Musikfest is a ten-day-long community music and arts festival on the Delaware River in Bethlehem, PA on the site where the Bethlehem steel plant used to function as one of the top producers in the nation before shutting down in the early nineties. In short, it’s a really interesting place.

Musikfest was started in 1984 as a way to use the arts to revitalize the town of Bethlehem after the steel plant shut down. When the factory- known as Steelstacks- was closed, steelworkers planted trees at the top of the blast furnaces as a symbol of the potential that the area still had. Now, all these years later, the trees still grow and Steelstacks is being renovated into the new ArtsQuest Center. ArtsQuest’s goal in Bethlehem is to “take a unique setting and turn it into something positive,” Curt Mosel said. Mosel is the director of marketing and PR for ArtsQuest. “It will be a huge win for tourism and more opportunities for the 25,000 college students that live in the Lehigh Valley area.”

ArtsQuest is certainly doing its part to give Bethlehem a name as an arts mecca, but Musikfest is all about the music and the vendors. According to Mark Demko, the Assistant Director of Editorial Services for ArtsQuest, 40% of the 300+ artists playing the fest are from Bethlehem. “Our main mission is to connect art and artists to the community,” Demko said. Their way of connecting to the community is by making Musikfest largely FREE. That’s right. Free admission to the fest and to eleven of the fourteen stages at Musikfest. The other three stages are where headliners like The Doobie Brothers, Norah Jones, Lynrd Skynrd, Adam Lambert, and The Avett Brothers play- you need to purchase tickets to those.

The name of each section of the festival uses the suffix “platz” as in “Festplatz,” “Lyrikplatz,” and “Liederplatz.” This is a tribute to the Moravian Dutch settlers who founded Bethlehem. Over at Handwerkplatz, local artisans sold cool jewelry, paintings, sculptures, and clothes. At almost every platz there was a beer tent where you could get your special edition Musikfest mug filled with 24 ounces of cold beer (Yuengling is actually brewing an original Oktoberfest brew in honor of the opening of the ArtsQuest center in 2011). Each platz featured a different kind of music from polka to rock to R&B to folk to reggae to world music. Trombone Shorty, Mingo Fishtrap, and Satabdi Express were the standouts from the time I spent there. Check them out.

Musikfest makes Bethlehem “the poster child for using the arts to revitalize the community,” Demko said. As ArtsQuest and the community art center The Banana Factory move towards making Bethlehem a bona fide tour stop for top national artists, Musikfest remains a constant source of music, art, great food, and great friends on this rusted mountain on the river.