As a child, playtime for Jane Heft meant building with LEGOs or making sculptures with details like shingles and shutters. Perhaps that was a career precursor to her current role as vice president and director of project design and corporate branding for City Center Lehigh Valley in Allentown. While she was detail-oriented at an early age, she admits to still being a little messy when it came to the paper stuff.
Maybe she is being a little too tough on herself. Looking around today’s downtown Allentown it is evident she has gotten much better with the “paper stuff.” What we like to refer to as the look, the ambiance and the aesthetic of a property—like the design of the Renaissance Allentown Hotel, STRATA Luxury Flats and the ArtsWalk extension—all come from this woman’s crayon box.
“I’m lucky to work with an amazing team of designers,” she says during an interview in her City Center office.
Building what she wants to see The Lehigh County native, who loves to rock climb and travel to exotic locales, shared that one night she decided to write down everything that led to her current position.
“It struck me, ‘What made you want to start to do this?’ I started looking back through my life and I wrote a couple pages from like, four years old all the way up to now. Different things I felt I could remember.”
This is where those LEGOs come in. While her dad, a Pennsylvania state trooper, was a little strict growing up, he supported Heft’s decision to pursue a degree at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. “He never said, ‘You’re not going to make any money.’” He took the same approach with her sister and brother. “He wanted us to do something we loved,” Heft says.
At school, Heft learned the mechanical side of creating an advertisement, known then as paste-up: the process of creating a print ad without the use of computers. Protractors, X-Acto knives and drafting tables were the tools of the trade then. This is where other skills, such as being good at math, also came in handy.
“I was a senior by the time we got computers,” she says.
But the training of handcrafting an ad helped her become quick-minded as she was required to come up with a design concept, typeset it, lay in a photo or illustration, add text and then paste the ad onto the page.
“It cost a lot of money if you wanted to reshape the paragraph,” she says. “And I think that made me think about projects from beginning to end.”
Heft says that when she is working on an ad or other project, she knows going in how it is going to look when it is done, taking any guesswork out of the equation.
“I don’t really second-guess it,” says Heft, who strives to have everything done the right way the first time. She feels this is probably what has helped her in her role with City Center. It’s this same ability that made her proficient at her first professional position when she worked in advertising for Junior Colony, an Allentown-based women’s clothing company.
At 23, Heft became the ad director and managed everything from negotiating newspaper advertising contracts to leases with malls, and worked with nearly $1,000,000 ad budgets.
But that was just the beginning of a career that would provide so much more opportunity.
Heft later moved to Connecticut to pursue a position with The Donaldson Group, where she eventually became senior art director. The company dealt with several industrial and aerospace clients initially, and then scored some big names and moved into branding those clients, such as Eastman Kodak, 3M and Pitney Bowes.
One of her favorite gigs was working with the toy manufacturer Hasbro. Heft is proud to say that at that time, she designed the artwork for the box of the popular party game, Pictionary.
While still in Connecticut, Heft also worked on the branding for the Bushnell Performing Arts Center and its expansion project in Hartford.
Heft would eventually find her way back to the Valley and soon picked up a project with Allentown’s Symphony Hall—a pivotal move since it led her to the former president of ArtsQuest, Jeff Parks, and his grand plans for SteelStacks and ArtsQuest in 1999.
While in the midst of her projects with Parks and the Performing Arts Center, Heft was introduced to an associate of developer, J.B. Reilly, the founder and CEO of City Center while walking downtown one day—another pivotal moment in Heft’s career trajectory. He offered Heft a retainer for conceptual ideas, with the caveat that he didn’t know how long the project was going to last.
“He said, ‘I don’t know the context. It could be a month or five years,’” she says.
After hearing more of Reilly’s plans, Heft was further encouraged and assured. “This is not just about building buildings, but shifting perceptions and creating images,” she says. In the beginning, conceiving the new look of Allentown was a full-time job in itself. But it was also a chance to build what she wanted to see.
“It was almost, in my head, like playing Sim City again,” she says of the project’s city planning aspects.
Three years later, City Center’s sixth major project, the Five City Center complex, is now on the drawing board with plans that take into account a workforce demographic that is shifting from Baby Boomers to Millennials. Heft is workingwith leading global design firm Gensler to plan Five City Center, which will span the entire block of Walnut Street between Seventh and Eighth Streets and include a signature office tower, luxury residences, parking, retail and a community park.
Heft says she aims to create that “wow factor,” whether she’s conceiving a restaurant space like ROAR Social House or The Dime, or the lifestyle aspects of the project, like the apartment complexes and green spaces. Combining the creative skills of a designer and the planning expertise of an architect, Heft is the design director of the total space and concept.
“I want to create an overall experience from the moment you walk in the door,” says Heft, and she is hopeful the area becomes comparable to what Manayunk is to Philadelphia.
“We’re trying to create a very...cool part of the city. The cool part where everyone wants to be,” she says, adding that Allentown is the state’s third-largest city.
And Heft is leaving bits of herself around every corner. As the creator of the PPL Arena logo, she is excited that it’s positioned at the very top of building. She says when Google Maps changes its picture of Allentown to reflect the current landscape, anyone will be able to see the logo on top of the arena.
Creating ownership
But City Center isn’t just about developing a skyline, it’s about drawing in the rest of Allentown. City Center is among several downtown companies that have joined forces to roll out an employer-assisted home ownership program in an effort to create a ripple effect into the surrounding blocks. While they can’t completely clean up Allentown, Heft says, they can attempt some crossover with the help of the city’s arts programs.
As a recently-appointed member of The Allentown Arts Commission, Heft hopes to make art and cultural opportunities available to more area residents. She feels there’s a gap in the sense that people aren’t finding the time or don’t have the funds to see a performance at Miller Symphony Hall or go to the art museum.
Heft is working on ways to make that happen and cited this year’s inaugural Jazz Fest event. She said the week started out with free concerts in City Center’s restaurants and then culminated at Symphony Hall. That’s why Allentown Art Museum’s annual Cocktails & Collecting event is one of her favorites. She says the casual act of chatting and socializing within the confines of the museum exposes more people to art—those who might not regularly go to the museum.
She also enjoys many of the city’s outdoor festivals, including the first Allentown ArtsFest, an alternative art event that took place last year at Cedar Beach Park. The festival was not only fun, it provided opportunities for local artists to introduce their work to a broader audience. Some were tapped to have their work showcased at the city’s Renaissance Hotel as an integral part of the decor. Heft says more outdoor events are in the works, as well—other elements that she hopes will bridge that gap between people and opportunities.
At home
Though Heft’s career has constantly kept her busy, she has always made time for family, raising two children as a single mother for the last 17 years. At times, her kids became a part of her work life, sometimes being stand-ins for ads or just lending a helping hand when needed. She says her daughter was even featured in a 12-foot advertisement in New York City after being shot as a stand-in for yoga wear.
When they were small, she enrolled them in a karate daycare program. She says it provided structure for their after-school hours and helped them learn respect for other adults. She said it was a great help to her.
“I was never a helicopter mom,” she says, adding that she raised her children to be self-sufficient and to be problem solvers. As a result, “They are both extremely independent thinkers,” she says.
Heft doesn’t mind passing along the secrets of success to her kids. She advised them to gain experience in their fields by getting work-study jobs and summer internships, and to learn how to network to build relationships that can pay off down the road.
Above all, she tells them that finding something that you love to do and working that into an occupation is key.
“I think, you have to live life a little bit fearless,” she says. “You shouldn’t be afraid to fail. If you fail then you learn to get up and try a different way,” she says.
It is evident, Heft is more than adept at getting back up—and she isn’t done yet. After many years running her own creative business and now working to build a new Allentown, Heft feels she isn’t anywhere near hitting a glass ceiling.
In fact, with every new project, she feels like she’s getting a new box of crayons, and that’s a very good thing.
