Will ArtsQuest & Sands – Hurt, or Help Bethlehem’s downtown businesses on the North side

Will ArtsQuest & the Sands Casino over time – Hurt, or Help Bethlehem’s downtown business district on the North side of town?

    How often have you heard from officials, organizations and some businesses about the tremendous financial benefit to the valley that the Sands Casino & ArtsQuest will generate? Are they really going to help the businesses on the north side of town? Almost sounds too good.

Here’s an observation, which might indicate that the visiting gamblers at the Casino do not flow over to the north side.

    The Bethlehem Loop is a shuttle bus service in Bethlehem that was implemented to loop between the City's two downtown business districts and the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem. Now, we travel throughout the north side business district during the day and in the evenings and at different times of the day and night and the overriding observation that we derived is that the Loop Bus is vertually empty. Now, this isn’t a scientific survey but it certainly would be interesting to see some “rider figures” on the Loop bus.

There are a few questions that might answer this whole "Hurt" or "Help" business question.

- When you go to the casino to gamble do you think about shopping?

- Why do your friends or family members go to the casino? - Do they go to gamble or shop?

- Say you get hungry at the casino while gambling would you eat there or go get your car from the parking garage and drive over to the north side to eat ?
    OR
- maybe you would leave your car in the garage and jump on that Loop Bus and ride over to the north side to eat and when your finished get back on the bus and go back to the casino on the south side. Hum… makes me wonder!

Oh yeah, lets not forget ArtsQuest.

    It’s a terrific facility that promisses to offer great entertainment. We have been there already and plan to return. They even call it the SteelStacks arts & cultural campus. Optimum word here is “Campus”.

    Ever campus that I ever visited was a self-contained little community. The campus has everything you need. You never really have to leave the campus. Oh, I guess that means you will not have to go over to the “north side” of town. Heck, you won’t even have to venture off of the main campus to the businesses on the south side either.

   Remember the Morning call story about the - 115 public toilets and urinals making SteelStacks the "place to go".

Not only will it be the “place to go” – there won’t be any need to “leave”.

Only time will tell.


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