Roger Hudak

My name is Roger Hudak. I've been the Chairman of the Mayor's South Side Task Force since 2003. The South Side Task Force is made up of individual blockwatch captains of South Bethlehem. The major industries in South Bethlehem; which includes Lehigh University, the Bethlehem Area School District, Northampton County Community College, and of course Sands Bethlehem; so we have a great deal of input on what we'd like to see happening here in Bethlehem.

Bethlehem Steel was an integral part of my life, which is the main reason that I wanted to be actively involved in this project. My dad was an executive at 00:01:00Bethlehem Steel; he was in charge of purchasing for the Bethlehem plants at the warehouse here in Bethlehem. The Steel Company took good care of my family and I. We all had jobs. My mom got a job as a cleaning lady, and let me tell you, the cleaning ladies made a lot of money back then. They made more than I did as a starting teacher with a four-year college degree. My brother worked for Bethlehem Steel all his life after his service in the Army. My sister worked for Bethlehem Steel all the way to the end. She actually was employed by ISG, and then again later on by the new owner of the old plant. She was in the shipping department. They hired all these ladies who used to do all that stuff because no one could figure out some of Bethlehem Steel's accounting practices. They kept 00:02:00them on because they knew the accounting practices, and they kept it the way it should be.

For that reason I want to preserve what Steel meant to Bethlehem. I worked there myself for one summer as a sand gang laborer on the blast furnaces. The guys who worked there made a lot of money, but they really earned it. If Dante's hell could be represented, it would be the floor of a blast furnace. It was that horrifying, that hot, and that dangerous. Bethlehem Steel paid very well, and they were very proud of their jobs. They were proud of what they were doing. The one thing that I saw in the short time that I was that everyone was friendly toward everyone else, usually. It was a tremendous mixture of ethnicities.

One of the things that Bethlehem Steel did was, and if you could look at the 00:03:00demographics of South Bethlehem you would see. Bethlehem Steel actually imported my grandfather from Slovakia in 1907. He came over here as an iron worker, 'cause it was Bethlehem Iron Works at the time. Bratislava had an iron mill, and they sort of swiped those guys, paid their fare over to the United States, and gave them the opportunity to stay here then and continue to work and send for their families, which is what my grandfather did. So the Steel is vitally important to me personally.

The amount of people, the different kinds of folks, the different races and ethnicities that were down there made it quite a melting pot, ironically. If you worked on a team, you were part of that team. It didn't matter whether you were 00:04:00Black, Hispanic, or Asian. It didn't matter, which is what made Bethlehem great and still makes the South Side great.

I've never worked with an organization that was as honest, straightforward as they were. Their motto was: never promise more than you can deliver, but always deliver more than you promise. Which is fantastic for a corporate entity to be that way.

Living here in South Bethlehem, and I've lived on this block for 70 years. My house was down the street, one of the big singles down the street. I had the opportunity to buy this one. But at night back when the Steel was in the heyday, you actually wouldn't want to live here. You get used to it because the amount of noise from that plant was unbelievable, but we got used to it. Because the 00:05:00noise meant success. We were rolling, baby. We're rolling steel, and that was important so we got used to it. We also got used to the dirt. I had a white car, a '57 Golden Hawk, that I kept in the garage, but I washed that car daily. That's how bad the dust was. The dust was an iron ore-type dust from the ore pit, which is where the casino stands on that on that site. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, that dust would come up and it would settle on the car, especially a white car, and it would chew into the paint, the wax, and everything. It was horrible. The car had to be washed every day. The Steel Company actually had a car wash in their parking garage for the executives to spray the cars off when they drove in in the morning. It was truly amazing. It was a wonderful, wonderful place. At night when the ingots were rolling out, the sky would light up in that orange glow. The orange glow is exactly the same 00:06:00orange as was used on the Sands sign. My wife said, 'That's the color we want.'

That sign, if you can imagine, was an amazing thing in that they were so many people with so much input into. The size, which way it would face. There would be no signage facing the north because the North Side wanted nothing to do with this casino. It was sinful. Ironically, that didn't happen. The hookers may be here-- I don't know--but I never see them. The drug dealers have always been here, and I never see them either. And this is the safest neighborhood in the City of Bethlehem because we have more cameras than CNN and Fox put together and because we get along very well. It's a multi-ethnic group, sort of like the University. If you don't get along with your fellow classmates, you're not going 00:07:00to survive. And we get along with our neighbors.

During the 'casino wars' as my wife and I used to call them, it was really terrible and I took a heck of a beating personally. I was the President of my church congregation. There were members of the church who were very upset with me because it was sin. Yet as many of them are down there now every so often and it isn't. I'm not a gambler, so it doesn't bother me.

I heard about the casino coming from the Mayor, John Callahan, at the time. We discussed it at great length. We also discussed the fact that there were going 00:08:00to be a lot of people who were against it, and there certainly were. The Moravian community was absolutely against it on religious grounds. Many of the churches were against it on religious grounds. Some of my family was against it on religious grounds, as well, and didn't talk to me for a couple of years afterward. But we knew that it was the only way that we were going to be able to fill up the vast industrial parks that were planned on the old Bethlehem Steel site. It would be the only way that we could be able to move the South Side forward again and to keep it operating. 20% of our tax base was destroyed when Bethlehem Steel left. We regained some of that but, and we regained most of it now.

This actually is the reason why the renaissance of Bethlehem was able to happen. Without these guys getting this license, it couldn't have happened. It was that important. The casino's an important bridge, and it's important to us basically because without them we wouldn't have ArtsQuest. They do own all the real estate down there except for the ArtsQuest building, PBS39's building, and the Welcome Center. The Sands owns everything else, including all the parking lots that we use on a daily basis. So the Sands has been a very important partner.

Plus with all the people that they hired--and they were mostly locals--it's been vitally important to us. But we still have that steel town identity because of the blast furnaces. That was one of the things we wanted to do.

The people of Bethlehem are the people that live on this block. It's a multicultural, multiethnic community, and I think the whole City is getting to be that way. There are still places where they don't want Hispanics living there, which is totally ridiculous. We are such a mix. Our [Donegan] Elementary School up the street is at mix. If you go in there, you'll see white kids, 00:09:00Hispanic kids. You'll see Asian kids. Every kind of kid you can think of is there. It's a huge elementary school. That's the way the South Side is, I think. The City of Bethlehem--well, there are still some enclaves of the whites only, but that's gone. You can tell that at the University. If you check out [Lehigh] University, you'll see that they're multi-ethnic. All kinds of variations of races, colors and creeds. That's what South Bethlehem has always been.

I think the Creek Indian tribe from Alabama that's going to be purchasing it is going to be just as good a partner, if not better.

But there are some things that I'm going to miss because I know what was planned, and that breaks my heart. I don't know if that'll ever come to pass. Some of it will; some of it has. With the partnerships that we've established, we're going to continue with the Creeks. That won't be for a year or two. It's going to take quite a while, so we've sort of coasting right now, but decisions are being made politically. Decisions are being made with the real estate. Decisions that I have no part of and I don't know much about, but they are very important. I hope to see John Callahan, who works with Mike Perucci, who is from new Newmar Corporation out of New York City. I'm hoping that they will be taking over some of the responsibility for the development of the real estate, 'cause there is a lot of real estate down there.

I just hope to continue the development of the site and to preserve the historic integrity of the site to tell the story of Steel and to show that we remember where we came from.