Kassie Hilgert

President and CEO of Arts Quest
Headshot of a woman.
Music Credits: “Renewal,” written and performed by Doug and Judy Smith Kassie Hilgert: Our goal was to revitalize a brown field, using arts and culture, and offer the types of programmings that would attract the creative workforce, which we had heard from so many local employers here was and is the workforce of tomorrow, while also providing those opportunities for artists to grow within their own discipline.  <music> Jo Reed: That’s Kassie Hilgert, president and CEO of ArtsQuest, and this is Art Works the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Let’s say you’re a not for profit organization that brings arts and culture to your region and you know firsthand how the arts can drive community revitalization. Let’s also say you’re located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania which was home to a mammoth steel plant that closed in 1995 leaving an economic hole and 1800 acres of desolate industrial space spotted with five 20-story blast furnaces, all in the heart of town. Well, that was the position ArtsQuest found itself in. But ArtsQuest also had a long history in the area. It began in Bethlehem in 1984 and it’s the non-profit behind Musikfest, the nation’s largest free music festival. So ArtsQuest rolled up its sleeves and with a determined and far-reaching public/private partnership, it transformed the abandoned site into SteelStacks. SteelStacks is now an arts and entertainment district that, as the name suggests, retained the old blast furnaces as dramatic backdrops as it houses new venues for music and art-- honoring its past as it brings new life to the area.  SteelStacks has just celebrated its fifth birthday and ArtsQuest’s Kassie Hilgert is here to fill us in on SteelStacks-- how it got started, where it is stands now, and what she sees for SteelStacks and Bethlehem’s future-- because as you’ll hear, the two are very much entwined. Kassie Hilgert: SteelStacks is a 10-acre arts and cultural district located on the South Side of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. SteelStacks takes up 10 acres of the former Bethlehem Steel site, which is approximately 1,800 acres in size and is, in my understanding, the largest brown field under redevelopment in the United States.  Jo Reed: Kassie, what is a brown field? Kassie Hilgert: Brown field is essentially a polluted former industrial-- heavy industrial site, so it is not a site that can be turned into a green field. You can't build a neighborhood on it. There are several restrictions as to what can be built on a brown field, and it's really a challenge that most cities have across the country of how do you redevelop these areas that are usually in significant and important locations but certainly have challenges. This site where SteelStacks is is part of the 1,800 acres of Bethlehem Steel, literally sits in the heart of Bethlehem, and when Bethlehem Steel went out of business, literally the city of Bethlehem lost 20 percent of its tax base overnight. Jo Reed: SteelStacks, you say, is an arts center. What does it contain? Kassie Hilgert: On that campus at the SteelStacks, we have the ArtsQuest Center, which includes a Musikfest performing arts venue, a two-screen independent foreign documentary film house, and then several multi-purpose rooms for the musical and visual arts, and then, outside we have the Levitt Pavilion SteelStacks, which is a 3,000-person venue that hosts a minimum of 50 concerts a year. Jo Reed: Can you describe Bethlehem when the steel industry was thriving? Kassie Hilgert: Sure. Bethlehem Steel really was the city of Bethlehem for almost 100 years, so, I believe Bethlehem Steel started-- I wanna say around 1905, 1906, and they were famous for inventing the I-beam here in Bethlehem, which allowed literally the New York skyline to go up with that invention of the I-beam in 1908. Bethlehem Steel was also extraordinarily instrumental in the defense of our nation's borders through both World War I and World War II, so, Bethlehem really, as a city of about 75,000, always was dependent on Bethlehem Steel, which had a workforce of about 30,000 until they ultimately went out of business, and it was a very long, slow decline. The plant closed in the '90s and Bethlehem Steel as a corporation declared bankruptcy in about 2005. Jo Reed: So, a company that had 31,000 workers in a town of 75,000, that's pretty extraordinary. Kassie Hilgert: It was the quintessential one-company town. It was the place where if you left and graduated high school, you could walk down the hill and go get a job at the Steel for life, and if you had a college degree, this is where you started, and as Bethlehem Steel became a worldwide company, there were a number of different opportunities you could pursue, so, no matter who you were, you could really find a lifetime of employment at Bethlehem Steel, which, as we all know today, is clearly almost non-existent. Jo Reed: And I also read that the steel plant was about 25 percent of the city's land mass? Kassie Hilgert: Correct. It was 25 percent of their taxable base, so, when that went out of business, the city-- not just lost its corporate citizen but lost a significant amount of tax revenue. Jo Reed: Can you describe Bethlehem at the turn of this century, say in the year 2000? Kassie Hilgert: In 2000, Bethlehem was still trying to figure out exactly what it could do with the Bethlehem Steel site. There were a lot of great assets in Bethlehem. Bethlehem is split into two downtowns, really. There is North Side, the historic Moravian District, which is home to a number of significant Moravian legacy structures, and then the South Side, what we call the Southside Arts District, was really foundering and trying to get its footing under it, so, there had been some changes. We here at ArtsQuest have been working on a revitalization of Bethlehem, both the North Side and the South Side, since 1984, but in 2000 there was some traction, but really not a ton of momentum yet, and I think both city officials and city leaders were trying to figure out what's the best way to bring this entire site back to redevelopment and contributing to the economy. Jo Reed: So, how did the project begin? Kassie Hilgert: There many players to it and I call SteelStacks one of the better examples of a public-private partnership from this standpoint. Once Bethlehem Steel went out of business, a number of things happened. The elected offices, the public officials came together and said, "Look, we could really look at taking of all this down and building a number of strip malls and we could generate revenue immediately,” or, as we were in discussions with them and talking with others, we could take the long view on this and set up this property to really build on what has started in Bethlehem in terms of Musikfest, a very vibrant music scene, home to the Bach choir, the Moravian legacy structures, as I mentioned before.  So, they created what was called a TIF district in South Bethlehem around the plan, and that's— Jo Reed: What does that mean? Kassie Hilgert: That's a Tax Incremental Financing district, and there's a lot of complexities to it, but if I really boil it down, they draw a imaginary boundary, and they say, "Okay. We're gonna do a baseline real estate assessment, and from this day for the next 20 years, any increase in property value will be dedicated to revitalizing this area,” so, investing in infrastructure, lights, roads, all that kind of stuff.  That was a big part of the redevelopment of SteelStacks, but I think what accelerated that growth was after the TIF district was in place, Pennsylvania state legislature approved gambling, and there were 12 licenses given throughout the state, and one of them was given to Bethlehem, and the Sands dropped about a $750 million investment within that TIF district, so, all of a sudden, you had this improvement in property values within the TIF districts that allowed for significant investment in infrastructure, so then we as ArtsQuest come along and say, "We can augment that infrastructure by creating an arts and cultural district within these ruins, so, keep the blast furnaces, keep a number of these structures so we can introduce the next generation to the importance of not just steel, but the city of Bethlehem to the history of the entire country and you will never see blast furnaces built on that scale again.” So, I think it was that both the public and private sector taking that long view, to be able to set up incentive districts that then somewhat serendipitously really worked once gaming was legalized, and then the Sands made a significant investment in the property including donating the 10 acres to us to build our campus. Jo Reed: And I know that early on in this process, Bethlehem’s then-Mayor Callahan attended the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, which had a hand-- Kassie Hilgert: --absolutely-- Jo Reed: --in planning. Kassie Hilgert: Absolutely. We work with a number of different entities outside of the City of Bethlehem when it came to best practices of how you should design this campus, how you should create a walkable community that would encourage people to come, not just from Bethlehem and, obviously, the Lehigh Valley, but from the entire Northeast. Jo Reed: It seems to me that probably the first big important decision was maintaining the furnaces. Kassie Hilgert: It really was, and there are certainly a number of stories about those blast furnaces, but what we remember here at ArtsQuest is there was a movement to tear down those blast furnaces, because at the time, Bethlehem Steel going out of business was the largest corporate bankruptcy in the country's history, so it was this stark reality and reminder of failure, but really, a number of us at ArtsQuest, board members and Jeff Parks, our founder, went over to northern Germany, where they saw that they had taken these heavy industrial areas in northern Germany with blast furnaces, essentially, and revitalized them into very vibrant cultural districts, so, that was a real "aha" moment from our standpoint that look, Bethlehem and the size of this city is not going to build enormous skyscrapers to give you a dramatic skyline. We are not gonna build steel plants the size and magnitude that were built back in the day, and those blast furnaces literally are our chance to create a skyline for Bethlehem and to attract people to that site. So, that's really, I think, one of the most important pieces of that site, is when people come down there, you just don't see that size and scale anymore from a manufacturing perspective in this country. Jo Reed: So then what was it like designing workable, friendly, usable structures that on one hand aren't completely dominated and overwhelmed by the furnaces, but, on the other hand, clearly can't compete with them in terms of stature? Kassie Hilgert: Well, you really hit the challenge there, and it was a couple of things. I'll go back to that public-private partnership. The redevelopment authority in the city of Bethlehem paid for all the external improvements on the site, so, the roads, the lights, parking. They also paid for the renovation of a building there called the Stock House, which was built in 1863 and actually predated Bethlehem Steel. So, there were a lot of people coming to the table here. Wallace Roberts & Todd out of Philadelphia was also significantly involved in the outside landscaping, and then, of course, we created and built the ArtsQuest Center along with Spillman Farmer Architects located here, and we exactly had that conversation, which is, how do you take advantage of the skyline, how do you create softscapes around so many hardscapes, and what we decided with the building in particular, and I mean the ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks, was to create a building that takes advantage of the view of the blast furnaces, so the entire front of that four-story building is all glass. We have exposed I-beams. There is a preponderance of the color International Orange in that building, which is the same color of the Golden Gate Bridge, where all of the structural steel for that bridge was poured at Bethlehem Steel. So we wanted to create a building that honored where we were, gave people these dramatic, sweeping views of the blast furnaces, which are illuminated at night, yet were acoustically excellent, and that was a huge challenge when you're dealing with construction materials like glass and concrete. Jo Reed: When you opened the ArtsQuest Center there, what was your aim? What did you want that center to be? Kassie Hilgert: The ArtsQuest Center and the SteelStacks campus had a number of goals, just like we had done back in 1984 with Musikfest, we wanted to first create economic development through the arts, so that was primary for us. We wanted to increase access to the arts, not just for the public, but by providing additional opportunities for musicians to perform and hone their craft there, and those were two large priorities for us. We also wanted to offer the kinds of year-round cultural amenities that people who lived in larger metropolitan areas were used to. So, Bethlehem is perfectly situated between New York City and Philadelphia, but we had lacked a lot of those cultural amenities that you would expect to find there, and people would subsequently leave on the weekends. We wanted to fill a lot of those programming gaps. So, our goal was to revitalize a brown field, using arts and culture, and offer the types of programmings that would attract the creative workforce, which we had heard from so many local employers here was and is the workforce of tomorrow, while also providing those opportunities for artists to grow within their own discipline. Jo Reed: When you talk about giving artists an opportunity to grow, can you give me an example? Kassie Hilgert: Sure. For instance, we run the nation's largest free music festival, called Musikfest that happens in the first-- about 10 days of August, and that is something that we have been doing since 1984. And we do over 500 performances on 16 stages, 15 are free, and we get 3,000 submissions for 500 spots, so there are a number of musicians that are good, just maybe not quite good enough to be able to perform at Musikfest yet, so, we wanted to provide them opportunities to get better, essentially, over time, and for us another very important thing with the ArtsQuest Center was to offer places both at the Levitt Pavilion and at the ArtsQuest Center where nationally touring acts could stop and perform in Bethlehem and not just during the 10 days when Musikfest was going on. Jo Reed: Who do you have in mind in terms of the people who are coming to SteelStacks?  Is it the people from the Bethlehem area, or are you looking for people outside the area, primarily? Kassie Hilgert: We have two marketing radiuses, and when we are reaching out to folks for our cinemas, which obviously we run every day, and some of our pre-performances, our marketing radius is about 40 miles, so that's about two and a half million people within that radius, so, it's well beyond the borders of Lehigh Valley. Musikfest and our larger festivals-- Musikfest in particular-- draws from 40 states and 12 countries, so, it is an international program. It's our flagship event, but certainly our smaller festivals will draw from about 120- to a 200-mile radius. Jo Reed: That's quite a radius. Kassie Hilgert: It is quite a radius, and, fortunately, Musikfest has a 34-year history, so, we have an established brand which certainly helped as we launched SteelStacks. Today we're attracting about 800,000 people to just the SteelStacks campus. When you add in Musikfest numbers, it's about 1.8 million people annually are coming into Bethlehem, and you know, that's something that we just see growing and growing each year. Jo Reed: We talked about the public-private partnership and also the amount of commitment that certainly came from the federal level, from the NEA for example-- Kassie Hilgert: --absolutely— Jo Reed: --from the state level, from the city level. I wonder-- community members themselves, were they involved in SteelStacks and how it came together? Kassie Hilgert: The important part of the public-private sector relationship-- I really focus on the public part, because what the NEA helped to support in one of the most dramatic pieces of visual arts we have on that campus called "The Bridge," which is a major fire sculpture that literally arches over First Street and has a 30-foot flame that comes out of it. If there wasn't that commitment from the NEA, from the city, the county, the state, to say we will build the infrastructure for this, we are going to put incentives in place for this, we are lining up behind the same vision. The private sector was not going to come in and take that risk. The private sector certainly is typically very risk-averse, so, they came in in droves once they heard that this is what the public sector had been able to put together and support as part of a vision. So, I don't see this project happening at all if just the private sector said “we need this,” 'cause we had been hearing that for years. We needed more arts and cultural amenities that you would find in a Baltimore or a Washington, DC, but, you know, it was hard to fund that. The NEA and others provided the risk capital and made the risk investments to help that vision come to a reality where then the private sector could come in and really finalize the vision and bring it to life. Jo Reed: Five years later. Kassie Hilgert: Tada! <laughs> Jo Reed: Congratulations. And I know you’ve seen growth. So why don’t you just tell me about it. ‘Cause it really is pretty phenomenal. Kassie Hilgert: Yeah, the growth has been amazing. We've doubled in attendance since opening up in 2011. The SteelStacks campus itself has a $48 million annual economic impact to the City of Bethlehem and the region. When you add that to Musikfest and our other programming and the Banana Factory, which is our visual arts and education center just down the street from SteelStacks, there's an annual economic impact of about $117 million. Today we offer 3,000 camps, classes, and concerts on an annual basis, and 65 percent of all of that programming is free. Those are great metrics for us, but beyond that, we have seen the beginnings of some real economic developments surrounding our campus, and that to us is a large measure of success that we know will take a lot longer. So, for instance, right up the street from us was a former Catholic church that closed down, and working with a group called HDC, that Catholic church was converted to artist housing, which is a very unique concept. It was 36 units that was planned, and that opened in October 2014. They are full. They have a waiting list. We've hosted officials from other counties coming in to say, "How did you do this? This is what we want to do, bringing artists into our urban areas to help provide programming to grow that community and to put it within proximity of people to walk to." The success, whether it's in attendance numbers or support from both non-profits and for-profits and the public sector has also grown, and we've certainly seen that annual economic impact just blossom. Jo Reed: What have you see in terms of people feeling a sense of community and ownership again? This, I think, is so important but it’s really hard to put numbers to. Kassie Hilgert: What we have seen is a number of things. So, now you see almost on a daily basis either the families of steel employees, or the steel employees themselves, coming down with friends and families to talk about what happened here, how important this was. We host 95 non-profits a year, who will do their fundraising events there or come down to do 5K charitable walks. It has become the community's town square, and what's been so exciting about that and why that place is so important, when you look at the blast furnaces and you look at the-- we have five visual arts sculptural pieces on that campus, people get to discover art in a very unique, unexpected backdrop. So you don't think you're going to walk into an industrial ruin and hear fantastic live music or experience living artists and watch them make art. So that's a great discovery moment for a lot of our attendees, and then I think what's the second part of that, which is certainly a sense of pride, is since people are standing there and they're surrounded by these Gothic structures, they inevitably ask, "What happened here?  What did those things do?"  And "What do you mean we made steel here?"  And "What is that process like?"  And "Why don't we do this anymore?"  And "I had no idea that Bethlehem Steel and the City of Bethlehem had done all of these things throughout of our history." So, it's been a great experience to watch people experience the campus as we had intended it, but, more importantly, to just come down there and interpret that site the way they want to and create the experience they want to. Jo Reed: Well, it sounds like it's being interpreted in a very personal way, where people can draw on their own family history, for example. Kassie Hilgert: Very much so, their family history, and I think what's also iconic about SteelStacks is it represents sort of that apex of the industrial era for our country, and I think that resonates with anyone.  You don't have to be from Bethlehem. You learn about our industrial era, and we hear so much today about the loss of manufacturing. This is that site where when everything was at its grandest, this is what it looked like. Jo Reed: What about the broader economy? Have you seen a growth in employment in the area or growth in people’s income over the past five years? Kassie Hilgert: You know, I don't have those numbers specifically, but we have seen a number of changes in this sense-- the fastest growing demographic in the city of Bethlehem is 18- to 35-year olds, and any city would love to have that. These are the millennials that every city wants to attract, and those millennials are looking to live within cultural districts where they can easily access the arts, and I think that's a real testament to the success of SteelStacks. There is a tremendous demand for housing by both millennials and boomers, and every generation in between, and there is a considerable shortage of that housing right now on the South Side, and there are a number of businesses and developers that are breaking ground now and in the very near future, who, whether through newspaper articles or otherwise, have cited the foot traffic of being near SteelStacks as a critical point in their decision-making. So, we are certainly seeing development happening around us. Of course, we are just a very frenetic and frenzied group to begin with, so, we're very impatient and would love to see more development. But I think when you step back and look at what is starting to take hold here, you know, we like to think that we are certainly at the center of it, but by no means the only reason for it. Again, I go back to that-- both the public-private partnership that was so important, plus the other cultural amenities that were already in the South Side, so, we're sitting in the WDIY studios. Jo Reed: And that’s the public radio station that’s housed on the SteelStacks campus? Kassie Hilgert: Right, and Godfrey Daniels is a dynamic, exciting, very small intimate music venue that's been around for 40 years and predates Musikfest, so, these threads were there. It needed a big splash for people to come in and experience all that Bethlehem has to offer, and that's what we hope SteelStacks really is. Jo Reed: What's next in the development of SteelStacks? Kassie Hilgert: I think we really scratched the surface of what SteelStacks can do. It has taken us five years-- now that we have five years of data, we are spending a lot of time analyzing consumer behavior, visitor trends, where they're coming from, looking around our current landscape to find additional programming gaps that we think that we can fill in. The Banana Factory is barely a mile away from SteelStacks— Jo Reed: I’m sorry, let me just interrupt you for a second, Kassie. You’ve mentioned the Banana Factory. Can you just tell me a little of the backstory there? What goes on there? Kassie Hilgert: Sure. The Banana Factory is actually five different buildings that we stitched together when we opened it in 1998.  Literally, one of the buildings was a banana warehouse, hence the name of the Banana Factory. But today, it hosts 30 artist studios, and all of those studios are subsidized for artists.  We have three galleries. We have a hot glass blowing studio. There's a photography studio, two visual arts classrooms, and a ceramics center in there as well. So, that is what composes the five different buildings there. We are home to two other non-profits, the Pennsylvania Youth Theater and the Pediatric Cancer Foundation of the Lehigh Valley. So, it is a visual arts and education center, but it's also become, like SteelStacks, another gathering place where people can come and experience art for free, certainly in our galleries, but then we offer classes and camps all throughout the year in a multitude of disciplines. Jo Reed: Thank you. You were saying, about the further development of SteelStacks? Kassie Hilgert: As I mentioned earlier, the Banana Factory is barely a mile away from the SteelStacks campus. We’ve treated those two campuses very different, one being performing arts and one being primarily visual arts. How do we erase that boundary? And, again, when we talk about the idea of discovery, if you walk into what you think is a visual arts and education center and you're surprised by a live musical performance, similarly with SteelStacks, how can we build on the dramatic success of visual arts pieces like "The Bridge," so, when you come down there you think you're coming for a live show, but you're surrounded by this wonderful public art. Jo Reed: Kassie, thank you so much. <overlapping music> It was really such a pleasure to talk with you, and I love what you're doing, because I love the sense of history that you're retaining but you're not limited by. Kassie Hilgert: Yeah. It's great to be given a lot of leeway to interpret and push the boundaries. <music> Jo Reed: That was Kassie Hilgert, president and CEO of ArtsQuest. To find out more about ArtsQuest and SteelStacks, go to steelstacks.org. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAarts on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. <music>

Reclaiming the abandoned Bethlehem Steel Plant for the arts gives a region new life.