On a steep South Side street, in the shadow of five rusting blast furnaces that once never slept, a brick church on Pierce Street kept the Slovak Mass alive until 2008. The story of the Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is written in that brick, in the bowling lanes of a Sokol lodge up the hill, and in the cabbage and dough of a food festival that still draws crowds to the old steel yard.
The Place
Bethlehem sits on the Lehigh River in eastern Pennsylvania, a city split by water and history into two halves. The North Side holds the colonial Moravian core, founded in 1741. The South Side is a different country.
South Bethlehem grew up around steel. In 1899 the Bethlehem Steel Corporation took shape here, and for nearly a century it was one of the largest steelmakers in the world, supplying the girders for the Golden Gate Bridge, Madison Square Garden, and parts of the Empire State Building.
The mills needed hands, thousands of them, and they came from across central and eastern Europe. The Slovaks were among the first and most numerous of those arrivals, and they built their parish, their lodges, and their streets in the long blue shadow the furnaces threw down each evening.
How It Became Slovak
The Slovaks did not come to Bethlehem for the scenery. They came for the work, and the work was brutal, hot, and constant.
The pull of the furnaces
As steel production grew in the late 1800s, Irish, Slovak, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and Polish labourers settled in South Bethlehem. Philadelphia served as the entry port and transit point for many of them, a way station before the iron and steel cities of the interior.
From there the trains ran north to Bethlehem and west to Pittsburgh. The Slovaks who chose Bethlehem stepped off into a town being remade by fire and ore, and they took the jobs that the established residents would not.
About eighty per cent of Slovak immigrants had been common or farm labourers in the old country. They arrived with few industrial skills, so they found their place in the heaviest, lowest-paid work of the mills, in the heat of the open hearth and the dust of the yards.
Living near the gate
Like the other immigrant groups, the Slovaks chose to live close to where they worked. The result was a patchwork of ethnic streets stacked on the hillside above the plant, each group clustering around its own church and its own language.
This was not a quiet melting pot. By 1910 the Hungarians were the single largest immigrant group in South Bethlehem, outnumbering the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Germans, the Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Croatians, and the Slovenes who shared the same crowded blocks. The Slovaks held their own among them, knit together by faith and by the mill whistle.
Building the parish
The anchor of Slovak Catholic life arrived early. In 1891 Monsignor William Heinen purchased land from Lehigh University for what would become Saints Cyril and Methodius, named for the brother saints who brought Christianity to the Slavs and who remain the patrons of Slovak national identity.
It was the first Slovak church in the diocese. As immigration swelled at the turn of the century, the original building could not hold the congregation, and a new church rose on an adjacent plot, opening to the public on Pentecost Sunday in 1906.
Three years later, in 1909, the old building was converted into the parish school. The parish became the centre of Slovak Bethlehem, the place where the language was preserved in the liturgy, where children were taught, and where the calendar of the year was measured out in feast days and bazaars.
The Lutherans and the Windish
Not every Slovak in Bethlehem was Catholic. By the turn of the twentieth century enough Slovak Lutherans had gathered to talk of forming their own congregation, and St. John the Baptist Evangelical Slovak Lutheran Church was founded on 6 August 1911 under the guidance of the Reverend John Hurdy of Hazleton.
The religious map of the South Side was finely drawn. A related congregation, St. John’s Windisch Evangelical Lutheran Church, served the Windish people, Slovene speakers of a distinct dialect who, like the Slovaks, had come for the mills. Each group wanted its own house of worship, in its own tongue, and the hillside filled with steeples.
The Sokol on the hill
Faith was only half of the immigrant institution. The other half was the Sokol, the Slovak gymnastic and fraternal movement that combined physical training, mutual insurance, and social life under one roof.
The national branch, the Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol of America, was established in 1896 as a fraternal benefit society. In Bethlehem, Lodge 93 was founded in 1905, and in 1926 it moved up into the hills of South Bethlehem, where it still stands today.
The Bethlehem Sokol grew through the 1910s with the addition of a women’s lodge, Lodge 66W, and a juvenile branch of Lodge 93. Both remained active into at least the 1970s, drilling, bowling, and keeping the membership rolls that doubled as a community census.
The Landmarks
Saints Cyril and Methodius Church, 617 Pierce Street. The first Slovak parish in the diocese, built on land bought from Lehigh University in 1891, with its new church opened on Pentecost Sunday in 1906. A Slovak Mass was offered here until the church closed in 2008. The building reopened the same year as Incarnation of Our Lord, a blended parish made from five consolidated ethnic congregations.
National Sokol Lodge 93, 613 Hillside Avenue. Founded in 1905 and settled on the South Bethlehem hillside in 1926, this is the surviving home of Slovak fraternal life in the city. Today it is a social club with a bar, a banquet hall, and six bowling lanes, the recreation room of the old steelworker community kept warm by its descendants.
The Tatra Slovak folk group. Formed within the Cyril and Methodius parish in 1977, Tatra Slovak set out to preserve and celebrate Slovak culture through dance, costume, and song. Its name borrowed the High Tatras, the granite mountains of northern Slovakia, and carried them to a Pennsylvania church hall.
St. John the Baptist Evangelical Slovak Lutheran Church. Founded on 6 August 1911, this congregation served the Slovak Lutheran minority of South Bethlehem, a reminder that the immigrants who shared a homeland did not always share an altar. Its founding under the Reverend John Hurdy marked the formal arrival of Protestant Slovaks in the city.
The Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces, now SteelStacks. Five furnaces, the two largest soaring more than 230 feet, line the Lehigh River where the plant rolled steel for the last time on 18 November 1995. The Slovak parish was built to serve the men who fed these furnaces, and the furnaces now stand as the largest gravestone the community has.
The SteelStacks campus and its festivals. The ten-acre arts campus that grew on the former plant hosts the food festivals where Slovak cooking survives in public, including a pierogi celebration laden with halupki, stuffed cabbage, the dish that anchored every parish bazaar. The recipes outlasted the mill that brought them.
Incarnation of Our Lord Parish. When the Diocese of Allentown consolidated five shrinking ethnic churches in 2008, the Slovak Cyril and Methodius joined the Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, and Italian parishes under one new name in the old Slovak building. It is the living afterlife of the South Side’s immigrant faith.
Where They Came From
The Slovaks of Bethlehem did not come from all of Slovakia evenly. They came, overwhelmingly, from its poorest eastern corner.
About three-quarters of all Slovak immigrants to America originated in just four counties of the old Kingdom of Hungary: Spiš, Šariš, Zemplín, and Abov. These were uplands of thin soil and large families, where land could not be divided forever and a young man’s only inheritance was the road out.
The emigration drained whole villages. By one estimate, around eleven per cent of the population of Spiš left for America, bound for the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania, the steel mills, and the factories of New Jersey. A Slovak group had already pioneered the route to Philadelphia from Zemplín, Spiš, and Šariš as early as the 1870s.
Chain migration did the rest. One brother sent for another, a cousin for a cousin, until a single eastern Slovak parish might find half its sons working the same Bethlehem shift, living on the same hillside street, and worshipping under the same patron saints they had left behind.
Bethlehem Today
The furnaces went cold in 1995, and the community they built has thinned. The closure took with it a fifth of the city’s tax base and the central reason the Slovaks had ever come. The Slovak Mass at Cyril and Methodius ended in 2008, and the parish dissolved into Incarnation of Our Lord.
The South Side has changed again, this time without the mill. Lehigh University and its students have pressed outward into the old immigrant blocks, and luxury apartments and rising rents have unsettled the families whose grandparents bought these houses on steel wages. Lifelong South Bethlehemites speak of the pressure with real grief.
Yet the Slovak inheritance has not vanished. National Sokol Lodge 93 still keeps its lanes and its banquet hall on Hillside Avenue. The brick church on Pierce Street still stands, repurposed but standing. And every year the festivals on the SteelStacks campus fill the air with the smell of halupki and pierogi, the food of a people who came to feed the furnaces and stayed to feed the city. For the wider story of Slovak steel towns, see our profiles of the Slovaks in Pittsburgh and the Slovaks in Whiting, Indiana. The same immigrant-parish pattern shaped other Pennsylvania communities, from the Italians in Norristown to the Ukrainians around Jenkintown.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Slovaks settle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania?
The Slovaks in Bethlehem came for work at Bethlehem Steel, which took shape in 1899 and grew into one of the world’s largest steelmakers. Most arrived as farm labourers from eastern Slovakia and took the heaviest jobs in the mills, settling on the South Side close to the plant gates.
Where did the Bethlehem Slovaks come from in Slovakia?
Roughly three-quarters of all Slovak immigrants to America came from four eastern counties of the old Kingdom of Hungary: Spiš, Šariš, Zemplín, and Abov. These were poor uplands where land was scarce, and chain migration carried whole villages to the same Pennsylvania mill towns.
What was the main Slovak church in Bethlehem?
Saints Cyril and Methodius at 617 Pierce Street was the first Slovak church in the diocese, built on land purchased from Lehigh University in 1891, with its new church opening in 1906. A Slovak Mass continued there until the parish closed in 2008 and merged into Incarnation of Our Lord.
What is the Sokol in Bethlehem?
The Sokol was a Slovak gymnastic and fraternal movement combining athletics, insurance, and social life. National Sokol Lodge 93 was founded in Bethlehem in 1905 and moved to the South Side hills in 1926, where it still operates as a social club with a banquet hall and bowling lanes.
What happened to the Slovaks in Bethlehem after the steel mill closed?
Bethlehem Steel rolled its last steel on 18 November 1995, and the Slovaks in Bethlehem scattered as the work disappeared and ethnic parishes consolidated. Many descendants remain in the Lehigh Valley, and Slovak heritage survives through the Sokol lodge, the old parish buildings, and annual food festivals on the SteelStacks campus.
Can I still find Slovak food and culture in Bethlehem today?
Yes. The SteelStacks arts campus on the former steel site hosts pierogi and pierogi-themed festivals featuring halupki and other Slovak dishes, and National Sokol Lodge 93 remains an active social club. The traditions outlasted the mill that first drew the community to the city.
If your family’s story passed through Bethlehem, or any of the places Slovaks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hillside village in Spiš or Šariš to a brick church on Pierce Street, to wherever you are now.