Easton is a city in and the county seat of Northampton County, Pennsylvania, United States. The city's population was 26,800 as of the 2010 census. Easton is located at the confluence of the Delaware River and the Lehigh River, roughly 55 miles (89 km) north of Philadelphia and 70 miles (110 km) west of New York City.
Easton is the easternmost city in the Lehigh Valley, a region of 731 square miles (1,893 km2) that is home to more than 800,000 people. Together with Allentown and Bethlehem, the Valley embraces the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton metropolitan area, including Lehigh, Northampton, and Carbon counties within Pennsylvania, and Warren County in the adjacent state of New Jersey. Easton is the smallest of the three Lehigh Valley cities, with approximately one-fourth of the population of the largest Lehigh Valley city, Allentown. In turn, this metropolitan area comprises Pennsylvania's third-largest metropolitan area and the state's largest and most populous contribution to the greater New York City metropolitan area.
The city is split up into four sections: Historic Downtown, which lies directly to the north of the Lehigh River, to the west of the Delaware River, continuing west to Sixth Street; The West Ward, which lies between Sixth and Fifteenth Streets; The South Side, which lies south of the Lehigh River; and College Hill, a neighborhood on the hills to the north of downtown, which is the home of Lafayette College, a liberal arts and engineering institution. The boroughs of Wilson, West Easton, and Glendon are also directly adjacent to the city; the first and largest of which, Wilson, partially aligns in the same North-South Grid as the city of Easton.
The greater Easton area consists of the city, three townships (Forks, Palmer, and Williams), and three boroughs (Glendon, West Easton, and Wilson).
Centre Square, the town square of the city's Downtown neighborhood, is home to the Soldiers' & Sailors' Monument, a memorial for Easton area veterans killed during the American Civil War. The Peace Candle, a candle-like structure, is assembled and disassembled every year atop the Civil War monument for the Christmas season.
The Norfolk Southern Railway's Lehigh Line (formerly the main line of the Lehigh Valley Railroad), runs through Easton on its way to Bethlehem and Allentown heading west and to Phillipsburg, New Jersey just across the Delaware River.