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In the first quarter of the 20th century the differences in city services between the boroughs of Bethlehem and South Bethlehem prompted business elites and government officials to commission a major report from the nationally-respected Municipal Research Bureau that pointed out the inefficiencies of having two municipal governments. In 1917 Bethlehem Steel head, Charles M. Schwab, led a well-organized campaign to secure support for merging the two boroughs. When the south side wards voted, the south side voted for the merger, 2527 to 92. On the heels of consolidation, local leaders rekindled interest in a "free bridge" and pushed for the construction of a new modern concrete span bridge connecting the two Bethlehems. Just as consolidation had been organized on the grassroots level, organizers solicited donations for the "Hill to Hill Bridge Fund." Though fundraising began during World War I, the project was completed in 1924. When finished, the combined concrete and steel trussed Hill to Hill Bridge was a distinctive specimen of urban infrastructure with ramps that created nine approaches at neighborhoods on either end of the bridge. The forty-eight piers and fifty-eight spans skirted automobile traffic over the river and the canals, and railroad tracks, into the heart of each Bethlehem.
Just as a bridge had helped to bring the Bethlehems together, some politicians hoped that improved transportation would lead to regional consolidation, overcoming a long history of ethno-religious factionalism between the residents of the valley's major citiesAllentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. At the 1913 dedication of the reinforced-concrete Tilghman Street Bridge, one Lehigh County judge waxed that "this bridge is another link uniting Allentown and Bethlehem and eventually bringing about one great city under a single name."[9]
By 1920 the automobile had begun to alter the urban form of both Allentown and Bethlehem. At first, the inconspicuous filling stations in the Spanish Colonial style were wedged into corner lots and suggested that the car and city could mutually coexist. Planners, too, viewed the car empathetically and Frank Koester's City Planning Report of 1918 shows a Bethlehem of the 1920s and 1930s surrounded by developments resembling spider webs. Wide boulevards link the new developments together and ring the entire metropolitan area. Though Koester's vision never materialized, the automobile and the freeway soon replaced the interurban trolley and the railroad as the premier mode of travel in the Lehigh Valley, changing patterns of work, play, and consumption.
