Scranton Lace Company

Updated March 2020 | By Matthew Christopher

Established in 1890 and incorporated in 1897, the Scranton Lace Company was once one of the premier manufacturers of a variety of textiles ranging from tablecloths, napkins, yarn, laminates, and many others including Nottingham lace, for which it was famed. During World War II they produced parachutes, tarpaulins, and mosquito/camouflage netting to the Allies. An enormous factory complex that once employed 1,200 people and boasted its own gym, barbershop, theater, four lane bowling alley, and an infirmary for its employees, Scranton Lace Company even owned its own cotton fields and coal mine offsite. Overseas competition and poor investments in television studios led to a slow decline in the textile mill's prominence. In their final days the staff had dwindled to fifty (given the size of the buildings, one wonders how often they even crossed paths) and had average annual sales of about six million. In 2002 they finally shut their doors mid-shift, telling the employees the factory was closed 'effective immediately'.

The 8.4 acre site was purchased by Lace Building Affiliates LP, who were awarded over $5 million in state grants for a redevelopment project that is intended to turn it into apartments and retail space. Many of the interior artifacts were stolen, scrapped, or sold. Of the nearly one dozen Nottingham looms - each twenty tons and fifty feet long - that were imported from England to produce the iconic Scranton lace, only one remained at the end, unprotected from the elements. I have visited this site many times over the years and watched with dismay as it has disappeared bit by bit.

I had desperately hoped Scranton Lace, whose clock tower was a symbol of Scranton's prosperity, would in fact be restored as a functional part of the community and that there was still something left of what it once was by then. You could still find fleeting glimpses of Scranton's golden years in its last days - a few scoring sheets in the bowling alley; a pallet with Victory Parachutes stamped on it if you know where to look; a graffiti-covered fireplace in one of the heavily vandalized lounges. The sad, battered Nottingham loom was still threaded with the tatters of the lace they were producing when the factory closed, as though waiting for someone to return and put it back to use. Perhaps that was just projecting my own feelings on an inanimate object. I was certainly waiting for it too.

Instead, demolition began on the factory in 2018. Supposedly the clock tower will be kept, but otherwise most of the buildings - whose rehabilitation would have meant so much - will be razed for apartments and town homes, which had been initially planned as part of the factory.

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Scranton Lace Company is a chapter in my book, Abandoned America: Age of Consequences.
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