Allentown, Pennsylvania
Allentown is the third-largest city in Pennsylvania, after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But to the extent that the city is known outside the state, it can thank an unfortunate bit of Rust Belt symbolism.
The symbol is Billy Joel’s 1982 song “Allentown,” which was a hit in the early music-video era and is more distinctly remembered than many others from that time. It used the name “Allentown” as a placeholder for that early wave of heavy-industrial shutdown and all the displacement that came from it:
Well we’re living here in Allentown…
And they’re closing all the factories down
This was unfortunate in the obvious ways—no one likes to be a nickname for failure—and with some additional twists. One is that the steel mills being closed in that era weren’t even in Allentown. They were fifteen miles away, in Bethlehem; but for the purposes of the song, the word “Allentown” sounded and scanned better, and also worked better in rhyme schemes, so Allentown it was. “That was the hell of it,” said Julio Guridy, who was born in the Dominican Republic but came to Allentown as a child in the 1970s. By the time we met him, he had become president of the city council, and as he walked us around town, he explained, “We have that song because nothing rhymes with ‘Bethlehem.’ ”
For the Allentown of the current era, a generation-plus after Billy Joel’s lament, shut-down factories aren’t really the main problem, either economically or culturally. The labyrinthine former U.S. Steel workshops and furnaces in Bethlehem that were the real subject of Billy Joel’s lament have been closed for so long that they’re well into a second life. Now they are a popular concert venue known as SteelStacks, with the idled blast furnaces and rolling mills serving as an artsy-spooky, industrial-Stonehenge backdrop for rock, folk, and country music acts, with “historic” tours into the steel mill’s ruins, plus an art gallery and a Sands casino nearby. Allentown has suffered its share of industrial layoffs, notably with what had once been the world manufacturing center for Mack Trucks. Now the truck factory is a center of advanced-tech and light-manufacturing start-ups—including a great brewery and a “meadery”—working on what had been the Mack shop floors.
The overall economy of the Lehigh Valley has expanded, diversified, and continued to grow. The presence of universities is one factor, the best known of them being Lehigh, in Bethlehem. Another is the importance of a range of specialty industries. Much of the Sam Adams beer that is sold and drunk anywhere in the country comes from a contract brewery in Breinigsville, just west of Allentown. The Rodale publishing and organic-products empire is based in Emmaus, just to the south. The most important economic advantage for the area has been that real estate stalwart: location. Allentown is far enough away from New York and Philadelphia to have much lower living costs than those cities do, and an identity as something other than just a bedroom commuter community. But it’s near enough that some people actually do commute. And the big north-south and east-west interstates that cross paths outside town have made greater Allentown an attractive logistical site. Amazon, having calculated that one-third of the U.S. population was within a day’s truck travel of Allentown, located its biggest East Coast warehouse nearby. Other grocery, furniture, and shipping companies are there as well.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the city’s population both grew and changed, largely through a significant move of Latino families from New York and New Jersey. The new arrivals were mainly of Puerto Rican or Dominican background—“Nuyoricans,” as Julio Guridy described them—and their flow accelerated after the 9/11 attacks. “It seemed safer here,” Guridy said. “We had more land, more space, lower costs, and it was still easy to get to New York or Philly.” By 2000, one-quarter of Allentown’s population was Latino. A dozen years later it was more than 40 percent.
The problem for Allentown was not so much the economy in general; it was the downtown specifically. Pennsylvania is more carved up into balkanized separate jurisdictions than any other state. With less than one-third as many people as California, it has five times as many local governing units: cities, townships, boroughs; water districts; school districts; counties—you name it. This theoretically keeps public officials closer to members of the public. It also makes it harder to set policies beyond a minutely local scale.
In the case of Allentown, the patchwork of jurisdictions meant that by moving development just outside the city borders—barely two miles from downtown, across a freeway in unincorporated county land—builders could escape city regulations, and merchants could have much lower taxes. So, starting in the 1970s, Allentown went through the destructive sprawl cycle familiar in so many American towns. New big-box malls and shopping centers sprang up in the suburbs; the customers followed them there; the downtown retailers struggled; the city’s revenues shrank; and services from police forces to street maintenance followed; and, as a consequence, everything about downtown life got worse. The result was a bombed-out-looking, high-crime shell of what had been until the 1980s an architecturally attractive and commercially successful downtown area.
Every city has a symbol of either decline or recovery. In Allentown, nearly everyone we spoke with mentioned the closing, in the 1990s, of the celebrated Hess Brothers department store as the marker for the city’s descent. In its post–World War II golden age, Hess was the anchor of the entire downtown. It had both high-end fashions and everyday family wear, a restaurant and a tea room, seasonal festivals, customers waiting when it opened its doors. We saw a picture in the Allentown Morning Call archives of throngs around Hess’s on a New Year’s Eve in that era, as if it were Times Square. “In 1970, Hess was the highest-grossing department store in the entire country!” exclaimed Ed Pawlowski, a balding man then in his late forties who had grown up in Chicago but had just won his third four-year term as Allentown’s mayor. As we walked past the former Hess site, he noted, “It did $190 million in retail sales, right here in Allentown. It was the retail hub for the entire region, and people came from all over to shop there.”
His mood grew more somber: “Then the malls got built, and slowly but surely they sucked everything out like a giant vacuum. We went from being a retail mecca to having dollar stores and tattoo parlors. We needed to do something to bring people back to the urban core.”
The “something” that the city did was similar to the “public-private partnerships” we had seen from South Dakota to South Carolina. The key was a new tax scheme called the Neighborhood Improvement Zone, or NIZ, which was approved by the Pennsylvania state legislature in 2009. This happened after years of effort by the Sixteenth District’s state senator, Pat Browne, a Republican who was born and raised in Allentown and had come up with the NIZ idea as a way to restore Allentown’s downtown to the splendor he remembered from his boomer-era boyhood. One of Browne’s boyhood friends was J. B. Reilly, who had grown up on the same street. Reilly had become a major builder and developer; his company was behind many of the suburban projects that had sucked vitality away from the downtown. Soon after he reached the state senate in 2005, Browne began asking Reilly what it would take to attract developers like him back to the city. The NIZ plan grew out of those discussions, Browne told us when we met him in his district office in Allentown.
Under the NIZ, the city designated a multiblock downtown area that was once thriving, had become derelict, and could be the foundation for a healthy new city core. For any developers who put up their own money to erect new buildings within the NIZ area—hotels, offices, restaurants, theaters or arenas, apartments or condos—the plan provided that all state and city taxes generated in those buildings over the next thirty years could go to retire bonds to cover the costs of the construction. City and state sales taxes for items sold in new stores, ticket taxes on concert sales, even state income taxes for construction crews building new office centers and workers inside them once they were finished—all would go into a special fund, to pay down the costs of the original investment. The idea was to make developers more willing to consider projects downtown, since capital costs would be lower than elsewhere, and, in turn, to make future tenants more likely to lease space or open businesses in the new buildings, since the lower construction costs would allow developers to charge less in rent.
Is this, in effect, a public subsidy for private investment? Obviously, yes—very much like the “Megasite” deal that Mississippi made to attract big factories to the Golden Triangle or South Carolina’s tax-concession and road-building deals when Michelin and then BMW were deciding where to locate their plants. The argument against all such policies is that they amount to “picking winners”—and, in Pennsylvania’s case, effectively transferring potential tax funds from the rest of the state straight to Allentown. The contrary argument is that without the incentives and investment, there would be no new tax revenues to divvy up, since the investments would not have occurred. The downtown would continue to deteriorate, and the new business would go elsewhere: Mississippi would still be trying to hold on to jobs at the toilet-seat factory, South Carolina would be struggling to replace its lost textile-mill jobs, and the crime rate in downtown Allentown would continue to mount.
This is one of the long-standing arguments in U.S. economic history. I am on the side of those who point out that public investments and incentives for big, new promising areas of technology—like agriculture and transportation in the 1800s, aerospace and biotech and infotech in the twentieth, genomics and energy technology now—have been crucial elements in national economic growth and have greatly repaid their costs. Other people might argue that this has been wasteful corporate subsidy. But whatever the views on those larger discussions, the reality is that they were not the object of partisan debate in Allentown or elsewhere in the state. (The main blowback the plan created outside Allentown was an effort by other cities, including Reading, Erie, and Scranton, to get similar provisions for their downtowns.) “Partisanship has to be set aside if we’re going to solve the problems of challenged cities,” Browne said—a sufficiently bland-seeming sentiment, but one that the locals had put into action.
“I’m thinking of ten thousand people coming right here, downtown!” Browne added, looking forward to the debut of the city’s new entertainment and sports complex. “What that will mean to everyone here…” Not far from Browne’s office, at the heart-of-downtown corner of Seventh and Hamilton, a classic Main Street–style large public clock had been repaired and repainted, put back in working order (through a $20,000 private donation), and set to the proper time. “When people in the town looked and saw that the clock was running again, we felt like it represented that the town itself was getting a new start,” Mayor Pawlowski said.
From Browne, the Republican creator of the NIZ plan, and the developer J. B. Reilly, also a Republican, to Mayor Pawlowski, a Democrat, and most others involved, people in the region seemed strongly inclined to give the plan the benefit of the doubt. By the time of our first visit in 2014, five years after the legislature approved the NIZ, more than $1 billion in projects had been committed to the downtown, which had seen essentially no investment in the previous twenty years. Tax revenue from new activities in the NIZ already totaled some $50 million. J. B. Reilly said that by the end of the year, three thousand more people would be working downtown than had the year before. “And for a city like Allentown,” he noted, “that’s just extraordinary.”
The editors and reporters of The Morning Call had kept a close and skeptical eye on the project’s finances, pointing out the lifelong friendship between Browne (the initiator of the NIZ plan) and Reilly (whose company made most of the investments and stood to receive most of the tax benefits), and probing repeatedly into whether Mayor Pawlowski had any personal stake in any of the developments. (Starting in 2013, the FBI investigated some of Pawlowski’s campaign and city hall associates on classic pay-for-play charges: taking payoffs in exchange for construction contracts. By 2017, at least half a dozen officials had pled guilty, and that summer Pawlowski himself was indicted, in a fifty-four-charge count that mainly involved allegations of influence peddling. But he ran for reelection to a fourth term as mayor, and that November he won. Two months later, his trial began.)
Since the time of our first visit, The Morning Call went through the strains and shrinkage common to many smaller publications, and one by one the reporters and editors who had followed the downtown and city-politics stories most closely—Sam Kennedy, Scott Kraus, Matt Assad—left for jobs outside journalism. The financial pressures on local and regional journalism are obviously another challenge for cities trying to revive a sense of public engagement and awareness, and a serious one. But in the editorials and reports The Morning Call’s staffers wrote while the downtown project was making its debut, and in updates they gave me as the years have gone by, they said that things were going about as well as anyone could have planned, and better than many people might have assumed.
On one of our visits in the fall of 2014, Mayor Pawlowski took us on a walking tour around the under-construction and just-opened sites in the NIZ zone. The centerpiece of the whole project was the $200 million PPL Center, at the corner of Seventh and Hamilton Streets in the heart of the historic downtown. “We made sure that all the major component parts were made in Pennsylvania,” Pawlowski told us. “Seven million tons of steel in there, all from Erie. Seven hundred and twenty football fields’ worth of concrete, all local.”
On a below-ground level of the center was a multipurpose arena; it would hold up to eighty-five hundred spectators for concerts and sporting events (including the home games of the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, the Flyers-affiliate minor league hockey team). On the other floors were restaurants, retail shops, office space, and an adjoining high-end Renaissance hotel. Around the corner was a new hospital and sports-medicine complex; in the other direction, condos in refurbished historic buildings. In that renovated high-rise, Pawlowski said, a law firm was bringing one hundred lawyers from a suburban location back to downtown. In another, a tech company would install a comparable number of engineers. Here was a cleaned-up park; there, a bike path; there, a brewery.
When we looked even a block or two in the wrong direction, we could still see the signs of a troubled downtown area. Pawnshops, blood banks, check-cashing operations. On other visits, we walked with Julio Guridy through some of the poorer, mainly Latino neighborhoods half a mile from downtown. The owner of a bodega said she was hopeful that the arena would bring new business to her area, as long as it was faster than the rise in property values that might push her out.
One warm August evening, we stepped away from the economic and political maze of Allentown’s downtown plans. We went to watch the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Triple-A minor league affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, take on the Syracuse Chiefs, an affiliate of our Washington Nationals. It didn’t really matter to us or to the hometown crowd that the Chiefs, like their parent Nats, were doing well in their league and the Iron Pigs, like the Phillies, weren’t. We were going in the traditional American summer spirit of a friendly night at the ballpark—in this case, the fine new Coca-Cola Park, an eighty-two-hundred-seat stadium.
The stadium had opened in 2008 at the edge of Allentown, and its success had become an inspiration and a model for some of the really big plans for downtown Allentown. Coca-Cola Park is more than a lovely stadium. It is a stepping-stone in the economic and spiritual revival of Allentown and the Lehigh Valley after the loss of nearby Bethlehem Steel and other fundamental industries and businesses. Lots of people questioned the wisdom of building the $50 million stadium, doubting it could draw or sustain a crowd. But it did and it has. People come from all around the Lehigh Valley, and the stadium boasts the biggest attendance record of any minor league stadium in the United States.
The stadium’s success was also used as an argument to undertake the construction of the downtown arena in the PPL Center, including the home rink for the Lehigh Valley Phantoms. If Coca-Cola Park worked for baseball, Allentown officials and the Phantoms reasoned, the downtown arena should work for hockey.
Fans poured into the stadium in droves the two evenings we went: groups of high school cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, employees from the nearby Amazon distribution center, buses of senior citizens from their assisted-living homes, pairs of twins celebrating their birthdays, couples celebrating anniversaries, service groups, Villanova alumni, an Episcopal church group from nearby Emmaus, the management staff from the Saucon Valley Country Club, groups with mysterious acronyms like HJSC and TCR, and the Pennsylvania credit union. They all popped up to cheers on the stadium’s big screen, one after another.
The evening was hardly a splurge, at the family-friendly price of seven dollars a ticket or an upgrade to ten bucks, which included a five-dollar food coupon. We went all in. Some people came for the food alone. Lee Butz, whose family company built Coca-Cola Park and later the PPL Center, walked us around one evening and told me about one such friend of his. “He didn’t really care that much for baseball,” Butz said, “but he loved to have dinner at the park.” Butz described the way his friend would sit at one of the little tables in the esplanade for as long as it took him to eat his dinner—that would be until about the end of the third inning—and then go home.
Making my own choice for dinner was difficult. Since we were in Pennsylvania Dutch country, there were all kinds of hot dogs and local sausages on offer. The longest lines were for the spicy corn on the cob—implausibly huge ears of corn dunked into vats of melted butter, then sprinkled heavily with Parmesan cheese and hot spices. Next up were funnel cakes.
Funnel cakes? I had noticed that the lines for make-your-own waffles at the free Marriott breakfast at our hotel were as long as the lines for funnel cakes at the stadium. Funnel cakes, waffles, one and the same? They looked the same to me. I thought it was perhaps time-of-day nomenclature: waffles for breakfast and funnel cakes after that. Locals whom I asked in Allentown launched into a heartfelt discourse, explaining that funnel cakes looked more like a pile of spaghetti than a well-defined waffle, proving again that regionalisms are alive and well across America. I went with corn on the cob for the shorter line.
Not a single stadium announcement went unsponsored. We heard the Allied Bank national anthem, the Toyota “Play ball!” call to action, the Wawa RBI batter of the game, the more creative Dave’s Vacuum cleanup hitter and ServiceMaster clean sweep. The litany and the signage that covered every square inch of the stadium might be wearying in the big leagues, but the hometown crowd was enthusiastic; we felt we were walking through the yellow pages or Yelp of the Lehigh Valley.
Inning breaks offered a sideshow of acts: races between a slab of bacon and a hot dog (we’re in pork country!); a blindfolded jump-rope contest; and a sumo match featuring wrestlers inside giant transparent plastic bubbles trying to roll each other out of bounds.
Only one such interstitial act struck me as heartless. A little boy who looked to be about eight years old was the lucky winner of two tickets to nearby Six Flags amusement park. Thrilled, he was invited onto the field by the local Vanna White stand-in, who offered him a choice: keep his two tickets or take a chance on one of three mystery boxes in front of him. He gamely chose the smallest of the boxes. “Vanna” held us in suspense, opening first the middle-sized box. It revealed a few tickets and some freebies. Then the big box: six tickets and lots of paraphernalia. Then, finally, the smallest box. The boy had exchanged his two tickets for nothing but a spool of black thread. A collective groan rose from the crowd as the little boy, visibly crushed, was rushed off the field with a “Tough luck, kid!” shrug.
Strolling the perimeter of the stadium, we saw playgrounds for the little kids, a grassy seating area for families to spread out, booths for fast-pitch and batting contests. There was something for everyone, or nearly everyone. Despite Allentown being over 40 percent Latino, we saw few Latino faces in the crowds. Julio Guridy, Allentown’s city council president then, told me that I would be more likely to see Latino families at the town’s parks, playing and enjoying soccer games, than at the Iron Pigs stadium.
We’d heard so much, from so many people, about the big blowout event that would announce the return of downtown Allentown, that when we took another tour of the premises of the PPL Center just a few days before the scheduled opening, we were protectively worried on the town’s behalf. The locked-in deadline was the evening of September 12, 2014, when the celebrated and brand-new PPL arena would host its gala first event, a concert by the classic-rock group the Eagles. Tickets went for $200 and up, and the event was sold out a few hours after it was announced. But when we walked through the PPL hall, we mainly saw painters’ tarps, audience-seating chairs still in their shipping boxes, scaffolding holding construction equipment, and other signs of a lot of work still to be done. “Don’t worry!” Mayor Pawlowski told us. “It will be fine!” said Julio Guridy. “No problem,” Lee Butz, the builder, agreed. “Okay!” I said, mock-cheerily. What I thought was “Oh sure.”
But when September 12 dawned, bright and sunny, the arena was ready for the Eagles, and much more. (More than 125 future dates had already been booked, for events ranging from Cher and Tom Petty to rodeos and hockey games.) Two days earlier, Browne, Pawlowski, Guridy, Reilly, and other local officials had gathered for an official christening ceremony. They’d all stressed the corner they thought the city was about to turn.
“What this means to Allentown is hope,” a city councilman named Ray O’Connell said. “Hope. Hope for a better Allentown. Hope for the families of Allentown. Hope for the children of the families of Allentown. Hope. And without hope, you have nothing.”
Big projects work best if they stimulate follow-on waves of smaller activity, in directions the original planners could not foresee. We saw signs of that kind of activity around Allentown, too.
The most visible industrial-age relic in Allentown is the remains of the Mack Trucks plant, on a bluff overlooking Little Lehigh Creek and the downtown. From the outside you’d take one glance and think: another Rust Belt abandoned factory. The Mack brothers founded their truck-making company in Brooklyn in 1900, but by 1905 they had moved to this site in Allentown, where they produced their famous trucks until the move to North Carolina in 2009.
The old shop buildings include an homage to the Mack Trucks era, with a historical museum full of antique models. But most of the shop floor is now occupied by small start-up operations of the sort we have seen in co-working and incubator spaces around the country. Most of them were for products that drew from the region’s manufacturing and mill-working heritage—and one of Allentown’s modern advantages, as the city saw it, of having an unusually large amount of manufacturing floor space available, unusually close to downtown.
“Our big idea here is ‘walkable manufacturing,’ ” said Scott Unger, executive director of the Allentown Economic Development Corporation, which operates the old Mack factory. By that he meant something we were seeing signs of in one city after another: reversing the model of people having to commute to suburban or industrial-park workplaces, and instead building manufacturing or white-collar working spaces closer to downtown. “When Amazon expands in Seattle,” he pointed out, “they moan about not having any public transit to their sites. But no subsidized system can offset the effect of sprawl. If you can place your plants where workers can easily get to them—and where trucks can get easily to I-78 with your products—you’re ahead.”
Different cities have different reasons for enacting land-use policies. Unger said that a big goal of Allentown’s was to preserve old industrial buildings like the ones we were walking through. “We are ahead because of our manufacturing real estate,” he told me. “Protecting manufacturing space is a crucial element of our land-use policy.” Enough small, new companies, with enough young founders, would be interested enough in a bargain like this—ample factory space, low costs, walkable or bikeable distance to affordable housing—to give Allentown a chance at the next wave of enterprises. “A generation ago, people never wanted to go downtown,” he said. “The new model is live/work/play” in a smaller area, for which he thought an old factory in an old town could be a good match.
We visited about a dozen different businesses: A cryogenics company, in which we saw vapors pouring from liquid-nitrogen tanks but whose specific product remained confidential. A polymers firm, bolstered by a National Science Foundation grant. A solar-tech company. Another making sporting products from composite materials. A brewery—and a distillery, and a meadery, which makes alcoholic drinks out of honey.
“We are looking for high-impact companies,” Anthony Durante, program manager of this enterprise center, told us. “Not what you could think of as lifestyle companies, providing a living for one to three people. We are looking for companies that will employ twenty people, then fifty, then more. Will they ever go public? We don’t know. Our job is to help them get started.”
Again, as a model, this is familiar—familiar, that is, in stories from San Francisco or Brooklyn or Seattle or Austin. Here the model was being applied, with local adjustments, in an old-tech old manufacturing town.
In the late 1970s, the CEO of Mack Trucks was Alfred Pelletier, who was raised in Toronto, trained as a mechanic, started at Mack repairing trucks, and rose from the blue-collar ranks to run the entire company. His son, Doug, a tall, lean, athletic-looking man in his early sixties, unlike his father went off to college and then headed to the software industry rather than the Mack plant. He worked for IBM and then in the early 1990s founded a company called Trifecta, which became a very successful business-software firm that now has about a hundred employees. When he was starting the company, the natural site for its headquarters seemed to be a clean, safe, anodyne suburban office park.
Some twenty years later, when he heard about the new NIZ program for downtown Allentown, Pelletier considered moving his company there. “We were growing and needed to expand. I was thinking of buying a building somewhere else, but I heard a presentation on the new city center and thought, I’m in!” he told me. Rather than moving into one of the new corporate office buildings, he decided to acquire a classic but distressed downtown building, the former home of Schoen’s Furniture Store barely a block away from the new PPL Center, and to develop it as a contemporary tech work space.
About two weeks before its formal opening, Pelletier walked us through his office, with the vintage industrial touches and fixtures now standard in the hippest work sites. All-glass walls overlooking the next-door park, and toward a historic church that once housed the Liberty Bell. Original beams on walls and ceiling, exposed brick, wood panels from old barns in the region, and restored, polished, century-old hardwood floors. Ping-Pong tables and a rooftop deck. Kitchens plus fridges, stocked with wine and local craft beer.
“I have always maintained that if we created a great work environment, it would help us to find and retain great local talent,” he said. “We could always find smart people coming out of Harvard or MIT and they would move here. But the odds are that without roots in the Lehigh Valley, in a year or two they will return to Boston. But if we find great people from the Lehigh Valley, who in theory could go anywhere—we could show them a caring company culture and cool workplace that would convince them this is the place to stay and start a career.” Pelletier said that as soon as his downtown plans were announced, he received six job applications from engineers at nearby firms.
“The next generation of workers and the young engineers that we want to hire want to live downtown,” he said. “The Trifecta Building has created a new and great opportunity for all of us.”
There was a long way to go, but it was a start.
If you’ve dipped into the world of gymnastics beyond watching the Olympics every four years, you may already know about the Parkettes. To the rest of you, the Parkettes probably sounds like a 1960s girl band. It’s not. The Parkettes is a national training center for U.S. gymnasts in Allentown.
The Parkettes is indeed a product of the 1960s, and the story of its origin is a heartwarming classic American saga. Donna Strauss, petite like a gymnast, founded the club with her husband, Bill. She has clearly told her story many times before, but she launched into it as if it had happened yesterday.
As we walked around the cavernous thirty-five-thousand-square-foot warehouse-like building, the floor was bustling with girls flying from one of the uneven parallel bars to the other, muscling through sets of pull-ups, pounding at top speed to a leaping flip over the vault, and walking on their hands in military-neat rows across the floor, in ramrod-straight upside-down posture. Everything they were doing looked impossibly difficult to me.
In the 1960s, Donna and Bill were teaching in the Allentown public schools. This was the pre–Title IX era, of course, and as a PE teacher, Donna was keenly aware that while the boys in Allentown had their football, basketball, and wrestling teams, the girls’ athletics options were spare. So she decided to start a girls’ gymnastics program and asked the principal, a man named Carroll Parks, for help with practice space.
Principal Parks came through, daring to carve out floor time for the girls from the boys’ basketball practices, and then opening the gym doors to the girls on Saturdays as well. He was such a motivator for Strauss and the girls, said Donna, that they named the now-legendary Parkettes in his honor.
The early gymnasts practiced at school, at a church, in a barn, and in a neighborhood backyard. The high school shop teacher built the girls a set of uneven bars. The program grew and flourished during Allentown’s glory days, when neighboring powerhouse Bethlehem Steel, which had produced steel for such showcase structures of America as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, and the Empire State Building, was still providing good jobs for the region.
In 1979, Donna approached Alfred Pelletier, then-CEO and chairman of the board of Allentown’s Mack Trucks. The Strausses took Pelletier to see the gymnasts training in their borrowed space, which was then an upstairs floor of the Allentown Symphony Hall, and asked if he would help them raise money for a real gym.
Pelletier was impressed by the couple’s dream of building a facility as safe, modern, and exciting as the one the Strausses had visited on a trip to Moscow shortly before the 1980 Olympics. There they’d seen their first foam-filled “pit,” into which gymnasts could safely fall from heights.
Pelletier pitched Allentown, and Allentown pitched in. Picture Thanksgiving weekend, 1981: A fleet of Allentown’s Mack trucks, filled with leftover foam padding from the airplane seats that Mack also produced, pulls up to the almost-finished Parkettes building. Two hundred town volunteers are waiting, armed with their electric kitchen knives, to unload the foam and carve it into small chunks for bedding for the pits. Other townspeople show up to install subflooring beneath the vaulting tracks and under the mats, put in telephones, or do whatever the skills they possessed could allow them to do. Allentown built itself a gym that would become a world-class training facility.
I visited the gym on a hot late-August Monday morning, the first day of the fall season for the elite girls’ team. The youngest gymnast there was about nine, the oldest seventeen. The members of the elite team are Parkettes’ best of the best. The girls mostly come from the surrounding Lehigh Valley, although some travel from as far away as Delaware or New Jersey. The parents drive the girls to practice every day, some telecommuting to their own jobs from laptops in the upstairs room the club provides for them. Then they drive back home at the end of the practice and start all over again the next day. The girls are homeschooled, an experimental idea the club rolled out in 2000, when it became clear that the highly motivated gymnasts were burning themselves out trying to keep up with five or six hours of practice piled onto conventional school life.
The Parkettes program boasts the flashiest list of achievements and all the hardware that goes with it: Olympians, national champions, world gymnasts, and full-ride scholarships to big-name universities. I watched the girls, even the little nine-year-old, carry themselves with laserlike focus on the floor, and this intensity also spilled over to a beyond-their-years maturity off the floor. If you planted this group of girls next to a randomly selected group of others their age at a mall and compared their composure, I bet lunch that you would agree with me. I watched the girls in every age group listen hard to their coaches, take direction, request clarifications, and stand straight when receiving criticism.
Much of the girls’ attitude, you have to guess, is a reflection of the culture that Donna and Bill Strauss have created. I admit that before walking through the Parkettes’ door that morning, I had steeled myself for the likes of Bela and Marta Karolyi, who make my stomach churn even when I’m just watching them on TV. So I was surprised when Strauss’s demeanor seemed toned down and unwound. When I owned up to my preconceptions, she admitted that their manner has evolved over the years. At the beginning, the model was “mean and ugly,” as Donna puts it, adding, “We thought that was what you do.” But they grew to see that it doesn’t have to work that way, and they have moved toward a different style. Realistically, of course, you can’t expect that the atmosphere I saw on the first day of the season would always remain so peachy, and Donna agreed, noting understatedly, “It can get more serious.”
So, how do the Parkettes play in Allentown today? I could hear the nostalgia in Donna Strauss’s voice as she reflects on the boom times in Allentown. “It was a vibrant and strong city,” she says, describing how coaches from visiting teams would come to town a day early just to shop at the flagship Hess Brothers department store. “We’re still a heartbeat of the town,” Strauss says. “But these days, Allentown is not the same.”
Although Bethlehem Steel closed, the Hess store was shuttered, Mack Trucks company was sold, Strauss says, “We survived. We stayed alive.” And as one of the newly retired superstars put it in her farewell speech before heading to Stanford: “Once a Parkette, always a Parkette.”