Allentown mayor gives Tim Heidecker key to the city, urges comedian to return to hometown

Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk made an appearance Feb. 12 on the YouTube call-in show “Office Hours with Tim Heidecker” in its Los Angeles studio while in the city for the 2026 Winter Leadership Meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, which ran from Feb. 12–14.

Tim Heidecker, the show’s host known for his role as half of the comedy duo Tim & Eric with Eric Wareheim, was born in Allentown and graduated from Allentown Central Catholic High School.

The mayor gave Heidecker a key to the city and said that, in his role as Allentown’s “chief cheerleader,” he needed to urge people to return.

Tuerk tried to convince Heidecker to return to the city.

“About a year ago, we opened a new, 1500-seat music hall off Hamilton Street,” the mayor said, in reference to the newly-built Archer Music Hall. “Hamilton Street has seen about a billion dollars of investment in the past ten years. You wouldn’t recognize [it] from when you were there.”

Heidecker reminisced about working at a Brass Rail Restaurant & Bar location that has since been converted into a Wawa. Tuerk said he prefers Sheetz but agreed that Wawa has increased its presence in the city in recent years. He noted, however, that the Fairgrounds Farmers Market was still going strong.

“The farmers market is amazing,” Tuerk said. “Brass Rail’s there, great Korean food. Saturday at 4 o’clock, there are 80-year old Dutchie women arguing about the price of meat that’s about to expire. That sounds like shit, but it’s amazing.”

Heidecker’s mother, who was also born in Allentown and worked in the city for the majority of her life, called into the show. She said that growing up in Allentown in the 1950s meant “cookie-cutter homes”, frequenting Hess’s – a department store chain based in Allentown that closed in the 1990s – and walking the now 180-year-old Bogert Covered Bridge.

“We’re restoring [it],” Tuerk said about the bridge. “We’re actually fixing it,” Allentown announced rehabilitation work on the Bogert Covered Bridge last September.

Tuerk also spoke about how the city itself has changed.

Allentown also now boasts an over 54-percent Hispanic or Latino population. Heidecker noted that Allentown’s Center City only had a decent Puerto Rican population during his upbringing.

“It’s hard to imagine how different it is now,” Tuerk said. “Allentown is a majority Latino city now.”

Tuerk, who is the city’s first Latino and Spanish-speaking mayor, evidenced residents’ response to Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s recent performance in the Super Bowl Halftime Show. He noted how the rapper’s first sold-out performance was at Allentown’s MainGate Nightclub in 2017.

“As a Latino mayor of a majority Latino city, and as a Spanish speaker, the biggest thing I do for residents is making people feel seen who haven’t felt seen in a long time,” Tuerk said. “The wife was going to take a picture of me weeping and send that to the kids but she decided to just describe it.”

Tuerk also didn’t refrain from commenting on how Bad Bunny’s performance comes in the midst of mass deportations of predominantly Latino individuals by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

“I don’t have to stay away from talking about ICE or Flock Safety or Donald Trump,” Tuerk joked. “I have to stay away from the Yocco’s and Willie Joe’s talk.” Yocco’s and Willie Joe’s are popular Allentown restaurants.

Tuerk noted that although ICE has not been particularly active in Allentown, the agency’s actions have affected Americans’ travel beyond particular cities.

“Whether it’s Los Angeles or New Orleans or Minnesota, they’re being deployed in ways that cause chaos,” he said. “The chaos in Minneapolis [is felt] in Allentown, because people are just looking over their shoulders all the time. [So] the message of positivity might sound trite, but bottom line that’s the message this country needs right now.”

Heidecker, like many others, compared the show to the recent “All-American” Halftime Show presented by Turning Point USA, which was streamed during the third quarter of the Super Bowl by more than four million people.

The show featured American country singer Lee Brice, whose song “Country Nowadays” centers on the lyrics “it ain’t easy being country these days.”

“You have all the power,” Heidecker said, after playing a video of Brice’s performance. “The presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court. Lee Brice, child.”

Tuerk didn’t join Heidecker and his cohosts in their numerous jokes about Brice’s performance. The mayor also didn’t hold back from criticizing President Donald Trump, whose ICE deployments are among the many actions the president has taken that are dramatically affecting the United States.

“When you don’t have a partner in federal government, you have to figure out how to do all these things yourself: affordability for housing, for healthcare, for food, for gas,” he said. “As that begins to harm residents, we have to figure out how to stitch together what looks like a social safety net without federal support.”

Tuerk noted that President Trump’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill”, which the president signed into law in July 2025, has negatively impacted Allentown residents, especially in regard to the bill’s twenty-percent reduction of funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits.

“The ‘big ugly bill’, as we call it, from Trump is doing real harm to people,” he said.

At the conference, Tuerk said one of the major areas of discussion would be the impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce. He disagreed with the number of cities that were attempting to cut costs under the assumption that artificial intelligence would deliver city services more efficiently and effectively.

“The thing I don’t like about it is that it takes humans out of the environment,” Tuerk said. “Being in city government is messy, so you have to engage with people. We keep disengaging from each other.”

He also noted that Allentown’s economy mostly relies on two sectors largely resistant to artificial intelligence: production, with gas and energy companies such as Air Products and PPL Corporation headquartered in the city, and healthcare, with the Lehigh Valley Health Network’s flagship hospital, Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar-Crest, operating as Pennsylvania’s third-largest hospital.

“The Lehigh Valley is a place where people are still making things, and it is hard to outsource production to robots,” Tuerk said.

Toward the end of the discussion, Heidecker asked Tuerk whether he would ever consider running for state representative in Congress.

“I do not have national aspirations,” the mayor said. “I love being a mayor in Allentown. I love cities, I love mayors. I love public service. I’m a proud public servant.”