Information
Landmark: Albright Memorial LibraryCity: Reading
Country: USA Pennsylvania
Continent: North America
Albright Memorial Library, Reading, USA Pennsylvania, North America
Overview
The Albright Memorial Library serves as the main branch of the Scranton Public Library and stands as one of northeastern Pennsylvania’s finest Gothic Revival civic landmarks, its pointed arches casting long afternoon shadows across the stone steps.You’ll find it at 500 Vine Street, right on the corner of Washington Avenue, facing the western edge of Nay Aug Park, with the Everhart Museum and Scranton Cultural Center just steps away, giving the city’s cultural district its heart.Between 1891 and 1893, coal barons John Joseph and Joseph Jacob Albright built the library to honor their parents, its stone walls rising from the ground with their fortune.Philadelphia architects Green & Wicks designed the building in a French-inspired Gothic style, using pale Indiana limestone accented with the warm, reddish tones of Medina brownstone.With its steep slate roof, tall lancet windows, and a gargoyle crouched at the corner, it looks every bit like a chapel tucked inside a college quad.Two bronze doors, crafted in the style of Ghiberti’s Florentine “Gates of Paradise,” swing open into a vaulted vestibule where mosaic tiles glint underfoot and oak wainscoting warms the walls.Sunlight slips through narrow stained-glass windows, spilling patches of color across the central Reading room, where a twenty-five-foot hammer-beam ceiling rests on carved oak corbels shaped like Pennsylvania’s wild creatures.Brass chandeliers, their metal warm with age, still hang above the long rows of study tables.On the south wall, a marble fireplace framed with carved tympanum panels of Chaucer and Shakespeare still shows faint soot, a trace of the coal fires that once kept early patrons warm.In the reference wing, three open mezzanine levels hold neat stacks of books, each reached by winding iron spiral stairs cool to the touch.Ornamental railings, cast at Scranton’s Lackawanna Iron Works, run along the edge of each tier like dark iron lace.You can’t miss the Local History Room, its walls warm with cherry wood and shelves packed with more than ten thousand volumes, city directories reaching back to 1850, and microfilm of the Scranton Times that crackles with stories from 1870.At the Albright Memorial Library, about 400,000 books pass through eager hands each year, with shelves rich in Pennsylvania coal-industry history, genealogy, and immigrant studies-some pages still smelling faintly of old ink and dust.Each week, the children’s department hosts story hour under sweeping murals painted in 1932 by Works Progress Administration artist A. He scrawled a crooked letter F, the pen scratching loud against the paper.Sauer brings to life folktales from the city’s Welsh, Irish, and Italian communities, painting scenes as vivid as a red scarf fluttering in the wind.You’ll find plenty here: a twenty-station computer lab humming with screens, 3‑D printing available to cardholders, and a freshly renovated makerspace stocked with sewing machines and cozy podcast studios.The library’s community programs include the long-running “Pages and Pints” book club, which gathers at lively downtown breweries, a springtime Local Authors’ Fair sprawled across the front lawn, and an autumn Haunted Architecture tour so popular it sells out weeks in advance.Each summer, it teams up with the Lackawanna River Conservation Association for “River Reads,” blending muddy, hands-on stream-bank cleanups with poetry workshops held under the shade of tall maples.Retired teachers volunteer to lead ESL classes, helping Scranton’s growing Nepalese and Dominican communities-often with a warm smile and a worn chalkboard at their side.In 2019, a major exterior restoration brought the building back to life-workers repointed seventy percent of the limestone blocks, swapped out cracked slate tiles, and fitted sleek, energy-saving storm glazing just behind the old leaded glass.Upgraded climate control keeps the historic collection safe, yet the building’s original cast‑iron radiators still stand, dark and cool, as part of its charm.The project won a Preservation Pennsylvania award for its adaptive stewardship, praised for keeping the century-old brickwork intact.The library’s open Monday to Thursday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 5, and on Sundays from 1 to 5 during the school year-quiet lamps glowing in the reading room as evening settles in.Street parking’s metered, and the little lot tucked behind the building is free-but it’s full before you know it.You can enter on Vine Street using a smooth limestone ramp added in 2004, and an elevator will take you to every public floor.For over a hundred years, the Albright Memorial Library has blended stately architecture with a spirit of openness, giving Scrantonians a proud landmark and a warm space to read by the tall windows, dig into research, create, and come together.Carved stone walls and rooms lined with books speak to the city’s industrial past, while lively, constantly changing programs meet the needs of today’s community.
