Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Station

About this property

The Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel, which was built as the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Station, is a French Renaissance-style building in Scranton, Pennsylvania. This historic structure was built as a train station and office building in 1908. It closed in 1970, was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on December 6, 1977; and was then renovated and reopened as a hotel in 1983. The building retains its original clocks, doors, fountains, stairs, ceilings, walls, and overall appearance. In the early 1900s, Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad president William Truesdale approved a plan to replace the railroad's Scranton station, an old brick structure located on Lackawanna Avenue near Franklin Avenue. The new station, to be built about seven blocks east at 700 Lackawanna Avenue, would be a far grander structure that would also house the railroad's offices, with the exception of the executive offices in New York City. The railroad commissioned New York architect Kenneth MacKenzie Murchison, who executed the design in a neoclassical style reminiscent of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he had been trained. Constructed of brick and steel at a cost of around $600,000, it has concrete floors and partitions. The exterior is faced with Indiana limestone and it has an eight-foot bronze clock on the façade. The main entrance leading to the former waiting room is furnished in Formosa, a soft, pinkish-yellow Italian marble. Its Grand Lobby, two-and-a-half stories tall, has an ornamented mosaic tile floor, a barrel-vaulted Tiffany stained-glass ceiling, rare Siena marble walls, and 36 unique Grueby Faience tile murals. The tiles are styled after the work of American artist Clark Greenwood Voorhees, and represent scenes along the DL&W's Phoebe Snow main line from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Buffalo, New York. A tall radio antenna was installed after a while on the roof; the railroad was a pioneer in the use of wireless communications between trains and terminals. The building, which was originally five stories tall, had a sixth added for office space by 1923. The last train, the Erie Lackawanna's Lake Cities, left the station on January 6, 1970. The building was shuttered and neglected, its windows cracking. The marbled lobby was used to store old timetables and railroad ledgers. The dilapidated exterior can be seen briefly in the movie That Championship Season, which was released shortly before the renovations. Owl (westbound) / New York Mail (eastbound) (night train, Hoboken-Buffalo) Pocono Express (westbound) / Twilight (eastbound) (Hoboken-Scranton, in 1950s to Buffalo)

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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