Not too many years ago, if you approached Bethlehem from the north (I can't vouch for any other direction), you passed through farmland almost up to the city's border. Cows. Silver-gray-weathered barns. The battered elegance of old farmhouses. Orchards. Genuine amber waves of grain.
Those of you who aren't really into all this rurality (although farms are still where most of our food comes from), bear with me. In this case I am talking mostly about food for the soul.
The entire Lehigh Valley used to have this same quality of patches of urbanity sprung up amid the alien corn. Coming into Allentown from the north, you could see the city from miles away, with the familiar PP&L building standing up in its midst like an exclamation point.
It was beautiful to look at. It was soul-satisfying. It gave you the feeling there was something to escape to. If you were, for example, frazzled by long work hours at Bethlehem Steel, maybe you could use some of your "off" time to go for a ride in the country and buy fresh produce at a farm stand. If you couldn't stand the farm another minute, you could go and have lunch and shop at Allentown's world-famous department store, Hess's.
The farmland around Bethlehem and Allentown was not a vacuum, moreover, but itself an expression of a very old, Germanic cultural tradition--one that, for simplicity's sake, we may call Pennsylvania Dutch. (I understand that, to be politically correct, one must now say "Pennsylvania German;" but I grew up thinking I was Pennsylvania Dutch, though I knew perfectly well that Pennsylvania Dutch, the dialect was Germanic. I, and no doubt many others, intend to go on thinking of ourselves as Pennsylvania Dutch.)
These days, though, most of the Pennsylvania Dutch/Germans have lost their farms, and the culture has found, perhaps, a last bastion at Kutztown University. There, there is an institute about us. I'm glad of that, although it is no substitute for being a culture to be reckoned with--which we were within my lifetime.
All this by way of prelude to mention of a news story I just read in the Morning Call. It seems that the development proposal made by Bethlehem developer Nic Zawarski & Sons for a tract of some of the most rural land left in Bethlehem Township was turned down by the commissioners of that township.
According to Morning Call reporter Daryl Nerl, the land the Zawarski firm wishes to turn into a profit farm contains cornfields, a farmhouse, a barn, a deer pen, and a trout hatchery, among other rural amenities. Water from the pools of the trout hatchery flows into the Monocacy Creek, Bethlehem's famed in-town trout stream (and infamous flooder of historic properties.)
I don't know whether this was originally a Pennsylvania Dutch farm, or somebody else's. I do know that the developer plans to submit a revised development scheme, and that, thanks to the concept of "development," this place is doomed. No use in blaming the Zawarski firm in particular; it is just doing what developers do. If not Zawarski, it would be another company pushing the process.
As I said, wave goodbye to heritage, goodbye to rural beauty, goodbye to one of the things that made the old Lehigh Valley so special.

(For more of Berengaria, read In Search Of Healing, http://insearchofhealing.blogstream.com )

More than a decade ago I left Bethlehem for a few years, a period of time during which I completed a book. When I returned I noticed that something had changed on the South Side.
It was noisier. I couldn't vouch for this being true in other parts of the town, because the South Side was where I lived. But I COULD vouch for my neighborhood.
Now, the South Side had been noisy for as long as I had had anything to do with it. But that was all right. At all times, the underlying music was discernible as the cars of young people went cruising by.
But it seemed that during my absence the ante had been upped. All concern for the nerves and feelings of others seemed to be gone. The emphasis that had been on music now seemed to have shifted to sheer noise. Decibels and nothing but decibels.
Twice I put myself, accidentally, into real danger. Once was when I encountered a man who was walking down the street carrying a boom box next to his ear in an apparent effort to deafen not only himself, but everyone within a mile radius. I asked him--I am afraid, not particularly politely--to turn it down. In return, I was transfixed by a gaze so full of venom that I thought I was about to be killed. The same thing happened when I asked a couple of young men who were installing a car stereo system right outside my apartment to turn down the volume. This time I really was a little more polite--at least, to the extent that I could make myself heard. But again, the response made my blood run cold.
Thank heaven, I now live in a much quieter neighborhood. But I gather that the problem around my old digs has, if anything, become worse. At the core of the problem, according to a Morning Call article I read a few days ago, are "boomer cars" that cruise the streets not only of the South Side, but of all Bethlehem--not to mention other communities, like Allentown. Owners of such cars sometimes meet at intersections and have "duels" that involve unleashing unbearable walls of sound. One of them was quoted as saying, "I want other people to hear what I hear."
Well, thanks. More than generous. What if we don't want to?
What if we call this a mere cultural expression, and let it go at that? I do believe that, to a certain extent, young people will be young people, and should be let alone to live through it. But, among other things, the noise presents a public health problem. These cars and their drivers are creating future patients for audiologists, psychologists, even cardiologists. (There is nothing quite like a good end-of-the-world roar to make the heart skip a beat or two.)
I don't know what to prescribe. Perhaps we could start pushing the virtues of civilization above those of culture. Those virtues include caring for the needs and wants of others, perhaps more than for our own.
It would be a start.


For more by Berengaria, read In Search of Healing, http://insearchofhealing.blogstream.com

Two days ago I had a truly distressing experience in my continuing (but almost certainly doomed) effort to save the South Bethlehem Historical Society, which I founded more than 20 years ago as a public service to the entire city of Bethlehem. I spoke to a member of the society's board, a well-known merchant, pointing out to him that it made no sense to vote for an end to a well-funded organization with much work to do.
He replied that he thought Historic Bethlehem Partnership had made a good offer, that that offer would not really mean the end of the historical society, that HBP had the resources and staff to help do what SBHS was chartered to do on the South Side.
I doubt that. Obviously, more HBP resources float away every time the Monocacy floods the Luckenbach Mill and the 18th century Tannery--perhaps, for all I know, Burnside Plantation as well. Beyond that, there is no reason why HBP should have ANY resources needed to help SBHS do the things the latter organization was set up to do, because it has traditionally not had the slightest interest in ethnic or immigrant history. When I began pointing out the historical importance of the South Side and its people I was met, to say the least, with great coldness.
More than that, I may have been the first non-professional to be aware of the importance of South Side history, but I was not the first to try to call attention to it. Always, the north side historical establishment was totally--and, if I may say so, sniffily--uninterested. That historical establishment wasn't even interested in the Lehigh Division Canal, which ran along its edge.
It is a well-known story how, years ago, when Bethlehem Steel was throwing away everything from books to other documents to artifacts, local and regional historical societies were allowed to "go through the dumpsters," as it were, and take whatever they wanted. Historic Bethlehem Inc., one of the precursors of HBP, didn't bother to show up. The National Canal Museum did; and that is why its holdings of South Side materials are immense. It has always wanted to return the items to Bethlehem; but HBI-cum-HBP has not been interested; and now HBP seems determined to destroy the one organization that was founded to be interested.
Of course, now HBP has discovered that the truly significant part of Bethlehem's history (in terms of world history) did indeed take place on the South Side. So now it may want in on the action--and on the historical control over the city, which it thought it had in the first place.
This may be the origin of the newly discovered "Moravian South Side," which has not been significantly Moravian since it was sold in the mid-1840s.
The board member with whom I had my unsatisfactory discussion complained that since he had been a board member SBHS had not done one thing, and that it was a waste of his time. Setting aside the idea I have that SBHS was set up not to do anything (i.e., there were one or more ringers on the board), he ought to realize that it is his job as a board member to help make things happen. If he cannot, he should resign, not vote to end the existence of the organization.
The "gentleman" ended by calling me a bigot. If I recall, I am the one who pointed out that all sorts of ethnic groups had made contributions to the city, and their contributions should be acknowledged, AS WELL AS those of the early Moravians. Apparently he had been indoctrinated with the idea that anyone who wished to acknowlege anyone BUT the Moravians must be dripping with prejudice.
Say again? But it's his choice, if he wishes to think that way.
"Thinking" may be too strong a term, though.

Check Berengaria's other blog, http://insearchofhealing.blogstream.com

...even if you don't care about history.
1. Because, as one of the city's generators of tourism, history is a contributor to the local economy. If it is not developed to its fullest and most intelligent extent (and it certainly has not been in recent years; many --not all--of the officers and board of the South Bethlehem Historical Society share the blame for that), the entire city suffers.
2. Because the destruction of one organization--any organization in any field, but especially in a field like this--is a restriction to your civic right to freedom of association, and also your right to pursue whatever interests you want to pursue.
3. Because some serious historical revisionism, the effort to re-write history as it never was, is going on here. Historical revisionism is very dangerous because, in interpreting a heritage as it never was, it leads us to a future based on misunderstanding.
Historical revisionism is a form of propaganda. There certainly can be positive aspects of propaganda, as when a master like American (and Fountain Hill-born) writer Stephen Vincent Benet wrote to bring out all the finest aspects of the American heritage and to burnish them in the face of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But no healthy future can lie down a road that begins with deliberate distortion.

Visit Berengaria's other blog, In Search Of healing, at http://insearchofhealing.blogstream.com

The time is ripe to return to the history of Bethlehem history.
Readers of one of the newspapers covering Bethlehem are by now aware that the apparent intent of the Historic Bethlehem Partnership is not to merge with, so much as to eat, the South Bethlehem Historical Society. And as soon as possible. This cannot easily be dismissed as a matter of my opinion; it is the opinion of a great many intelligent people, both those directly involved and those who are only observing from the sidelines.
But why? It is hard to know; HBP has tried for months to keep the matter under wraps, and that in itself raises questions. To put it simply, if their plans are honorable, why not hold a press conference and, with joy and pride, make them public?
Could the northside organization need money? Very likely. It has a couple of buildings down in the Monocacy Creek valley, and in the past few years flooding has become unusually frequent down there--perhaps not as frequent as it is going to be if global warming is indeed part of our present and our future.
All this flooding requires cleaning up; and this does cost money--enough, perhaps, to keep HBP officials awake nights. But how is gaining access to the South Bethlehem Historical Society's few tens of thousands of dollars going to change much? That amount of money, it seems, would be very little help against the ocean--or rather, creek--of HBP's needs. And there is the additional inconvenience that much of SBHS's money came to that organization as bequests, with which to do South Side history. That moral obligation remains, even if both HBP and the current (and singularly unqualified) SBHS board choose to violate it.
If HBP needs money, I have a better idea for them. Do what the great old South Side entrepreneurs did, and put in your own money, Ladies and Gentlemen. This is how Lehigh was built--and saved. This is how St. Luke's was built.
At least some HBP associates are known to be very wealthy. Why shouldn't they find a way to establish an endowment for the north side historical organization, to tide it over difficult times? It seems more sensible than trying to make "affiliates" (read: appetizers) of other historical organizations--and especially since it seems SBHS is the only good candidate for affiliation. Eat this, and the meal's over.
But in the last analysis, this is not about money. This is about power. This is about a small group saying that only the parts of history it favors are important. If it should be proved otherwise, as in this case it has been, the group that seeks to dominate will attempt to extend its reach. Now that it realizes that--contrary to its expectations--Southside Bethlehem history really is important, HBP is attempting to see to it that it, and only it, can work on the South Side.
I think HBP and the current members of the SBHS board will achieve the destruction of the South Side organization. Too bad, since for me that represents a considerable portion of my life's work; but I can live with the loss.
What HBP will never do is achieve control over South Bethlehem history.

(Check out Berengaria's other blog, In Search of Healing, at http://www.insearchofhealing.blogstream.com)