Wednesday off the rails, Part 2

After lunch at a cute little café, we walked over to the former Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad station, built in 1908 and closed in 1970. This beautiful French Renaissance-style building with Italian marble and a Tiffany stained-glass skylight is now a Radisson Hotel. We wanted to look at the Grueby Faience art nouveau tiles showing bucolic scenes of the Delaware Water Gap, Budd Lake, and Niagara Falls along the Phoebe Snow line from Hoboken, NJ, to Buffalo, NY. ("Phoebe Snow" was the New Woman dressed in white who prized the clean-burning anthracite coal mined in the Scranton area in rhyming advertisements for the DL&W. We had wanted to visit the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum, but it is closed due to COVID and the fact that the underground tour involves spending considerable time squeezed into a very small space.)

Looping back to where we parked the car, we stopped by the county seat to photograph some of the many memorials there. The "Scranton: Electric City" sign was first lit in 1910 with 1,200 40-watt filament incandescent bulbs that featured circles of red and green, a flame of red and amber, and letters, rays, and sconces of white. It went dark in 1972 before being renovated in 2004, and again in 2014. It now uses 1-watt LED bulbs and stands for the combination of history and civic rebirth, tradition and technological innovation. La Fiesta Italiana, an Italian-American cultural organization that runs an annual cultural festival, organized the fundraising for the sign.

The obelisk is an American Civil War monument. There were markers for other wars and individuals (including Christopher Columbus), and around the corner, a plaza dedicated to artists, including a hometown hero who had written for television that we had never heard of. Then it was home for hamburgers before a cool round of miniature golf. The occasional spitting rain held off from becoming a downpour just long enough for us to finish. Mom won, aided by not one but TWO holes in one on a tricky course!

In case you missed Part 1 "on the rails."