The Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel Scranton is that rare thing at this end of the market, a hotel worth booking for the building alone. It occupies the former Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad station on Lackawanna Avenue, a French Renaissance pile of 1908 that stopped serving trains and reopened as a hotel in 1983. The old passenger concourse survives as the lobby: Sienna marble, faience panels advertising the railroad’s destinations, and a barrel-vaulted ceiling of leaded stained glass overhead. Nothing else in Scranton, and very little else in the Radisson portfolio, looks remotely like it.
The 146 rooms upstairs are comfortable and conventional, the expected mid-scale fittings rather than a continuation of the downstairs drama, so book with the public spaces in mind. The Station Grille sets its tables beneath that vaulted ceiling in the former waiting hall, which turns an ordinary dinner into an occasion, and there is an indoor pool and free parking. It is the ground floor, not the guest floors, that justifies the stay.
The setting suits the theme. Steamtown National Historic Site, with its working locomotives and roundhouse, is a short walk away, so the railway story continues out of the door. Downtown Scranton, the Lackawanna County Courthouse square and the Electric City Trolley Museum are all within easy reach, and Montage Mountain is a short drive for skiing or summer concerts. For anyone with an interest in architecture or the age of American railways, this is the obvious and rewarding place to stay in the city.
