Moravian Days: A Historic Community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Draws International Recognition

May 1st, 2025 | World Heritage

By: Eve M. Kahn; Photography by: Samuel Markey

I am having a heady preservationist moment in midair. It’s a crystalline winter morning in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a city known for industriousness and architectural stewardship since the 1740s. I have been escorted up sinuous staircases to the domed belfry of Central Moravian Church’s Sanctuary, a gabled and stuccoed building that has welcomed worshippers since it opened in 1806. From my perch overlooking Main Street, I admire the church’s well-kept tower clockfaces and its planes of gray slate roofing, supported by walls six feet thick. All around, Moravian settlers’ 18th-century masonry buildings have been adapted into bustling museums, businesses, and homes, cheek by jowl with their Victorian and Art Deco counterparts.

In July 2024, the church and eight of its brethren structures, plus four ruins and a cemetery, were inscribed on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Only 25 other sites in America have earned that designation, and only two others (Independence Hall and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater) are in Pennsylvania.

As I look out over the multipurpose Historic Moravian Bethlehem District, a worker comes into view on the roof of the Historic Hotel Bethlehem, a nine-story brick building with soaring Romanesque arches along its base. It opened in 1922 (and has been part of the National Trust’s Historic Hotels of America program since 2002). The hotel’s structural beams were fabricated at Bethlehem’s now-defunct steelworks, which has been preserved as a public attraction.

I have just spent the night in the hotel’s top-floor aerie, where my predecessor tourists roaming the halls have included Amelia Earhart, Winston Churchill, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the Dalai Lama. I watch the rooftop worker repairing a malfunctioning letter in the hotel’s all-caps red neon sign—an “O” has been missing for a night in this not-so-little town of Bethlehem. Over the hotel’s entranceway, a banner is fluttering, congratulating the Moravian enclave for its UNESCO listing. I wonder: Where else could I wake up in upscale Jazz Age quarters and then stroll through so many World Heritage sites, so tightly interwoven with a living city?

I spend two days here, walking for miles, astonished at the variety and adaptability of the historic fabric. I am also amazed at the tenacity of Bethlehem’s preservation advocates and the fortuities that have fostered their work.

Attracting UNESCO attention to the city’s treasures “has been a journey for the entire community,” explains LoriAnn Wukitsch, the president and CEO of Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites (HBMS), which oversees 20 rural and urban acres with structures containing 60,000 objects. Wukitsch has 10 full-time employees and an annual budget of $1.9 million. Her team is now strategizing to leverage the UNESCO inscription for fundraising and boosting tourism and scholarship.

The Moravian attractions already draw crowds, partly because pedestrian traffic flows right alongside them. I watch families finishing their hotel brunches and then pouring into HBMS’s rebuilt 18th-century blacksmithing shop next to the hotel. Metalsmiths dressed in period garb tend fires, make objects, and explain how the Moravians manufactured housewares and tools. As in many HBMS properties, there are no glass cases to separate the objects from the visitors—“a mindful decision,” says Wukitsch. She adds that another key HBMS technique for captivating guests at the Moravian sites is to ask not, “Are you interested in history?” but rather, “Are you interested in learning about the Moravians and their ingenuity?”

UNESCO designated the place as part of what is officially called a “transnational serial property,” along with three 18th-century hamlets in Europe: Herrnhut in Germany, Gracehill in Northern Ireland, and Christiansfeld in Denmark. All were set up as Christian communities by members of the Moravian Church, a Protestant sect founded in the 1450s in what is now the Czech Republic. Fleeing persecution, the community dispersed, and in the 1700s a group of adherents revived the Moravian Church. They eventually scattered worldwide to worship and proselytize. In 1741, some especially intrepid Moravians settled on Pennsylvania acreage at the confluence of the Lehigh River and Monocacy Creek, on land that white explorers had recently swindled from the Lenape people.

A bronze relief plaque posted on one of the Hotel Bethlehem’s exterior walls depicts a log cabin, the Moravian settlers’ first quarters at the site. My day-long tour, guided by Keith Sten, HBMS’s museum sites and education manager, begins at the plaque. Sten is dressed in earth-tone docent garb: a wool cape, broad-brimmed hat, waistcoat, and breeches.

He points out recurring architectural details—flared eaves, shallow eyebrow arches—throughout the district’s masonry, clapboard, and log structures. Plaques and labels around the properties contain reproductions of the original drawings, maps, and aerial views, which the Moravians meticulously preserved. Within a few years of their arrival, they created a compound with dozens of workshops, now known as the Colonial Industrial Quarter. The communal economy, supported by the work of a number of enslaved people, boomed as tradespeople turned cowhides by the thousands into shoes, wove silks and velvets, and made ceramic tiles for roofs and stoves.

Men and women at first lived and labored separately, sleeping in communal quarters that were segregated by sex. Marriages had to be approved by the church elders, and couples could reserve rooms for private time. The campus, where at one point about 15 languages were spoken, grew to thousands of acres, with farmsteads, stores, and multipurpose buildings. The creekfront waterworks contains a reconstruction of the machinery that powered America’s first municipal pumped-water system.

Non-Moravians came to marvel. John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, in 1777 about the “vastly industrious” Bethlehemians, who ran America’s finest “Grist Mills and bolting Mills, … an oil Mill, a Mill to grind Bark for the Tanyard, [and] a Dying House where All Colours are dyed.” Adams noted, “They have carried the mechanical Arts to greater Perfection here than in any Place which I have seen.” He made a pit stop at the Sun Inn, a gabled masonry building that is still thriving as a tavern and museum. “Best Inn, I ever saw,” Adams wrote.

At the Moravians’ first burial ground, God’s Acre, the flat gravestones are identical, and the interred include globetrotting missionaries from Europe and Black and Native American converts. The Moravians founded one of America’s first schools for girls, and the institution’s coed descendant, Moravian University, is one of the stewards of the UNESCO-designated buildings.

Central Moravian Church’s senior pastor, Janel Rice, welcomes us into the awe-inspiring, column-free Sanctuary, which seats more than 1,000 people and is ornamented with the most delicate Neoclassical details. She points out barely visible signs that an upgraded HVAC system was recently woven into the building. Well-preserved antiques include gaslight sconces and an organ with more than 3,000 pipes. The church’s collections have been so well documented, she says, there’s a running joke: “You’ll get inventoried if you sit still too long.” Across the street at the Gemeinhaus (“community house”), which was originally occupied by about 80 people, we tour museum displays of musical instruments—the founding Moravians had brought with them their skills in making and playing trombones, violins, organs, and clavichords. No glass cases separate us from a display of ribbons worn by female settlers: red for girls, pink for single women, blue for wives, white for widows.

At the time of my visit, we cannot access a number of the UNESCO designees’ interiors because the buildings are either under restoration or in continuous use by modern-day Moravians and other Bethlehemians. HBMS thrives on its unusual, pragmatic mixture of public and private space, and it tries to make the latter as accessible as possible. “We’re a cultural site that the community is caring for, a living microcosm of the community,” Wukitsch says. “We’re in the forever businesses.”

In the 1800s, church-run institutions preserved their Bethlehem landmarks while industrialists took over acres a mile away along the Lehigh River, building what eventually became known as Bethlehem Steel. Many of the company’s employees studied new technologies at the city’s Lehigh University, founded in the 1860s by railroad magnate Asa Packer. In the 20th century, Bethlehem’s 30,000 steelworkers loaded freight trains with products that enabled America to win world wars and set new records for skyscraper heights and waterway spans. The executives invested part of their profits in promoting historic preservation and tourism—in the 1930s, locally made steel was used to support a giant star (which is still agleam) on a mountaintop, as Bethlehem was designated the Christmas City.

“In their heyday, [Bethlehem Steel’s local leaders] were a community partner,” Bruce Haines, the Hotel Bethlehem’s managing partner, tells me. (He’s a Lehigh alum and former steel executive.) The hotel, designed by the prominent Philadelphia firm Ritter & Shay, was the brainchild of steel magnate Charles M. Schwab and “built as the social center of Bethlehem,” Haines says. The ballrooms, corridors, and dining halls are lined with memorabilia, such as murals of Moravian settlers and Ritter & Shay’s original blueprints.

By the 1960s, as many Main Streets nationwide ailed, the Moravians’ industrial quarter suffered from neglect, and the creekfront became a dumping ground for rusted cars. “Imagine in the middle of this city, we’ve got a major junkyard,” Wukitsch says. Preservationists, philanthropists, and Moravian leaders founded what is now HBMS to document and protect historic buildings and welcome the public. Ralph G. Schwarz, a Lehigh grad, preservationist, planner, and architectural historian, wrote books about Bethlehem’s history and spearheaded restoration campaigns. Site after site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, among other high-level designations.

The waterworks alone has been named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, an American Water Landmark, and a National Historic Landmark. As the steelworks declined, the National Trust listed it as one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. Grassroots preservationists rallied to save it as a multipurpose compound. In the 1990s, as the Hotel Bethlehem fell into disrepair, Haines formed a group to acquire and restore it. “We knew that without this hotel, Bethlehem would never be the same,” he tells me. His wife, retail expert Jo Ann Haines, came out of retirement to help.

The hotel, which also owns nearby stores and a convention center, is high on Wukitsch’s list of HBMS’s strokes of fortune. “Not every town has a historic hotel that embraces Main Street,” she says. Without partners of such caliber, Wukitsch adds, “We could have been any old blighted downtown.”

In the early 2000s, Charlene Donchez Mowers, Wukitsch’s predecessor at HBMS, started pursuing World Heritage designation. Despite skeptical eyerolls from many, her teams invested untold hours preparing hundreds of pages of documentation, attesting to the “outstanding universal value” of Bethlehem and its European counterparts.

The transnational Moravian designation resulted from countless calls, emails, meetings, and transatlantic site inspections, involving officials from governments, churches, businesses, and nonprofits. The four properties qualified partly because they remain in active use: “The continuity of the Moravian Church community contributes to safeguarding authenticity in spirit and feeling as well as atmosphere” of the sites, according to a 2024 UNESCO report. In July, Wukitsch watched a livestream of the UNESCO inscription ceremony taking place in New Delhi, India, while feeling “absolutely euphoric,” she recalls.

During my trip, HBMS is finishing restoration of a gabled masonry structure alongside the hotel, built in the 1780s for a grist miller and his family. It is now the Ralph G. Schwarz Center for Colonial Industries, with space for exhibitions, hands-on interpretation, and demonstration events. The project’s architect, Christine Ussler, a Lehigh alum who heads the Bethlehem-based firm Artefact, tells me that the miller’s home had reached the brink of collapse. One floor was shaky, “like a trampoline,” and another was held up mainly by its baseboards. While working on Bethlehem landmarks for four decades, Ussler has never lost her sense of wonder at the city’s texture and surprises. “There’s an indescribable continuum of history here,” she says.

HBMS is planning to build a glass-walled multipurpose wing called the Overlook on History, which will connect the miller’s house to the adjacent 1869 Luckenbach Mill. The wing’s architect, David Scott Parker, is a Schwarz protégé and a trustee of the National Trust. Like Ussler, he has worked in Bethlehem since the 1980s. “Moravians documented absolutely everything they did. The archives are extraordinary,” detailed down to the purchases of nails and windowpanes, he tells me. His team will reinforce the Overlook with steel beams that had long been used to prop up the miller’s endangered home. Among Bethlehemians, Parker says, “There’s a passion for the past, and it’s very, very vibrant.” The UNESCO inscription, he adds, “is an endorsement of their longtime commitment.”

In my all-too-short visit, I navigate through holiday shoppers at HBMS’s newly restored dry-goods store on Main Street; I cannot resist buying a blue-striped cotton dishtowel, quilted with a star pattern. I indulge in a gooey slice of cheesecake at the Sun Inn, surrounded by braided rugs and Windsor chairs evocative of John Adams’s day. I stop by a cluster of 19th-century row houses that HBMS runs as a decorative arts museum, where dozens of antique dollhouses are on display.

At HBMS’s 18th-century farmstead, I explore a barn containing a working, high horse–powered wheel (one of only a handful known to survive in the United States), as well as a neatly tilled garden that supplies the Hotel Bethlehem with fresh herbs and produce. At the steelworks, I admire drill presses and mortisers at the National Museum of Industrial History, located in the former electric repair shop. As I hike along a rail-trestle-turned-elevated-walkway alongside the rusted blast furnaces, a freight train rumbles and screeches past, like a ghost.

On the bus homeward to New York, I wistfully turn around to watch as two landmarks ablaze in light, the hotel’s red neon sign and Central Moravian Church’s belfry, recede behind us in the twilight skies.

Read the article on Preservation Magazine’s website.

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