This WSJ story about Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – just a few miles from where your humble scribe grew up – is certainly a sign of the times. It is not a good sign, however, as a once mighty steel mill, whose product was shipped through the Panama Canal in order to build the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s, has been turned into a casino with mixed results so far.

Five years ago, this former steel town took a gamble on Las Vegas Sands Corp., allowing the company to put a casino on the site of its historic steel mill.

Las Vegas Sands promised to build a hotel, shopping mall and events center on a corner of the 126-acre Bethlehem Steel site, which was shuttered in 1995. Anchoring it all would be the casino filled with 5,000 slot machines, where even the ceiling lights, made to look like molten iron rods, would evoke the site’s old industrial legacy.

But revenue from the slots parlor, which opened last May, has been disappointing. The hotel and events center are both 20% complete, and the planned shopping mall is 70% complete, all stalled because of the economic downturn.

That has put many here on edge. “The fear is we’ve put so much trust before to a big corporation, and here we’ve done the same thing again,” said Karen Dolan, a Bethlehem city council member.

In visits to the area over the years, most recently last fall, the casino really has an odd feel to it due to the rusting infrastructure all around it. Looking both impressive and sad at the same time, the former for its massive scale and the latter for the desolation of the last couple decades, you don’t know whether to be intrigued or put off.

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