Category:Bus transport in Allentown, Pennsylvania

The Allentown Bus Terminal is located at 325 Hamilton Street. It provides intercity bus service, and is operated by Greyhound Lines.

Commercial land transportation began in the early 1800s when a stagecoach terminal was established at the American Hotel at 6th and Hamilton Streets. Inter-city railroads and a city streetcar system were established in Allentown after the Civil War. The stagecoach terminal operated along with the two railroad stations in Allentown until the early 1900s, and the invention of first automobiles, and then gasoline-powered busses which replaced the horse-drawn stagecoaches. In 1920, the Morning Call newspaper moved its offices from a building on South 6th Street to a new location at 6th and Linden Streets after the closure of the Allentown Democrat newspaper. With the move, the old Call building, and some others on south 6th were torn down, and the land cleared for a new hotel, the Hotel Lehigh.

However the hotel was never built when the developer went bust and instead the land was used for a dedicated Allentown Bus Terminal that opened on the site in 1929. The Morning Call retained control of the property until 1932 when the terminal was sold to a firm that included Charles Wesley Strauss, a terminal employee, Clara DeYoung and her late husband John. North of the bus station, a gas station was built, and the rest of the cleared land was used as a parking lot for Hamilton Street merchants. After World War II in the late 1940s, the bus terminal was remodeled in 1945. In 1956, the terminal and the parking lot was sold to Park & Shop. Park & Shop tore down the gas station and repaved the parking lot on the north side of the bus terminal and the interior was again updated.

In the early 1960s, Park & Shop wanted to use the land where the bus station was located to expand its profitable parking lot on south 6th street. The cooperative made proposals to move the bus terminal out of the downtown area, first to the southwest corner of 6th and Turner Streets, which was a large empty lot since the old Allentown Post Office was torn down in 1952, and then to the southeast corner of 4th and Linden Streets that was cleared in 1962 in a redevelopment project. Both sites were studied and eventually rejected by Allentown city planners for a variety of reasons. The Bus Station was given a $10,000 remodeling in 1964 after it was decided to retain it at it's South Sixth Street location. A small luncheonette was inside the terminal until being closed in 1980.

Park & Shop leased access to the terminal to several bus companies over the years until the general decline of the area and facility in the early 1980s led the company to terminate the lease on August 31st 1985. However the terminal stayed open until November 1986 until a place could be found to move it. Finally, an unused storefront of the Americus Hotel at the corner of North 6th and Court Street was leased, and permission was granted from the city to use the curbing on north 6th between Hamilton and Court street to be used on a "temporary" basis until a new bus terminal could be built. The location of the Bus Terminal in the Americus Hotel was never an optimal location for the facility, with large busses having to be parked on the north side of 6th Street which disrupted traffic on a narrow city street.

For several years one proposal after another was made and rejected. Finally, in May 1994, a new location on Race Street, between Hamilton and Linden was found at the location of the former freight terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey, which was closed in 1967 and torn down in 1975. However funding issues delayed construction for several years. The current Bus Terminal opened at its current location in August 1996. When it opened, it was serviced by Transport of New Jersey, Greyhound, Trailways, Susquehanna Trailways, and Trans Bridge lines.

The former bus station on South Sixth was subsequently torn down and the lot repaved expanding the existing Park & Shop parking lot. In December 1991, the Park & Shop cooperative was taken over by the Allentown Parking authority. In 2016, a new multi-level parking deck was built on the parking lot on South Sixth Street where the station was last located. In 2018, the Walnut Street Commons apartments were built on the unused grassy areas around the parking deck.