Round and About: Scranton

 Last December, my littlest guy had to go to Scranton for a friend's Bar Mitzvah, and I actually remembered to take my camera!  Of course, it was 20 degrees out that day, so almost all of the pictures were taken through the car window.  Sorry, but it was too cold for me to be wandering about!

 This is the Scranton City Hall.  Police and Fire headquarters are here, also.  I love it; to me, it's just what a city hall should look like, almost like a castle.

This is the beginning of the University of Scranton.  They bought up a large number of buildings along this main road and renovated them, along with numerous old houses on the blocks to either side. They spent a very long time building the curved wall on the left corner of this intersection out of local granite.

 The very first time I drove down this street, I spotted this house.  At the time, it looked pretty sad; the paint was peeling, and the few shrubs which were there were out of control.  Still, I loved the house.  If it had been on more than one-half acre, I might have been tempted to buy it.  This front view, while lovely, isn't what I loved most about this house.

 This is what I loved most about the house: this bay window.  Can you tell from the picture that the glass in it is curved?  I am in awe of the craftmanship from the 1890s.

 The old lady who had owned the house died a couple of years back, and two guys from either New York or New Jersey bought it.  They've made it into a banquet hall available for rentals.  It's where the Bar Mitzvah was, and I sought out one of the owners to ask to see the curved window from the inside, and to tell him that they have done a magnificent job renovating it.  He seemed pleased by the compliment.

This is a closer view of the University of Scranton's curved wall; you can see some of the buildings farther up the road a little better.

 This is the cathedral in Scranton.

 And this is just a random intersection, one of many.

This is nowhere near all of Scranton.  It's just the first two miles on the main road into the city heading south from the suburbs.  It really is a stately old city.

My tours aren't nearly as informative or exhaustive as Diane's tours of France.  Of course, Scranton is under 200 years old, so there's nowhere near as much history to absorb.  But, if you're a fan of "The Office", or just like seeing other places, I hope you've enjoyed the little bit of our "big(ish) city" that I've shown you!