Steel worker housing in South Bethlehem, PA, circa 1935.


Image of crowded housing in Bethlehem.
Full Size

In the early 1900s South Bethlehem became a crowded and noisy boomtown. Biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen, who lived in Bethlehem as a child, wrote that the borough was "like another place and another planet, a Wild West of its own."