Icon meant something different to everyone
Whether building’s seen as corporate greed or architectural marvel, Bethlehem loses a landmark
When the explosives go off Sunday in what is sure to be the spectacle of the year in the Lehigh Valley, Martin Tower will collapse into a heap of metaphors.
Take your pick. Over its half-century of existence, the 21-story, 332-foot-tall former headquarters of Bethlehem Steel suggested something different to just about everyone.
It was a dark, soulless-looking monument to executive arrogance and foolishness — or an architectural ode to the laborers who, in blazing, sooty acreage along the Lehigh River, forged the steel that built America.
In its afterlife, it was regarded as a
fitting memorial to the city's industrial past, or a tombstone poignantly marked with life dates: 1899-2003.
When the tower was built, between 1969 and 1972, things in the steel world looked pretty good. So it's understandable that the white collars of the company wanted a spiffy new headquarters. Understandable, too, that they wanted a cruciform design to maximize the number of corner offices. A corner office is the proper home of the successful executive, and the second-largest steelmaker on the planet was chock-a-block with successful executives.
From the higher floors, they could see forever. But, by some accounts, it was shortsightedness that did them in.
The petition to get Martin Tower on the National Register of Historic Places concisely summarizes events during and after the construction of the tower, which was named for one-time CEO and chairman Edmund Martin:
“Steel was on the top of its game … The company was the 14th largest industrial corporation in the country by 1970. It produced 20.6 million tons of raw steel and shipped 16.3 million tons of finished steel — a company record. But
around this time imports and labor costs were rising and the demand for steel was decreasing. By 1977 — four years after Martin Tower opened — the company posted its first loss, $448 million in the hole.”
The postmortems have all been conducted. Steel executives were blind to the changing landscape, more concerned with building marble-floored tributes to themselves than reckoning with market forces. Or they were overtaken by economic dynamics they couldn’t have predicted. Or the union was greedy. Or all of the above.
The famed last cast at Bethlehem Steel — the last time workers engaged with molten metal in the process of turning it into one of humanity’s essential creations — was on Nov. 18, 1995. Many of the places where men and women plied this fiery trade are occupied now by the Sands Casino and the SteelStacks entertainment complex, which operate against the backdrop of the blast furnace towers. For a wistful and painful experience, visit those sites with an old steelworker and listen to the memories.
Steel’s lengthy implosion — it filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and ceased to exist two years later — was stunning, even if it wasn’t surprising. How could something so essential to our history cease to be? It was like finding out the beams that rolled out of South Bethlehem all those years were hollow inside.
Most of the white-collar workers had left Martin Tower long before the end came. Other companies moved in and moved out. The last tenant — it was, ironically, a debt collection company — departed in 2007.
That the city of Bethlehem survived all of this tumult without crashing into a localized depression is a credit to its civic and government leaders and, more broadly, to the founding Moravians who created a place of such surpassing charm that tourism could keep it afloat.
It wasn’t just Moravian history, either. Most of the Founding Fathers of note — George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton — visited Bethlehem at one time or another. So did the Marquis de Lafayette, who recuperated from his war wounds there. Steel is gone but the Sun Inn, favorite haunt of those immortals, still remains. And who wouldn’t want to see that?
Through this post-Steel reckoning, Martin Tower stood. The tallest building in the Lehigh Valley — a title it usurped from the PPL Building in Allentown by virtue of eight extra feet — was visible for miles, as much a part of the landscape as South Mountain. When it disappears, the directionally challenged among us will have to recalibrate their inner compasses.
Not everyone was crazy about the outside of the building. It was dark and block-like. But the inside? A marble lobby. Friendly doormen and elevator operators. Walnut and mahogany furniture. Richly paneled offices and conference rooms. The Steel logo on the doorknobs.
“Absolutely stunning,” said Marian Hough, one-time executive assistant to Bethlehem Steel CEO and chairman Curtis “Hank” Barnette. “Bright and classy.”
Barnette, who led Steel from 1992 to 2000, remembered the building as beautiful, functional and well-suited to the company’s powerhouse reputation.
“Very modern,” he said. “Very international, very steelcentered in terms of the desks, tables. You certainly knew you were at a steel company headquarters.”
After its padlocking in 2007, the tower went the way of all abandoned buildings. As plans to redevelop it lurched and sputtered, the paint and wallpaper peeled. Tiles buckled. Pipes rusted. The elegant spiral staircase that once took visitors into the brain of a great American industry still stood, but led nowhere.
Like the Allentown State Hospital, another marble-accented Lehigh Valley landmark doomed to demolition, Martin Tower became all past, no future. By showing its age, it made you feel your own.
No one was likely to feel it more keenly than Barnette, who led the company through most of the painful final years.
“It makes us all very sad that it’s happening,” Barnette said. “Sad that the building couldn’t be re-adapted, sad that the building is coming down. But also very hopeful that the owners can develop the site and bring employment and good jobs and good services to the site — a very important part of Bethlehem.”