Hotels in Allentown

Allentown is Pennsylvania's third-largest city and the anchor of the Lehigh Valley, a former Mack Trucks and Bethlehem Steel-adjacent manufacturing hub reinvented over the past decade around its downtown NIU-designated arena district, home to the PPL Center where the AHL's Lehigh Valley Phantoms play. It's also inseparable from Billy Joel's song of the same name, though the city he was singing about — hollowed out by industrial decline — bears little resemblance to the revived downtown of today.

Outside the arena district and a scattering of restored blocks, much of Allentown still feels post-industrial and thin on tourist appeal, and it's more a business and regional-event stopover than a destination in its own right. Its real advantage is location, roughly convenient to both Philadelphia and New York without their price tags.