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Hotel Bethlehem
LVB Staff//March 9, 2026//
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Historic Hotel Bethlehem, anchoring downtown Bethlehem at 437 Main Street since 1922, operates as a luxury destination offering accommodations, multiple dining venues, a spa, and 19,000 square feet of event space.
Managing Partner Bruce Haines oversees financial and strategic direction while Kelly Ronalds — appointed General Manager on February 1, 2026, and the first woman to lead the property in more than 40 years — manages daily operations. The hotel is a member of Historic Hotels of America and has earned the organization’s No. 1 national ranking for multiple consecutive years through 2025.
The site’s hospitality lineage begins in 1741, when Moravian missionaries established the First House of Bethlehem on the property. By 1822, the Moravians had built the Golden Eagle Hotel on the same ground. The current building came a century later: in 1921, Charles M. Schwab, then president of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, acquired the site and raised $1 million in stock — roughly $15 million today — to construct a Beaux-Arts-style hotel built with Bethlehem Steel’s own fireproof I-beams. It opened in 1922.
Bethlehem Steel purchased and upgraded the hotel to four-diamond status in the 1950s and 1960s, but the plant’s 1996 closure triggered the hotel’s bankruptcy and shuttering in January 1998. A group of local investors — primarily Lehigh University graduates — purchased the property in 1999 for preservation and restoration, reopening under a Radisson franchise before transitioning to Historic Hotels of America branding in 2002. Haines subsequently rebuilt the management team post-COVID and rebranded the property as a nationally recognized luxury historic destination.
