In the 1970s, the residential neighborhood from Packer Avenue to Morton Street simply vanished from Bethlehem's south side, leaving behind dust, tears and memories of what had been. To this day, displaced residents question why the Southside was the butt of what some called the pillage and rape of its neighborhoods. For answers, many looked to the triumvirate-in-crime: Lehigh University, Bethlehem Steel and the Bethlehem Redevelopment Authority.

Looking back to 1865, millionaire Asa Packer founded Lehigh University, which could not have existed without the completion of his brainchild, the Lehigh Valley Railroad whose stock helped to finance the university. Packer's formula for success was the delegation of two important men: his good friend, Robert Heysham Sayre, chief engineer of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and his nephew, Elisha Packer Wilbur, accountant and personal secretary. Packer delegated Sayre to acquire an important asset for him and both Sayre and Wilbur to assure a key transportation link to the Lehigh campus.

In 1859, the Bethlehem Rolling Mills and Iron Company had been erected along the Lehigh River, east of the Pennsylvania and Lehigh Zinc Company. Packer saw the answer to his need for iron rails and delegated Sayre to acquire the iron company. In 1861, the renamed Bethlehem Iron Company opened with Packer as one of seven on the Board of Directors. The same year Lehigh was founded in 1865, the Borough of South Bethlehem had been incorporated by a petition to the Court of Quarter Sessions at the Northampton County seat in Easton. Nine signers of the petition included South Bethlehem zinc workers, businessmen, builders and a brewer.

Within that decade, while Lehigh University campus was still in its planning stage, Asa Packer envisioned a bridge across the Lehigh River at New Street, which would allow easy access from Bethlehem through South Bethlehem directly up to the Lehigh campus.

Bridge-builder Charles N. Beckel presided over the New Street Bridge Company along with Robert H. Sayre and E.P. Wilbur - Asa Packer's delegates. By the time Beckel built the iron New Street Bridge in 1870, Union Station had opened and all roads seemed to lead to Packer Hall on Lehigh University's campus. Packer's dream had been realized.

In the latter part of that century, Lehigh Valley Railroad stock continued to fund Lehigh University, which, in turn supplied management to Bethlehem Steel. Lehigh graduates were welcome and given secure employment in the engineering and management ranks of Bethlehem Steel. Eugene Grace, Class of 1899, worked his way to president of Bethlehem Steel and Archibald Johnston, Class of 1889, first vice president.

Enter the immigrants - European escapees from hardship and tyranny who sought "streets paved in gold." Instead, they were employed as laborers at Bethlehem Steel, bound to rigid 10-hour work shifts and strict labor bosses who gave 10-15-minute lunch breaks with no time to off to pee.

In 1904, Charles M. Schwab headed Bethlehem Steel with his "hard work" ethic. During his watch, clashes with management caused a labor strike in 1910. One worker was killed while the constabulary tried to quell the crowds. In the end, management assured the immigrant worker a safer work place. In 1912, Schwab, the chairman of the Board of Directors of Bethlehem Steel, became a trustee of Lehigh University, which conferred upon him an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree.

After the First World War, Lehigh University and the South Bethlehem community enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Lehigh students patronized retail shops, restaurants, movie houses and barbershops. The prosperity of Bethlehem helped to produce a greater prosperity for Lehigh. Though not a commercial enterprise, the university was one of Bethlehem's biggest assets. By the beginning of the 20th century, it brought up to a $1 million every year to the city's economy.

Second and third generation Americans born to immigrants earlier in the century enjoyed the fruits of the middle class. Steady work at Bethlehem Steel, assured through the establishment of bargaining rights, enabled them to clothe and feed their children, send them to Lehigh University or to other schools, and something many families waited a lifetime for - buy a house.

Ethnic neighborhoods evolved around ethnic churches built with every cent congregations earned by sweat. Families cultivated backyard gardens filled with vegetables, grape vines and rose bowers. Between Fourth Street and Packer Avenue on either side of New Street, homes built in Mayor Robert Pfeifle's era, were solidly constructed and stylishly appointed: porches and garages, leaded glass and amethyst doorknobs. This first- and second-generation American neighborhood sloped lower than Packer Hall and Packer Memorial Church whose towers loomed skyward. Nothing could possibly violate this safe and idyllic Southside setting.

After the Depression and WWII, Southside Bethlehem and cities like it around the nation seemed in decline. Returning G.I.s earned good salaries at Bethlehem Steel, which afforded them new homes in established "suburbs" with shopping malls and convenient parking. Parents and grandparents they left behind in their old neighborhoods struggled on limited incomes. As local businesses suffered and closed, the end result was "blight."

In 1956, Bethlehem reviewed plans to build a City Center on Church Street that would block New Street Dedicated in 1967, the complex included a new public library across from the new city hall with offices for the mayor, city officials and a police department. Left empty, the former Municipal Market House, which had housed the mayor and police department, on the corner of East Third and Adams Street added to the Southside's "blight."

Ten years later in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson announced his "war on poverty," while Bethlehem Mayor Gordon Payrow issued his "Demonstration City Program," designed to abolish slums and "blighted" areas of racial strife and high crime rates.

For 40 years, though Lehigh University advanced academically, the physical campus could not sustain its mission of cutting-edge education. Based on a mindset of divine right set forth by Asa Packer himself, the campus needed to grow. In 1964, Lehigh's "master plan" for expansion, the "Packer Avenue Urban Renewal Project," would thrust the campus into the neighborhood down the slope on both sides of New Street, from Packer Avenue to Morton Street and from Webster Street to Vine.

To acquire these properties, the university welcomed support from Bethlehem Steel, the Bethlehem Redevelopment Authority, and "straw buyers." By neglecting the properties, they would appear "blighted" in order to qualify for funds under the federal Urban Renewal Plan. In effect, a perfect storm had succeeded to expand the university campus.

Vine Street resident, Anna Pongracz, became a champion of those who lost their homes in the Packer Avenue Urban Renewal Project. After the entire neighborhood had been leveled, she said, "Its not that they took our homes but how they took them."

Fifty years later, the vanished neighborhood is Lehigh University's expanded Asa Packer campus with technological facilities that include the Fairchild-Martindale Library and Computing Center, Mart Science and Engineering Library, the College of Arts and Sciences at Maginnes Hall, Sinclair Laboratory, Neville Hall, Seeley G. Mudd Building, Whitaker Laboratory, Campus Square and STEPS: Science, Technology, Environment, Policy and Society Building.

To help tell the story of this Southside neighborhood that vanished, South Bethlehem Historical Society and Lehigh University students are collaborating to interview, scan, document and make accessible the memories and photographs of family members, church groups and students who once lived on both sides of New Street, from Packer Avenue to Morton Street and from Webster Street to Vine Street - a vibrant neighborhood that was demolished during the university expansion in the 1960s.

Before this neighborhood fades from memory, tell your story and have your artifacts scanned or photographed on Saturday, Oct. 19, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Victory Fire House, 205 Webster Street, Southside Bethlehem.