Historical Scranton

We tracked down old postcards and photos of Scranton and lined them up with the exact same spot today. Slide between them and watch a hundred years disappear. Pick a corner below to get started.

• 

  Albright Library

  Vine Street at North Washington Avenue

  Modelled on the Cluny in Paris. A century on, what has changed is mostly the signage.

  c. 1900today

• 

  The Auditorium

  North Main Avenue at Oak Street

  The shape survived the century. The surface did not.

  c. 1910today

• 

  Courthouse Square

  Spruce Street at North Washington Avenue

  The memorial column was new when this was taken. It is still the only thing in the frame that has not moved.

  c. 1905today

• 

  Dickson Works

  Penn Avenue at Vine Street

  The works turned out a hundred locomotives a year. The tower still stands, shorn of its spire, over a paper warehouse.

  c. 1895today

• 

  High School

  Vine Street at Adams Avenue

  The tower and the roofline hold their positions; the elms over the sidewalk do not.

  1910today

• 

  Hotel Jermyn

  Spruce Street at Wyoming Avenue

  Radler's and the Purple Cow are lettered across the ground floor. Both were gone by 1965; the building wasn't.

  1950stoday

• 

  Hotel Terrace

  Wyoming Avenue at Vine Street

  Burned in 1986 and cleared. The stone wall across the street is the only thing left to line up.

  c. 1900today

• 

  Lackawanna Avenue Bridge

  Lackawanna Avenue at the river crossing

  The Central Railroad of New Jersey station still stands at the far end. The bridge under it has been rebuilt, and the trolleys went with it.

  c. 1910today

• 

  The Last Streetcar

  400 block of Spruce Street

  Car 507 rolled through here on the last day Scranton's streetcars ran. The tracks and wire are gone; the brick building down toward the corner isn't.

  1950today

• 

  Scranton Dry Goods

  Lackawanna Avenue at Wyoming Avenue

  The signs called it Scranton's Busiest Corner. The building is still standing; the signs are not.

  1920stoday

• 

  St. Charles Hotel

  128 Penn Avenue

  One of the city's first hotels and, for two decades, the unofficial seat of local Democratic politics. Razed in 1913, its replacement razed again in 1956; a parking garage holds the corner now.

  c. 1900today

• 

  Theater Row

  200 block of Wyoming Avenue

  Three theaters and five restaurants lined this block on a snowy night in 1936. All of it is gone now, cleared for a parking lot and a mural.

  1936today

• 

  Wyoming Avenue

  Wyoming Avenue, looking south

  Two churches bookend the block and both still stand. Most of what filled the gap is now a parking lot.

  Mid-centurytoday

Historical images are period postcards and photographs; each page credits its source. Modern imagery is Google Street View, © Google. Notes on making these are in the playbook.