June 16, 2026
— Jeff Ward, Lehigh Valley News Briefs
Discover Lehigh Valley and ArtsQuest will hold a public session today to seek input on a mural on Broad Street in Bethlehem.
Kyle Edwards, an artist who works out of Breinigsville, will create the mural. Based on the notice above, the artwork will be on the side of the Main Street Commons building at 559 Main St.
That mixed-use building at the corner of Broad and Main is home to Fegley’s Bethlehem Brew Works, other businesses and offices. It used to be Orr’s. Look carefully as you walk in to the Commons to see the old department store’s logo (see photograph below).
If the mural is planned for the wall facing Broad Street, toward the rear of the Brew Works, it won’t be in the most visible spot.
Public art can be a tricky thing. A mural in south Bethlehem was described years ago by a member of the city Planning Commission as a portrait of a “pig-nosed steelworker.”
Already, the proposal is drawing some interest. Will the mural be in a historic district, and if so, should it go through a review process? It’s on Main Street. Residents and businesses have to submit plans to the city to put up signs, put up new fences and make bigger changes to buildings in historic districts. That costs time and money.
How will the business community react, and what about people who live in sight of the mural? They get their chance to make their case today but as there is already a draft mural, the value of that input may be minimal.
Not far from Broad Street is the new UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Moravian Village. Will the mural depict that history, or detract from it? Here’s a link to some of Edwards’ works.
The mural proposal may be part of the Lehigh Valley 250 initiative, a $1 million plan to spend taxpayers’ money to mark the semiquicentennial (250th anniversary) of the United States’ Declaration of Independence. That allocation of state funds was celebrated by four politicians at a pork-barrel party in Easton earlier this month.
With local senior centers closing, the national debt increasing and taxes rising, finding a new way to spend $1 million of public funds was not a good idea but that’s how things work around here. Politicians want credit for bringing home the bacon, regardless of how it is spent.
The mutual admiration at the Easton event was excessive and bi-partisan.
Anybody who wishes to comment on the plan or see a draft of the mural can do that at 5 p.m. today at the offices of the Coalition for Appropriate Transportation at 33 W. Walnut St., Suite 100 in downtown Bethlehem. Again, the event is being held by Discover Lehigh Valley and ArtsQuest.
Discover Lehigh Valley is an organization that promotes tourism. According to the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Discover is trying to bring people to downtown Allentown. Good luck with that, reversing a trend that started about 40 years ago.
So the chance to comment is today at 5 p.m.
July 4 is 18 days away, so time is pressing.
Lehigh Valley News Briefs 