Hotel Bethlehem

A month before the first bridge was engineered across the Lehigh River in 1794, a store was built on the same web site. As the city grew and traffic accumulated within the space, it was converted to associate degree hotel.

In the early 1920s, a group of Bethlehem businessmen UN agency felt town required a excellent edifice organized a project that semiconductor diode to the development of associate degree $800,000, 200-room building they called the edifice Bethlehem.

It opened its doors in 1922, 100 years once the Golden Eagle served its 1st client.

With the backing of Bethlehem Steel executives like Charles Schwab, the hotel became the center of the city's social life.

As Bethlehem Steel rose to prominence as the nation's second largest producer of steel, the Hotel Bethlehem prospered.

For many years, it was the positioning of the putz that every year draws thousands of tourists to Christmas town.

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was on the campaign path in 1960, he visited the Hotel Bethlehem. So did former U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Nixon's running mate, when he was candidature against Kennedy.

The Continental Room, where connoisseurs of French cooking dined to a lower place crystal chandeliers, brought the hotel essential acclaim in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Classic French dishes were prepared at tableside to suit the style of diners, who may choose a appropriate wine from the hotel's cellar.

The hotel has received the yankee Automobile Association's Four-Diamond rating many times, ranking it among the top eight % within the nation.

In the early 1960s, Bethlehem Steel bought 89 % of the hotel's stock and created it a subsidiary. Steel considered closing the then-62-year-old edifice in the Seventies, when there were reports of a convention center to be inbuilt downtown Bethlehem. The convention center never materialized and, instead of selling it, Steel renovated its exterior in 1976.

But in Nov 1984, the financially troubled steel company sold the edifice to Henry M. Robert and Dee Decker for $2.7 million, according to reports within the Morning Call.

The Deckers, Bethlehem developers, redecorated the rooms and made them larger - reducing the range of rooms from two hundred to one hundred twenty five. They added king-size beds, sunken tubs, and desks with typewriters and calculators. Jacuzzis were installed in some rooms.