Levan Associates, Inc. of Upper Milford Township fabricated and erected the steel of the 46-foot-tall pedestrian walkway, which spans 2,000 feet along the famous blast furnaces.

Scott Davis, president and CEO of the structural steel fabricator, embraced the sense of history surrounding the challenging, high-profile project, which won a national award for urban development.

He’s the 61-year-old son and grandson of Bethlehem Steel employees — a man who thrives on evolution.

Levan has grown from a few employees that mainly erected pre-engineered buildings to a 27-employee business that has become a major regional player in structural steel fabrication and erection.

The small business has been involved in a slew of school and hospital construction as well as more distinctive projects like Hoover-Mason Trestle and the Levitt Pavilion stage at SteelStacks.

Raymond Davis, Scott’s 90-year-old father, was an ironworker at Bethlehem Steel before starting the business.

A few years after hitting Utah Beach on D-Day, Raymond Davis had fallen into a routine of simultaneously “leaving one job, starting another job and looking for my next job,” as he put it recently at Levan’s newly renovated plant near Emmaus.

One day, he walked into Bethlehem Steel’s Pottstown office and told the boss he wanted to be an ironworker. Asked for his qualifications, Davis said, “I like heights, and I like to climb. If I can’t reach where another ironworker can, I want to be fired.”

Among other jobs, he wound up installing railings atop the blast furnaces, which required crawling up one column and then another to connect multiple pieces.

“I was never happy until I got to the top,” he said.

Raymond Davis eventually moved onto the structural steel erection business. In 1971, with financial backing from Butler Manufacturing, Davis went into business for himself and created Davis Construction and Steel Erectors Inc.

Scott Davis graduated from Allen High School in 1972, spent two years being a ski bum in Aspen, Colo., and returned to the structural steel business for good. The business began doing more structural steel fabrication in the late 1970s.

There were some lean times, Davis said. For many years, they fabricated in the back alley of their small office at 544 Jubilee St., Emmaus.

But Lehigh Structural Steel Co. used Davis Construction as a subcontractor on a few Air Products buildings and two Baptist churches in Philadelphia, among others. When Lehigh Structural closed, Levan brought on a few of its key employees. It scored a big project fabricating and erecting Lehigh County Prison as well as the Priscilla Payne Hurd Pavilion and the Cox Pavilion at St. Luke’s University Hospital in Fountain Hill.

In March 1985 Scott Davis founded Levan Associates as the structural steel fabrication arm of the business. His brother-in-law Michael Levan had died in a workplace accident in 1981, so Davis put the business in the name of his sister, Nancy.

He bought the company from her in October 1990 and made longtime friend and colleague David Mushko a partner and vice president.

Davis Construction erected 14 rides at Six Flags Great Adventure, and in the mid-1990s, the company helped renovate the Hercules roller coaster at Dorney Park. Davis then won a bid to fabricate and erect the steel of a new roller coaster called Steel Force, the first to break the 200-foot barrier on the East Coast. Levan fabricated, and Davis Construction erected.

Levan doubled its shop personnel when it moved to its current location off Tank Farm Road in 2001. The Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp. granted a tax-free mortgage loan and also covered half of the business’ payroll its first year in the new plant.

Levan has also grown by investing in state-of-the-art equipment. It first bought a drill line in 1998 for $380,000 — a bit of a reach that paid off in the long run.

Two years ago, it spent $750,000 on an automated plate processor. This past December, the company gutted its shop and spent $1 million on creating a fully automated fabrication process, including a new carbine drill line and an automated plasma layout marker.

The overhaul was a huge undertaking that had been discussed for nearly a decade, plant Superintendent Doug Schul said.

“You have to be able to feed the monster once you build it,” he said.

The demand is there. Later this year, Levan plans to install a crane bay on the exterior of its plant to further speed up the feeding of raw steel into the drill line.

“This new technology allows us to do larger jobs instead of being limited to certain-sized projects,” Mushko said. “Now we can go after anything.”

The much more efficient process hasn’t resulted in personnel cuts; Levan has retrained employees to be computer-savvy and has hired a few additional employees.

“We have the ability to train anybody that’s willing to learn and work hard,” Schul said.

Other recent projects in the region have included the St. Luke’s Anderson Campus, the St. Luke’s Monroe Campus, an expansion of East Penn Manufacturing (Deka) in Berks County and an expansion of Northampton Community College. It’s currently working on the new Nitschmann Middle School in Bethlehem.

“The reward is when you can sit back and appreciate the skeleton of a structure you just got done putting up,” Davis said. “I call them monuments sometimes. Monuments to the process, and knowing they’re going to be around for a long time.”

Davis would love to see a high-rise in the company’s future. But he and Mushko also look forward to one day handing over the reins to their sons, Scott Davis Jr. and Ryan Mushko, who both began sweeping floors at the plant as teenagers. The steel industry of the Lehigh Valley has changed, but its sense of purpose has endured.

While Levan was erecting the Hoover-Mason Trestle last year, former Bethlehem Steel ironworkers stopped by to see the project. They stayed for awhile, sharing stories of another era. Davis listened.

Employee John Vegh welds a steel beam Thursday inside the technologically advanced Levan Associates structural steel plant located in Emmaus.