Bethlehem Steel 1: Virtual tour of the blast furnaces along Hoover-Mason trestle walkway

This summer (2018), arriving early for a movie at the ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks https://www.steelstacks.org/ in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I was surprised to see the elevated walkway over the old trestle right in front of the majestic row of closed Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces across from the arts venue. (Steel making in Bethlehem ceased in 1995, and the expansive industrial property along the Lehigh River has been repurposed as an arts/entertainment/retail center.) The walkway with educational signs about the blast furnaces and related steelmaking process has been there since about 2013, but somehow, big events or bad weather kept me from noticing it before. 

Not sure when in my life I first heard of Bethlehem Steel: definitely by the time my youngest sister attended Lehigh University, an engineering and liberal arts school, just up the hill from the steel works in Bethlehem. She would mention the huge completed I-beams that would tie up traffic as they tried to make their way out of town.

Eleven years after her graduation, we moved to Easton, immediately east of Bethlehem and the smallest of the Lehigh Valley’s three cities: Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton. Although non-local media outlets sometimes call the area “Philadelphia suburbs”, and many do commute daily 50-60 miles to Philadelphia, we are also 65 miles straight due west of New York City with a significant population commuting to the “Big Apple”. Scranton/Wilkes Barre in the northern anthracite belt is ~75 miles north. The Lehigh Valley during colonial and growing industrialization of the 19^th century became an industrial hub due to river and canal access along the Lehigh and Delaware rivers connecting the anthracite fields, markets of Philadelphia/NYC, and its own mills and factories. Steelmaking began in Bethlehem in the mid-1800’s.

Prior to moving to the Lehigh Valley, we lived in Carbondale, Illinois, where I worked part-time in the coal petrology lab, Geology Department, Southern Illinois University. The lab director, from whom I also took courses in Coal Petrology and Advanced Coal Petrology, had worked several years in the Bethlehem Steel research labs characterizing coals for coke-making and specific parameters that would well-predict the behavior of a coal in both coke ovens and the resultant coke in the blast furnaces.

I was fortunate to get a tour of Bethlehem Steel works in 1990 while it was still operating. We visited the Basic Oxygen Furnace and a rolling mill, escorted by a retired employee. And a few years later, on a grad school field trip to various outcrops of the Late Triassic Lockatong lacustrine black shales of the Newark basin, we ended up in New Jersey right under the George Washington Bridge (crossing the Hudson River between New York City and New Jersey) with Bethlehem Steel boldly stamped on the lower girders of the west suspension tower.

So here is a virtual tour of the blast furnaces along the Hoover-Mason Trestle walkway at the eponymous site of Bethlehem Steel. (All photos without citation are by me.):

Figure 1A: Map- Bethworks master plan (~2013) for transforming the Bethlehem Steel site to arts/entertainment area from http://stream-hugger.blogspot.com/2013/01/going-brown-when-going-green-is-bad.html http://stream-hugger.blogspot.com/2013/01/going-brown-when-going-green-is-bad.html . The blast furnaces are in light brown at the central north of the map, bordering the Lehigh River (click to enlarge).

Figure 1B: Map- Bethlehem Steel works from 1979. Note location of brown-colored ore yard (now Sands Casino), red basic oxygen furnace on right (now industrial park), red blast furnaces (center).

Figure 2: General diagram of a blast furnace operation (Dong, 2008*).

Figure 3:  Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces looking east. There are 5 blast furnaces, A-E (see Figure 1B). The A furnace is the three-stack one on the left. Brick building on the left is the Visitors Center; in the center of the photo are the steps up to the Hoover-Mason Trestle walkway.

Figure 4: Blast furnace row looking west. One can see the silver-gray tourist walkway over the remnants of the Hoover-Mason railroad trestle used to transport materials to furnaces. Canopy structures at the lower left edge of the photo are part of the Leavitt Pavilion outdoor concert venue.

Figure 5: Staircase up to trestle walkway, right in front of blast furnace A. According to AbandonedAmerica, “the oldest furnace is blast furnace A, which was built in 1914. It was rebuilt in 1950 and last ran in 1960. Because of its location directly beside another blast furnace (B, which ran into the 1980s), active mill buildings, and a busy mainline railroad, it was never demolished. ‘A’ furnace is notable because it is the only surviving blast furnace in the United States that still has triple pass stoves”.

Figure 6: Looking east from west end of elevated walkway.

Figure 7: Educational diagram on walkway showing relationship of blast furnace to trestle and explaining the transportation and charging of furnace with the three “ingredients”: coke, limestone, and iron ore. Coke is a vesiculated elemental carbon solid produced by cooking bituminous coal in ovens at high temperature.

Figure 8: Close-up of walkway, trestle, and old trestle car, looking west toward blast furnace A.

Figure 9: Trestle route map. The coke works were about 2 1/2 miles ESE of the blast furnaces; the Sands Casino was built over the old ore pits, half mile east of furnaces (see Figure 1B map).

Figure 10: Blast furnace with skip track used for hauling materials to load at top of furnace.

Figure 11: Sign explaining materials layering in blast furnace and transformation of iron-oxide ore to metallic reduced pig iron (which has about 4% carbon).

Figure 12: Working at a blast furnace, Bethlehem Steel, Sparrows Point, Maryland, 1951 (Baltimore Sun)

Figure 13: The basic oxygen furnace (BOF) at Bethlehem. In a BOF, recycled steel or other additives can be added to pig iron from the blast furnace. The BOF at Bethlehem was just west of the current casino (old ore pit location), but has been demolished, replaced by an industrial park (see also map of Figure 1B). (Photo: Hagley Museum collection)

Figure 14: Panoramic shot, looking west, with Hoover-Mason Trestle walkway and blast furnaces on the right (north) and the ArtsQuest concert/movie venue, on the left, that includes studios and offices of the local Public Broadcasting station.

Figure 15: Relict stone walls of iron foundry (background) and possibly old plate shop (foreground), just west of blast furnaces. (Based on map 1B and truck dock legend at http://www.brokenbushandroundtop.com/bethlehemsteel/bethmap_page.html .)

Figure 16: From 2014, leaving Christkindlmarkt, an annual German-tradition Christmas craft market in Bethlehem, the “Christmas City”.  For the last several years, the market has been located at the west end of the “SteelStacks” behind and next to the Visitors Center.

Figure 17: Blast furnace A illuminated at night.

To finish your virtual visit, there is a great DRONE FLYOVER of the SteelStacks from 2016 on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HPwX4pB_Qo .

* Citation for Figure 2 diagram: Dong, Shan Ning, 2008, Development of Analytical Methods for Characterizing Metallurgical Coke and the Injectant Coal Chars, Tars and Soots Formed during Blast Furnace Operation (dissertation), Department of Chemical Engineering
, Imperial College London of Science, Technology and Medicine, 204 pages (Figure 2-1) (https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/1329/1/Dong-SN-2008-PhD-Thesis.pdf )