Audioguides Allentown

In September 1777, as British forces occupied Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was smuggled out of the city and hidden beneath the floorboards of the Zion Reformed Church in what is now Allentown, Pennsylvania, where it stayed until June 1778. The city was founded in 1762 by William Allen, a shipping merchant wealthy enough to name the streets after his own children. Margaret, Ann, James, and William still appear on the grid today. In October 1951, a transistor was produced for the first time at Western Electric's Allentown plant, a fact the city does not mention nearly enough.

Allentown sits 48 miles north of Philadelphia on the Lehigh River, and it grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries on silk, steel, and beer.

By 1928 it had 85 silk mills. Mack Trucks moved here in 1905. The PPL Building went up in 1928, an Art Deco tower illuminated every night since it opened, and the Federal Writers' Project documented Pennsylvania Dutch dialect still shaping local speech into the 1940s. Then the mills closed, the steel industry contracted, and Billy Joel wrote a song about it in 1982 that captured something accurate and painful about the Rust Belt's hollowing-out.