Bethlehem’s social entrepreneur Jeff Parks once said he never wanted anyone to be able to say there was nothing to do in the Lehigh Valley.

As the visionary who spearheaded the creation of Musikfest, Christkindlmarkt, the Banana Factory, the ArtsQuest organization and SteelStacks, Parks has done more than his share to assure a year-round abundance of local music, arts and educational programming. The purpose behind his efforts, however, goes far deeper than just providing someplace to go.

Parks, who retired as ArtsQuest president in 2014, says he believes strongly there is a connection between the arts and community and economic revitalization. That is one of the reasons he said he wrote his newly released book, “Stronger Than Steel: Forging a Rust Belt Renaissance.” He said he wanted to share Bethlehem’s arts strategies with other communities facing the same challenges, particularly in the wake of deindustrialization.

One of those challenges, Parks said, is that the largest cities are drawing economic strength away from smaller communities – strength needed when faced with adversity. “It’s a struggle just to be a small town.”

His second reason for writing the book, he said, was that he considers himself to be a student of Bethlehem history. “I wanted to record this [history] for posterity and I wanted to tell the great stories of people who were creative and came to the fore.”

One of those stories is about Parks’ vision for an arts park or regional art center and how it morphed into the ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks. What he envisioned in part was a place where Musikfest could expand to the Southside of Bethlehem. What he wound up pursuing was a total surprise, especially to him.

When the vacated Bethlehem Steel site was suggested as a location for the art center, Parks balked. “I saw nothing remotely attractive about industrial relics on the southside,” Parks admits in his book. “I understood the history of the plant and the company, but I failed to see any beauty in the rust.”

At the start of the new millennium, Pittsburgh and other cities were tearing down their old buildings and plants, according to Parks, who says he assumed that was what would happen to the Bethlehem site, until he and a “group of arts park plotters” visited the redeveloped industrial sites in the Ruhr Valley in Germany in 2003. What they saw were an outdoor concert venue where molten iron had once run and preserved blast furnaces enhanced with artistic lighting. Other industrial sites had been turned into museums, residences and hiking and biking trails.

“That was the ‘ah hah’ moment for me,” Parks recalled. Now he refers to the Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces he was instrumental in saving as “industrial art that will never be built again.”

Today he claims he’s retired, but he’s now chair of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts.

He also is keeping an interest in the pending sale of the Sands Casino to the Creek Indians from Alabama.

“Our hope is that it [the sale] will free up the land,” referring to the rest of the former Bethlehem Steel property. “There are eight or 10 buildings that need developing, and Sands had stopped [developing]. The casino will be the new owners’ flagship and we hope they will develop for residences and retail.”

Parks describes himself as “a private person, even though I’ve lived a public life.”

He has spent 30+ years of that public life promoting music and the arts for the betterment of Bethlehem’s image and economy.

Would he do it all over again? His answer is definitive: “God, yes.”