My wife and I have lived in Bethlehem since 1971, raised four children and sent them to school here, and known thousands of people through our association with Moravian College (now University) and St. Anne’s Church.

During those decades I heard stories about a legendary place called Northampton Heights, a mixing bowl of peoples that disappeared utterly, like Plato’s mythical city of Atlantis that supposedly sank into the ocean. But until recently I could not have told you where the Heights, as former residents affectionately call it, was located or what happened to it. On Oct. 18, the South Bethlehen Historical Society dedicated a handsome marker to the neighborhood on its old terrain, East Fourth Street, and some 30 “kids” who grew up there, now grandparents in many cases, filled me in.

Organized as an independent borough at the beginning of the twentieth century, Northampton Heights was a largely residential neighborhood that ultimately included 280 homes for approximately 1,000 people.

Twenty-eight ethnic groups were represented in the Heights. Frank Podleiszek, who lived for 25 years at 1529 E. Fourth St. (now gone), described the neighborhood as “our own League of Nations.” His family is Windish. Next door lived Hungarians, and beyond them a Russian family and then a Pennsylvania Dutch family. “We never locked our doors,” Podleisek commented. Small businesses provided essentials to the residents, and three churches – one Orthodox, the second Ukrainian Catholic, the third evangelical – addressed their spiritual needs. To an outsider, it sounds very much like areas in Bethlehem’s present Southside – working class, proud and neighborly.

Former residents expressed some bitterness about the fate of the Heights. The end came in 1963 when Bethlehem Steel Corp. decided it needed the land on which the neighborhood stood to build a “basic oxygen furnace” or BoF, the latest steel-making technology in the 1960s.

Homeowners were approached individually about the sale of their properties. At a certain point, black families realized that they were being offered less for their homes than whites. In response they “stuck together,” as Vivian Ungerford put it, insisting on fair market prices. Ultimately, everyone moved. The BoF that replaced the Heights lasted less than 30 years, then went the way of the Heights itself.

At present much of the land occupied by the neighborhood and the plant that succeeded it is designated as an industrial park and is undeveloped. But the new historical marker permanently fixes the spot of Bethlehem’s mystery community.