Dickson
Manufacturing Co.

Penn Avenue at Vine Street

Thomas Dickson’s works started in 1856 with thirty men and a contract to build engines and boilers for the Delaware & Hudson. By 1890 it employed more than 1,200 and turned out a hundred locomotives a year, alongside hoists and pumps for the mines, rolling-mill engines and waterworks machinery. American Locomotive absorbed the company in 1901. A Dickson engine was still working in Honduras in 1967.

Then	Photograph, the Dickson Manufacturing Company works, Penn Avenue at Vine Street. Undated; the company was absorbed by American Locomotive in 1901, which places it in the 1890s. Lackawanna Historical Society.
Now	Google Street View, captured May 2026. Imagery © Google.
On the fit	The Street View frame is aligned to the photograph’s own frame rather than scaled to fit it, and it registers closely: the PENN PAPER sign sits on the circle where the clock face was, and the arched windows, the corbelled band beneath them and the dormers all land together. The modern capture does not reach as high as the photograph does, so the top seven per cent of the “now” plate — sky, and nothing else — is reconstructed, and the four overhead wires that cross the join were measured below it and carried on as straight lines rather than left to stop in mid-air. Google’s search box, address panel, minimap corner and place marker have been patched out of the sky, road and wall they sat on. No structure is invented. What differs between the two halves is real: the top of the tower — balcony, clock stage and spire — came down after the works closed, and the corner office block that fills the right of the photograph is gone, with a later warehouse and its parking lot on the ground it stood on.