Things are Looking Up for the Bethlehem Steel Administration Building

yes, it is peculiar how quickly the public is willing to shift responsibility for a long-neglected structure from the owner(s) to everyone who objects to the neglect, as though neglect is a protected right.

grad - as you know, the Central Terminal was privately owned too for many years/decades.

The point is that for the CT a volunteer group stepped forward willing to go way beyond complaining, and do a lot of real work on the CT and take responsibility for owning it.

Gateway has made clear they don't want to develop this building, just like previous private owners of the CT didn't want to develop that either after its original use came to an end.

My question stands - will any of the activists be willing to organize beyond awareness raising (which of course is fine to do - I never said they should shut up) and also publicly offer to take ownership of the Bethlehem building and do something similar as the huge amount of volunteer effort done with the CT for its cleanup, mothballing, administrative, raising funds, etc?

If there is a serious proposal to do that for the Bethlehem, and if enough people who say they love it will donate via Kickstarter or something like that, then who knows - it's very possible that both Gateway and the city govt of Lackawanna would cooperate. If a serious proposal to do that is made and rejected, then at least a real effort was attempted.

But otherwise if there's not even serious willingness expressed to do that - if all that's willing to be done is just protesting and awareness raising, blogging, tweeting, … well then that would answer my question too.

Who are you referring to that's in favor of demolishing this building? I don't believe that anyone here is arguing in favor of proceeding right to demolition. In any case, if you want to hold the property owner accountable for their property, I think that is fair enough. However, this is a somewhat different situation. The current owners apparently have had no need for this building, and seem to have wound up acquiring it as part of an overall package purchase. They have let it sit for decades now, and that has allowed it to survive to this day. Forcing their hand on the issue could just have led to them having demolished it years ago rather than have to maintain a building they had no use for. So as much as I think what you're arguing their makes sense, Steel, I think that things do have to be addressed on a case - by - case basis.

There must be a supportable business case that could be made for a hotel - someone put in a brand new Best Western a couple of years ago less than a mile away on Rt5 in a "highly inaccessible area away from any attractions, and surrounded by a sea of Superfund brownfields"