Preparing an Interpretive Plan for the Bethlehem Steel Site

FAIN: BP-50045-07

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden (Camden, NJ 08102-1405)
Howard Gillette (Project Director: September 2006 to April 2008)

Planning for a symposium and collaboration with scholars to create an interpretive master plan for the abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, examining local industrial history.

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University-Camden in partnership with the city of Bethlehem and the Lehigh Valley Industrial Heritage Coalition seeks funds to develop an interpretive plan through a conference and associated collaboration that will bring national scholarly expertise and wide professional perspective to an ongoing community-based effort to preserve and interpret the abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem, PA. The plan will build on work MARCH has done in cooperation with the city and the LVIHC in development of a complex public-private collaboration designed to (1) save the historic site from demolition, (2) adapt and resue surviving buildings for cultural purposes and economic revitalization and, (3) create pervasive interpretation on the site and in the surrounding areas of local industrial history spanning several centuries.

Associated Products