Jeffrey A Parks

Jeffrey A. Parks is a lawyer in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1983 Parks launched his career as a Social Entrepreneur by conceiving a signature festival: Musikfest, which is now the largest free admission music festival in America, held in the city’s small, historic downtown every August. Parks founded a German style holiday market, Christkindlmarkt, to support the downtown and the Christmas City brand, followed by the creation of an arts center in an old banana distribution warehouse near the closed Bethlehem Steel Plant. After a visit to Germany’s Ruhr Valley, he developed the concept of a cluster of arts activities around the dormant Bethlehem Steel Blast Furnaces. The arts and culture campus became the highly successful, award winning SteelStacks. The non-profit ArtsQuest, led by Parks for its first 32 years now operates the two campuses and serves two million people each year with over 2,000 arts and cultural programs. SteelStacks is one of only three real estate projects to be awarded the Urban Land Institute’s Global Award for Excellence and the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence. ArtsQuest is widely credited with the success of Bethlehem in navigating the travails of deindustrialization and suburbanization to become a culturally and economically robust twenty-first-century city.

Parks serves as Chair of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He has served on the Board of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, the jury for The Waterfront Center Awards for Excellence, Discover Lehigh Valley (tourism promotion agency) and the Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce. He is a frequent speaker on the topic arts and post-industrial revitalization. Parks also serves as Vice President of Alibi Music Library, a music production library. Since retiring from ArtsQuest he has become engaged in real estate development. Parks and his wife Susan are the caretakers for their 1895 Victorian home in Bethlehem’s Historic District, which they share with Folly, a Havanese rescue. They enjoy travelling, with favorite spots including Meran, Italy; Sedona, Arizona and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany.

Parks is a graduate of Lehigh University and the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania