Scranton Christmas Windows

Now is the perfect time to visit the Scranton Christmas Windows collection in the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives.In 2009 Gene Giancini was cleaning out a building on the West Side of Scranton. His family had operated a business in the building for 60 years, and he was in the process of selling it. He found, stacked in the corner, old photos of Christmas window displays from Household Outfitting Company, 306-314 Lackawanna Ave. The entire collection appears in the LVDA.

The Pennsylvania Guardsman

The Pennsylvania Guardsmen was a magazine published about the Pennsylvania National Guard. This periodical contained stories about the Guard and what they were doing at the time. This issue released in the Fall of 1955 focused on the National Guard deployed in Northeast Pennsylvania after Hurricane Diane.  The magazine features photographs of the disaster along with the story behind it.  If your interested in the National Guard the whole magazine was scanned in our digital archive.

Interview with Hurricane Diane Victim

Jim Keenan remembers Hurricane Diane vividly because his family home in East Scranton was swept away in the flood waters. This video interview is one of several in the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives where witnesses and survivors recount their personal memories of the flood.

Feel Free to Correct Us

This photo below shows the damage Hurricane Diane inflicted on the Delware, Lackawanna, and Western railroad tracks near Nay Aug Park. Many historians believe this was the death knell for the DL&W. Herein lies an interesting lesson. When this collection first went live, we erroneously stated that this was the Erie-Lackawanna right-of-way. A user of our collection pointed out that the merger between the DL&W and the Erie post-dated Hurricane Diane. We verified that the merger did indeed occur 1960, five years after the flood, so the information has been corrected. When we enter metadata for items in our collection, we work with the best information we have available at the time, but sometimes it is incomplete or incorrect so, if you know something we don't, feel free to correct us either by commenting on a blog post, commenting in the archives itself, or by sending an email to lvda@albright.org. We really appreciate your input.

Richter Avenue Flooding

 

 

The above picture is one of the many photos that can be found in the Hurricane Diane collection on the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives. This photo scanned from the collection of James Keenan shows the damage the Roaring Brook did to the area and especially the houses on Richter Avenue.  In the photo above, the water is flowing down what is left of the street.

WDAU-TV Footage of Hurricane Diane

Anyone who grew up in Scranton in the 1950s through the 1970s knows that WDAU-TV (Channel 22) was "the Scranton station" and WBRE-TV (Channel 28) was the "Wilkes-Barre station" until mergers and acquistions changed the landscape of the local TV market. Footage from WDAU-TV's nightly news program is stored in the basement of the WBRE building in Wilkes-Barre and is a tresure trove of mid-20th Century local history. Thanks to Jack Scanella, a retried WDAU photographer who maintains an index to the footage, and Tom Gregory, a current WBRE-TV photographer, we were able to find the reels pertaining to Hurricane Diane and have them digitized. This haunting, soundless footage records the devastion wrought by Diane in and around the Scranton area.

Hurricane Diane is now ONLINE!!

The Hurricane Diane collection is now available on the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives website. The library is very excited about this collection because it contains video histories, recorded histories, and photos from our community and also from some of our original partners, which includes the Lackawanna Historical Society and Steamtown National Historic Site. The photo above is one of the many photos in this collection.  You will find 83 items which includes actual TV footage of the flood. Check it out!!