from the working-class neighborhoods. Charles Schwab, who became president of Bethlehem Steel and incorporated the company in 1904, bought a mansion in Fountain Hill, a separate South Side borough west of the plant. Schwab had previously led the Carnegie Steel Company through its transition to the U.S. Steel Corporation, the nation’s largest steel manufacturer. He then helped turn Bethlehem Steel into the next biggest company, largely based on his plan to produce a new type of structural beam for use in building skyscrapers. Between 1910 and 1915 Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s employment doubled to 22,000 people.¹²

South Bethlehem

This 1935 photograph shows the close proximity of steelworkers’ housing to the plant down the hill, as well as its density. The smoke-filled sky contrasts with North Side images of the leafy Moravian settlement. (Walker Evans, “Bethlehem Houses and Steel Mill,” 1935, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress.)

Schwab passed the presidency on to his protégé Eugene Grace in 1916. Grace had started at the plant as a crane operator and would head the company for the next thirty years. Rather than settle in Fountain Hill, in 1923 Grace bought a house that he expanded to twenty-three rooms in West Bethlehem, on the north side of the river by the old Moravian settlement. Grace and six other senior officers lived within a few blocks of each other on what became known as Bonus Hill—an allusion to their generous pay. The side streets housed aspiring junior executives, professionals, and businessmen.¹³ The Steel Corporation had played an integral role in consolidating the separate boroughs of Bethlehem, South Bethlehem, and West Bethlehem into one city in 1917, in part because it hoped to maintain influence over local politics by offsetting South Side immigrant votes with those of wealthier and more business-friendly residents across the river.¹⁴ Even after the Steel helped construct the Hill to Hill Bridge to physically link the two sides of the river in 1924, class distinctions between North and South persisted.

“See, Chloe, everybody in South Bethlehem wanted to get out of South Bethlehem,” George Dias explained to me at the kitchen table of his sprawling Spanish deco North Side home. George, a soft-spoken man now in his mid-seventies, grew up above his family’s furniture store on Third Street, directly across from the Steel’s main gate. George’s father had immigrated to Bethlehem from Spain in 1920. Though he founded his successful business soon after, he made money during Prohibition running liquor to New York and at least once found himself in the South Side jail down the street. George’s mother, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, grew up on Atlantic Street in an area known as Nanny Goat Hill. There, immigrants from Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia kept animals and gardens on the slopes of South Mountain. Some of the land technically belonged to Bethlehem Steel, but it was effectively treated as commons. During the winters, George and other neighborhood children went sledding down the narrow city streets past the groceries and bars that anchored every street corner. Each night, George went out with a pail and picked up lumps of coal that had jostled loose from the trains that meandered through the neighborhood, cutting just behind the furniture store. He took them home to fuel the kitchen stove. The city market, a hub of activity in the South Side’s downtown business corridor, was a couple of blocks away, near chicken shops where women heated fifty-gallon drums of boiling water, dunked the birds in, and picked the feathers off. Pedestrians crossed to the other side of the street to avoid the stench.

The dirt and the smells and the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Introduction: Grand Openings and Closings
• 1. Order in the Landscape
• 2. Christmas City and Sin City Simply Do Not Go Together
• 3. The Postindustrial Factory
• 4. A Steel Site in Limbo
• 5. Landscapes of Life and Loss
• 6. What Happens in Bethlehem Depends on Macau
• Conclusion: Postindustrial Planning and Possibility
• Appendix: Note on Methods
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index