“Organic Weirdness” and “Intentional Care”: How Easton, PA Became a “Culture-Sustaining City”

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For this month’s installment of Small City Stories, we sat down with Laura Stedenfeld — principal of the landscape architecture firm Omnes Studio in Easton Pennsylvania. We spoke about Easton’s culture, creative identity, and growth, and the ways her studio is helping to shape her small city’s future.

Easton, Pennsylvania, is a small city home to nearly 30,000 people at the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers. An old mill town, Easton has built a reputation over the past two decades as a creative and cultural hub in the Lehigh Valley. When asked what she loves about Easton, Laura described the city’s mix of small businesses and a thriving food and arts scene that neighboring cities often try to replicate.

“Art, food, and culture always bring people together,” she said. “They create an authentic draw for a community. Even in what used to be a sleepy, gritty little river town like Easton, those sparks of creativity and connection helped magnetize the city.” She added, “all these things have grown from the organic weirdness of Easton but also from the intentional care of the community, and the influence of artists and creative people working and living here.”

According to Laura, change in Easton has happened through the waves of artists, independent shops, and restaurants arriving over the past two decades. When she returned to Easton after working in larger cities, Laura was struck by an unexpected mix of small businesses that were thriving: “three beef jerky shops, three crystal stores,” she laughed. “It kind of cracked me up, but it was great, because they were keeping storefronts open and active.”

She remembers another early turning point when the restaurant Sette Luna came to Easton 20 years ago. “It’s a Tuscan restaurant, run by a local, that also turned out to have a world-class sommelier and really beautiful food. It felt like a symbolic recommitment to Easton as a culture-sustaining city.” For Laura, these small businesses reflect the community’s commitment to sustain Easton and the creative influence of people who work and live there.

Having grown up nearby, Laura finds these small but consistent changes by longtime residents and newcomers alike to be remarkable. “Easton’s undergone a real evolution in my lifetime,” she said. “When I was in high school, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I remember walking downtown and photographing what felt like endless empty storefronts. There just wasn’t much going on, although even then, artists like Karl Stirner were finding inspiration here and championing Easton as a place with something real and great to offer.”

As Laura notes, Easton’s contemporary arts landscape rests on foundations laid decades earlier by sculptor Karl Stirner, whose arrival in the early 1980s helped catalyze the city’s artistic revival. Stirner recognized potential in Easton’s vacant industrial buildings and began converting them into studios and creative spaces, inviting fellow artists from New York and Philadelphia to join him. His early commitment to building a creative community transformed underused buildings into places for design and collaboration.

Today, Easton’s art scene is thriving and operates on two distinct but intertwined levels. There are artists who anchor themselves locally—running small galleries, hosting community events, and contributing to the steady hum of cultural life downtown. And then there are those who live and create in Easton while exhibiting in New York, Philadelphia, and other major markets, returning home to the affordability, space, and slower pace that larger cities rarely offer. “You kind of need both for the art ecosystem,” she explained.

It’s a dynamic that mirrors what has happened in places like Newburgh and Beacon: smaller cities within proximity of New York where early waves of artists sought room to experiment, eventually creating hybrid art economies that bridge local, small-city culture and metropolitan reach. Easton, like these Hudson Valley counterparts, shows how small cities can become extensions of larger creative regions: close enough to participate in major cultural networks, yet distant enough to cultivate their own artistic scenes and sensibilities. This regional relationship – rooted in a small city while connected to a large one – is shaping a new generation of small arts-driven cities on the periphery of metropolitan influence.

As Easton’s arts and culture scene expands, Laura is playing a central role in elevating the city’s design landscape as a landscape architect and principal of Omnes Studio. Her work is rooted in a belief she repeats often: small cities deserve the same design excellence as major metropolitan areas. Rather than treating a place like Easton as a secondary market, her practice approaches smaller cities as environments worthy of ambitious and thoughtful design.

“It’s a very post-industrial landscape,” she explained. “Easton’s architecture includes old wire factories, carpet mills, and foundries. Our studio is in the former Simon Silk Mill, which was once one of the largest producers of American silk and is now home to a vibrant mixed-use community of creative businesses and residents.” Choosing to locate Omnes Studio was equally practical and philosophical. “It just feels really inspirational and creative,” she said. “We wanted something that matched the energy of our studio, and the Silk Mill really does.”

Omnes’ projects reflect the same spirit of adaptive reuse, creativity, and community-centered thinking that underpins Easton’s broader cultural evolution. During the early pandemic, the firm’s Easton Pocket Parks project used 2,000 colorful pinwheels to activate small public spaces. “We put them out in the parks and created a system where people could go to all of the different parks and essentially get a bouquet of pinwheels,” Laura explained. “It was happening during COVID when parents didn’t have a lot to do with their kids, and it was just this very cheap and cheerful material that we turned into art.”

Omnes is now leading the Bushkill Corridor project: a post-industrial redevelopment linking the Simon Silk Mill to College Hill. “It will extend the Karl Stirner Arts Trail across a new bridge, creating access to nature and excellent public space alongside new housing,” she said. The effort reflects Easton’s growing design ambition and its ability to bring together art, ecology, and mobility through strong public–private partnerships.

Laura’s practice may signal a larger shift in the design world that mimics the city’s art scene transition in recent decades. Here, highly trained designers who might otherwise cluster in big cities are intentionally choosing smaller places and raising the bar for local design expectations. Her work in Easton demonstrates how a single studio, embedded in the fabric of a small city, can catalyze a broader culture of design excellence, offering a model for other practitioners who want to build meaningful, community-rooted work outside of major metros.

Check out more of Omnes’ work here: https://omnes.studio/ !