NEWS VOICES
Welcome to News Voices, a weekly feature where members of the WVIA News team will talk with each other — and sometimes sources — about key things we've learned in recent stories we have been working on.
Today Roger DuPuis sits down with Kat Bolus to discuss her recent stories on St. Luke's Episcopal Church joining the National Register of Historic Places and renovation work at Scranton City Hall.
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ROGER: You are listening to Morning Edition here on WVIA Radio. I'm Roger DuPuis, and this is News Voices. I'm here with WVIA News reporter Kat Bolus.
KAT: Hi, Roger.
ROGER: Hi Kat. How are you?
KAT: Good. How are you?
ROGER: Great, thanks. Thanks for being here.
KAT: Thanks for having me.
ROGER: So I moved to Scranton 19 years ago this month, and one of the things that impressed me when I first came here was how much historic architecture survived. This week you got to write about major milestones with two very historic buildings downtown. Tell us about that.
KAT: Yeah, I started off at St. Luke's (Episcopal Church) on Wyoming Avenue. The church was built in 1871 and it is now on the National Register of Historic Places. It's this really massive church that has these stunning stained glass windows. Many of them were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, who is from the Tiffany Jeweler family. The church itself was designed by Richard Upjohn and his son Richard Mitchell Upjohn. The father had designed Trinity Church near Wall Street in New York City.
ROGER: And so something very special has happened to St. Luke's.
KAT: So they're on the National Register of Historic Places, which is a National Park Service program that honors the history of some of our old buildings and places and locations across the country. And then I was also at the Scranton Municipal Building, which is on the corner of Wyoming and Mulberry Street. That was put on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s. So it's been on for a while. The city used some state and federal funding to be able to kind of fully restore the outside of that Victorian Gothic building.
ROGER: And there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the mayor and other officials, right?
KAT: Yes, a caution tape-cutting ceremony.
ROGER: Okay, excellent!
KAT: There's like two things that I love in this world — historic buildings, specifically in Scranton — and newspapers.com. So for both of these stories, I got to see historic buildings in Scranton and use newspapers.com to kind of do some research into when they were built, what they may have looked like. And one of the really interesting things that I found out about the Scranton Municipal Building, which was built in 1888, was that they had to move a house. So the mayor at the time, Ezra Ripple, he signed legislation to purchase the land that the municipal building is still on today, and there was a house there. But the streetlights had just become electric in the Electric City. So moving the house from Mulberry and Washington to Adams Avenue where they eventually put it, they had to get around all of these electrical lines.
ROGER: Wow.
KAT: So there was a mayor's address that I found in one of the old newspapers where he had mentioned that hassle to get (the house) around the new electrical lines.
ROGER: Wow. That's amazing. And there was a time, not so very long ago, when the city of Scranton wanted to move out of that building.
KAT: Yeah. In 2019, they hadn't really had a long-term plan to repair that building. I mean, it's built in 1888. It's bound to go into some level of disrepair if you don't keep up with it. So they had been patching things here and fixing things there, but there was really no long-term plan. And they had, at the time, in 2019, they had gotten an estimate that it was gonna cost $10 million to fix. So they thought about moving, they thought about selling the building, and everything kind of just like fell flat. And then there was an administration change. Then the pandemic happened, and then some state and federal money was available for them to kind of put into this project.
ROGER: You talked with City Council President Gerald Smurl, and he basically said you couldn't build something like this today.
KAT: Modern buildings don't look like they did in, in 1888, that's for sure.
ROGER: Right! Kat, thank you for being here with me.
KAT: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
