Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (January 2025)
The Frozen Susquehanna
Wilkes-Barre sits just twenty minutes from Scranton, but the two cities feel like they arrived from different directions. Where Scranton carries the weight of its industrial past in every stone and streetcorner, Wilkes-Barre has a different quality to it, something more civic and almost academic. The courthouse, the bridges, the Victorian homes, the statues of John Wilkes standing in the snow all point to a city that was built around ideas as much as industry.
I had passed through here as a child on those same drives north to visit my grandparents, and had come back once to help a friend pack up and move home. This was the first time I came for the city itself.
What stopped me most was the Susquehanna. I had never seen a frozen river before, and here it was, locked solid, ice spreading bank to bank with the old bridges rising out of it like something from another century. I stood there longer than I planned to. Some things you just have to let sink in.
