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These tours started four years ago. Each year, we visit new spaces and learn more history of the people that built this community and our country. Bus Tours of Bethlehem Steel plant site, south side churches, and cemeteries.
Presented by Steelworkers’ Archives, Inc. and South Bethlehem Historical Society.
Tour schedule for 2017 with in-church or cemetery visits.
Each date listed below includes a Google map link to each location.
Saturday, July 22, 2017
9:30 AM Concordia Lutheran Church (formerly St. John’s Slovak Lutheran Church)
1:00 PM Sts. Cyril and Methodius Cemetery
Saturday, August 19
9:30 AM Packer Memorial Church
1:00 PM Holy Ghost Cemetery
Saturday, September 16
9:30 AM Nisky Hill Cemetery
1:00 PM Fritz Memorial United Methodist Church
Saturday, November 4
9:30 AM St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
1:00 PM Historic Fountain Hill Cemetery
Free and open to the public on every weekend of the tours:
Open House at St. John’s Windish Lutheran Church
10:30 AM—2:30 PM – Exhibits / Baked goods / Church tour @ 12:15 PM
(Kiffle, anyone???)
These tours which will take you back to the era of immigration of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. You will learn about work at the Bethlehem Steel mill; the South Side Bethlehem ethnic communities and their churches; and local cemeteries, as well as their interconnections. The initial one-hour section of the tour, guided by a representative from the South Bethlehem Historical Society, will tour steelworker churches on Bethlehem’s South Side (entering one church on each tour) or a local cemetery, the final resting place of many steelworkers. A one-hour steelworker-guided tour of the Bethlehem Steel plant site follows. An Eastern European goulash (which may look like this, or some version of it) lunch is provided to tour participants for take-out or to eat at St. John’s Kaiser Auditorium of the St. John Windish Church..
Open house: The Steelworkers’ Archives, local churches, and community-based organizations will display historical materials and artifacts from 10:30 AM—2:30 PM each tour day in St. John’s Kaiser Auditorium. A tour of St. John’s by Frank E. Podleiszek is scheduled at 12:15 PM. Free and open to the public. Free parking.
Reservations are required for the mini-bus tours. Tickets are $20 per person and can be ordered at www.steelworkersarchives.com or 610.861.0600. All ticket sales are final.
(*) Any Lehigh University student or staff member who has enjoyed the view of South Bethlehem from Rathbone Dining Hall, Rauch Business Center, the top levels of any campus parking garage, or the Iacocca Tower, or a Lehigh Valley resident who’s been to the Lehigh Lookout may be curious about all of those steeples that spike across the city scape not too far from the blast furnaces. Most of these churches were built by ethnic immigrant laborers who worked at the steel. In 2008, the Catholic Diocese in Allentown closed four of the churches, but sold the buildings to other organizations; keeping the buildings (ref article here.)
South Bethlehem history is right under our noses every day. Ever wonder why so much energy is spent on “The Steel”? This program is a chance to learn more about the people who built these magnificent structures and how they became icons of the multi-ethnic character of this rich community. If you’ve ever studied abroad in Europe, these churches were “home” to so many ethnic groups that immigrated to Bethlehem in the late 1800s and 1900s. For the next four months, on one Saturday each month, we can learn about the people who worked, built, lived, and prayed in these magnificent buildings.
We had the good luck of taking these tours when they started in 2014. It was a delight to walk in the holy spaces where the ancestors of Bethlehem’s rich and diverse culture held their European traditions. Added benefit to the tours of the churches, are the stories shared by retired steelworkers as the bus roams through the former Bethlehem Steel plant. To hear about the working conditions and the multiple generations of families that dedicated their lives to making the steel that built America is to understand the nostalgia of the place now converted into new community assets with the ArtsQuest campus and the Sands Casino/Mall.
As we shared a cozy bus ride, we heard many childhood memories of growing up in South Bethlehem. Where they once played, swam (Mohler Lab on the corner of West Packer Avenue and Broadhead had a swimming pool when it was a synagog!!), and shopped. The original Banko Beverage was in a little shop in South Bethlehem. This is the same Banko that is now one the area’s generous supporters of the arts and community. There’s so many more delights of knowledge, but we don’t want to take the joy of discovery for the reader. You’ll just have to experience it.
For further background reading, here is a Lehigh Valley Express Times article from 2014. And a follow up article in 2015 by the same journalist. The cover image for this post is a Lehigh Valley Live.com stock photo.
For a more thorough map of Southside Bethlehem Churches.
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