The recent column about the need for public input to Bethlehem\u2019s tourism plan is one I embrace.<\/p>\n
My wife and I bought a condemned house in West Bethlehem in 1980 that overlooked the railroad and canal. I would sometimes cross the tracks and walk to the bridge over the canal to walk along the river. When you walk along that canal it is hard to believe that you are between two cities. There are deer, wild turkeys and foxes, and plenty of birds.<\/p>\n
There is a place that was right near our house where the river becomes shallow and legend says that it was where Native Americans would walk across the river. I have read that the area across the river was a sacred area where local tribes would meet and trade the jasper stones found near Lanark that they valued for making arrowheads.<\/p>\n
One of our neighbors, Lewis Shray, worked for the city and he helped me to contact the various parts of the city to get permission to restore the house. The city allowed us to live in the house while we worked on it, though it took a year of work before we could move in. We needed to rewire the whole house and add plumbing because someone had broken into the house and tore up the floors to steal the copper pipes.<\/p>\n
At the time, I was a painter so I had a steep learning curve to bring the house back to livable condition. We had a friend who was a licensed electrician and I worked with him to rewire the house. The walls were all wallpapered and we had work parties on weekends with friends who helped us soak then scrape off the wallpaper then scrub off the glue to get down to the plaster walls and ceilings. The plumbing inspector instructed me into how to run the drain pipes to comply with code and after a year of work we moved in, though it was still quite rustic.<\/p>\n
The yellow pine floors had perhaps had a shellac finish, but if so it had worn away and after patching the floor boards with boards salvaged from the back of the attic floor we sanded them and coated them with two coats of urethane varnish. I expect that caused some damage to my brain because I didn\u2019t yet understand the danger of those fumes, but it looked great.<\/p>\n
The house had a slate roof and I took advantage of the knowledge of some old carpenters who were working on a job installing solar on a house in East Stroudsburg and learned slate repair on the barn roof on the property. Barbara Kozero gave me a slate repair tool that her father made when he worked at the Steel and I became a customer of the Penn Big Bed Slate Co. and did my own slate repairs. When the valley flashing started to rust out, I installed new valley flashing.<\/p>\n
The old wood front porch was rotten so I got some help from a friend and formed and poured a concrete floor to replace the front porch floor.<\/p>\n
At some point I started to notice some large birds flying above the river and, after doing some research, I identified them as ospreys.<\/p>\n
There is one lock in West Bethlehem. I got it in my mind that if the one lock was rebuilt it would allow people to take a ride on a canal boat from downtown Bethlehem all the way to Allentown. For a while, around the time of the first Lehigh River Sojourn, we discussed the idea of forming a Bethlehem Canal Association.<\/p>\n
The Lehigh Canal was an important part of the development of the industries that helped bring coal to heat homes and run businesses and ore to make iron then steel.<\/p>\n
If the one canal lock in Bethlehem was rebuilt and some of the trees that have grown on the bank were removed, then the canal would be navigable, so people could take a trip to Allentown while learning about the history of the canal and enjoying the unspoiled area between the cities.<\/p>\n
Originally the lock was a swinging lock, like most locks, but I later learned that it was replaced with a drop lock that hinged so that it lay on the bed of the canal so the boats could float above as they passed.<\/p>\n
Whether the lock is restored to a swinging or a drop lock is up for debate, but it is clear that rebuilding that lock and providing canal boat rides would be a huge boost to tourism and provide an opportunity to teach about the importance of canals to the growth of industry in Bethlehem, Allentown and the entire area of Pennsylvania. It connected with the Delaware Canal in Easton and was an important economic resource.<\/p>\n
This is a contributed opinion column. Bruce Wilson of Upper Saucon Township is a builder who specializes in green projects. The views expressed in this piece are those of its individual author(s), and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of this publication. For more details on commentaries, read our guide to guest opinions at themorningcall.com\/opinions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The recent column about the need for public input to Bethlehem\u2019s tourism plan is one I embrace. My…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,1559],"class_list":["post-286428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}