Move jolts area’s heart
S. Allentown residents hope changes at longtime facility won’t hurt neighborhood
Gladys Pezoldt has lived near Good Shepherd long enough to remember when the south Allentown institution was still a single farmhouse for orphans and children with disabilities.
From her porch on St. John Street on Friday morning, a block from the rehabilitation network’s campus, the 85-yearold woman reminisced about growing up in the neighborhood and eagerly awaiting the annual three-day lawn festival the Good Shepherd Alumni Association began hosting in the early 1930s, when Good Shepherd founder, the Rev. John Raker, was still prominent in the community.
“It was like the World Fair for us,” she said.
Pezoldt also reflected on the relationships she’d made in more recent years with residents of Good Shepherd’s Raker Center, a nursing home for people with physical disabilities. She’s gotten to know them while volunteering for years at the 12th Ward polling place, usually located at the home. One resident
liked to tell Pezoldt about the time he watched the arrival of a newcomer and vowed to marry her. He did.
“My daughter used to go to birthday parties thrown for Rev. Raker’s granddaughter,” Pezoldt recalled. “All these little stories come back when I start to think about it.”
Her ruminations came a day after Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network announced its presence in south Allentown will likely shrink for the first time in more than a century. The nonprofit will close its south Allentown hospital, 850 S. Fifth St., and build a three-story, 75-bed rehabilitation hospital on 45 acres across from The Promenade Shops in Center Valley. About 250 employees are expected to transition there in 2023, spokesperson Carry Gerber said.
The relocation allows the network to add private rooms (75 compared to the 12 in the Allentown hospital) and accommodate the increasing number of patients from outside of the Lehigh Valley with a site close to hotels, restaurants, entertainment and shopping.
Good Shepherd plans to renovate and repurpose the Allentown hospital building, which stands on 6 acres, but it isn’t ready to publicly discuss the options, Gerber said Thursday. The larger city campus will continue to offer long-term care, an outpatient center, administrative services and apartments for low-income people with disabilities.
State Rep. Peter Schweyer and City Councilwoman Ce-Ce Gerlach both said one of their main concerns is that the residents of the Good Shepherd HomeRaker Center and Good Shepherd supported independent living apartments continue to have access to the services the hospital provides.
Long-term care residents receive therapies and physician appointments at their homes on campus, Gerber said, and outpatient services also will continue to be offered at the Health & Technology Center on campus. In the rare instance that residents require acute rehabilitation hospitalization, Good Shepherd will provide it in Center Valley, she said.
Joe Hoffman of St. John Street has mixed feelings about the move. The former city employee and recent Allentown City Council candidate arrived home Wednesday after spending 11 weeks in a local hospital recovering from the coronavirus and other health issues, and said he was unable to complete an in-patient rehabilitation stint at Good Shepherd because there were no private rooms available.
The upgraded facilities are much needed, he said. But he’s anxious to see what Good Shepherd does with its existing hospital. A smaller footprint in the city, he said, would be disappointing — especially for the hospital’s hourly workers who can walk or catch a quick bus to work.
April Riddick, who lives on South Sixth Street a half block from the hospital, said Good Shepherd has helped beautify the neighborhood through the upkeep of its buildings and grounds. She worries what might happen if the institution has less of a presence. She also said the relocation of jobs would change the neighborhood.
“I know a lot of people in the neighborhood work there and they enjoy walking to work,” she said.
Should a commute to Center Valley become a hardship, Good Shepherd will work with employees to find alternate positions within the network, Gerber said. Given the range of services that will remain in south Allentown, “there will be ample opportunities for employees who wish to continue working on our main campus,” she said.
Antonio Lopes reluctantly left his nursing job at Good Shepherd for another opportunity but continues to rent one of a half-dozen row homes Good Shepherd owns along Cleveland Street, a block from the hospital. He counts a number of former colleagues as neighbors, noting that the institution charges well below market rent. The Center Valley move has been a rumor for years, he added, but he expected the network would make good on its promise to keep a lot of jobs in south Allentown.
An institution like Good Shepherd benefits neighborhoods through investments it makes in its property, which can have a domino effect, Gerlach said.
She pointed to the streetscaping St. Luke’s University Hospital made around its Sacred Heart campus in Center City. The knowledge that thousands of hospital employees and visitors pass through the neighborhood around Good Shepherd prompts residents and landlords to keep up their properties, Gerlach said.
“If you’re able to just put a pot of flowers out, you might do that,” she said.
But the loss of 250 jobs will also be a blow for the community, Gerlach said. Good Shepherd has been an important source of employment, and she hopes the institution considers that in its plans to repurpose the property.
“If they do decide to hang on to the property and redevelop, I do hope that it is a job creator for people who have a high school diploma or an associate degree,” she said. “It’s important that we have a diverse job market, where not everyone has to have a college diploma and people can still earn a living wage.”
If Good Shepherd determines it is not going to use the property for its own programs, the community must be involved in determining what uses best suit the neighborhood, said Gerlach, who has been critical of development in Allentown’s Neighborhood Improvement Zone for not serving surrounding neighborhoods.
“There has to be a paradigm shift where we don’t go into a neighborhood and decide what that neighborhood needs without even asking them,” she said.
The real estate changes are happening as Good Shepherd transitions to new leadership. Michael Spigel takes over on Aug. 3 after being named CEO and president in May.
His tenure starts 112 years after Raker, a Lutheran pastor, established the farmhouse orphanage in south Allentown, with his wife, Estelle. They later expanded the home to elderly people who were destitute. Their son, Conrad “Connie” Raker, in 1958 launched the region’s first workshop to train people with disabilities for the workplace, and opened the rehabilitation hospital a few years later.
With 1,400 employees, Good Shepherd has remained independent, even as most other hospitals in the region joined Lehigh Valley Health Network or St. Luke’s University Health Network after failing to compete for patients. Its administrators said Good Shepherd carved out a niche in the region and across the country for its specialty care in catastrophic injury recovery and its commitment to helping patients gain the strength to return to their jobs and passions.
Good Shepherd’s independence hasn’t completely buffered it from what Hoffman termed the impersonal corporatism of the 21st century. Those lawn festivals are long gone, and Hoffman said the institution is not as intertwined with the community as in the days when he would run into Connie Raker, a “man of the people,” at the local pizza parlor, laundromat or corner store.
George Sosa, owner of Georgie Porgie’s American Pizza & Grill at 757 St. John St., said Good Shepherd has remained a solid customer in recent years, occasionally ordering large deliveries for long-term patients and residents from his restaurant as well as others in the neighborhood.
Sosa said he’s hopeful the hospital move won’t affect business much, but also noted he’s used to “rolling with the punches.”
Employee Jennifer Alliston said they’re used to change in the neighborhood. She grew up there and remembers running past Good Shepherd to the Pink Elephant ice cream parlor on South Fifth Street. Her first job was next door at the Poodle Skirt diner. Both were in buildings razed to make way for a Good Shepherd parking deck.
That deck didn’t solve street parking issues in the dense neighborhood. Carl Moser of Cleveland Street was one of a handful of residents who found a silver lining in the news Good Shepherd is building in Center Valley.
“Maybe I’ll be able to find a parking spot on my block now,” he said.