Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel (Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Station)

Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel (Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Station)

Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel (Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Station) © George E. Thomas
Photo 2 of Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel (Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Station) Photo 3 of Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel (Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad Station)
1907, Kenneth Murchison. 700 Lackawanna Ave.

As the birthplace and operational center of the Lackawanna Railroad, Scranton received a gift from the Lackawanna's Manhattan owners in 1907: a grand French Renaissance railroad station and office building, essentially an enlarged version of Murchison's earlier Hoboken terminal for the same railroad. This station, built to serve as a fitting gateway to the Electric City, remains the Lackawanna Valley's primary City Beautiful monument. After the railroad closed in 1970, the building languished until being rescued and rehabilitated for hotel use in 1983 by C. Robert Buchanan and Associates of Youngstown, Ohio. The interior is organized around a soaring light court. The walls of the former waiting room, now a restaurant, feature an early-twentieth-century travelogue: terra-cotta panels depicting picturesque scenes along the “Route of Phoebe Snow,” the 1903 white-garbed invention of the railroad embodying its clean-burning fuels. The Classical Revival Scranton–Spring Brook Water Company, now a county office building (1921, Davis and Lewis), across Jefferson Avenue, makes a deferential companion.

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