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Eastern Pennsylvania » Anthracite Region » Lackawanna County » Scranton » Albright Memorial Library

Albright Memorial Library

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1893, Green and Wicks. 500 Vine St.
  • (© George E. Thomas)

After removing his business interests and his residence to Buffalo, New York, industrialist John Albright (founder of Buffalo's Albright-Knox Gallery) sent that city's foremost architects, whom he had commissioned for his gallery, to Scranton to design a public library on the site of his family home. Green and Wicks crafted an elegant French Renaissance structure modeled after the Hotel de Cluny in Paris and built in Indiana limestone with a black tile roof. The L-shaped building wraps a courtyard whose garden plan was originally by Frederick Law Olmsted. Its intimate interior is more indebted to the Richardsonian library tradition than to the openness of the Carnegie model: a series of cozy reading rooms with beautiful oak woodwork and beamed ceilings that pinwheel from an impressive stair hall. The barrel-vaulted second-floor reading room is particularly fine.

Writing Credits

Author: 
George E. Thomas
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Data

What's Nearby

Administration Building, Lackawanna College (Central High School)
Scranton Cultural Center (Masonic Temple and Scottish Rite Cathedral)
Finch Towers (Hudson Coal Company, International Correspondence School)
City Hall
Herold Apartments

Citation

George E. Thomas, "Albright Memorial Library", [Scranton, Pennsylvania], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/PA-02-LK21.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of PA vol 2

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, George E. Thomas, with Patricia Likos Ricci, Richard J. Webster, Lawrence M. Newman, Robert Janosov, and Bruce Thomas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012, 487-487.

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