A Store On Wyoming Avenue

City preservation records place the Globe Store’s beginning in 1878, when John Cleland, John Simpson, and David Taylor opened a one-floor shop at 121 and 123 Wyoming Avenue. The business started as a dry-goods store but grew around a newer kind of retailing: fixed prices, ready-made goods, and merchandise arranged in large display windows rather than negotiated across a counter.

The building most Scrantonians remember came later. The Globe Store Building at 123 Wyoming Avenue is listed by the city’s Historical Architectural Review Board as a 1906 stone building designed by Edward Langley, with a Neoclassical and Chicago School exterior. By then, the store had already made Wyoming Avenue its address and downtown Scranton its market.

Department Store Years

The Globe expanded with the city around it. By the 1950s, the city landmark survey describes it as Scranton’s largest department store, large enough that its 75th anniversary became a local event. The store sold ready-made clothing and household goods to shoppers whose parents and grandparents had known retail as a slower, more custom trade.

In 1956, the company pushed deeper into the block, extending the store back to Penn Avenue. That expansion added a 500-car garage and a larger restaurant, giving shoppers a reason to stay downtown for more than a single purchase.

The Holiday Store

For many local shoppers, the Globe was measured in December. Former employees and residents remembered its Wyoming Avenue windows, its gift boxes and shopping bags, and the holiday displays that filled the old store after Thanksgiving. A 2015 Times Leader story on a nostalgia exhibit at 123 Wyoming Avenue described collected Globe items, display-window decorations, music, Santa, and local residents returning to the building more than 20 years after the store closed.

Keystone Edge recorded the mechanics behind the spectacle. Trees used on the facade began as Arbor Day seedlings distributed to Scranton schoolchildren, then returned years later when residents donated them back to the store. The Globe arranged a crane and flatbed to bring them downtown, fastening them to eyebolts set into the granite blocks along the second floor.

Competition And Debt

Suburban shopping changed the downtown store’s position. The city landmark survey points to the opening of Viewmont Mall in the 1960s as a new source of competition. Wanamaker’s purchased the Globe from the Cleland-Simpson Company in 1968, and the store later passed to Globe Management in 1987.

The 1993 opening of the Steamtown Mall was supposed to help pull shoppers back downtown. Instead, the Globe became an outlying anchor linked across Lackawanna Avenue by a pedestrian bridge. Keystone Edge reported that the bridge failed to solve the store’s problems as mall anchors changed, legal and financial troubles grew, and the Globe entered bankruptcy just after New Year’s Day in 1994.

Closing Day

On Thursday, January 27, 1994, Globe President Edward G. Rossi gathered employees at 10 a.m. and announced the store was closing immediately. The next day’s Times Leader reported that the downtown fixture owed $1 million to the city of Scranton and more to PNC Bank, which had taken control of the business and its merchandise.

The closing put hundreds of employees out of work. The Times Leader estimated more than 400 workers were affected, while PNC kept between 50 and 60 people for inventory, clerical work, and security. For a store that had spent more than a century training Scranton shoppers to look downtown first, the end came as a bank-controlled shutdown rather than a planned farewell.

County Offices At The Globe

The building did not disappear with the retailer. In April 2016, Lackawanna County commissioners voted to enter a $1.3 million purchase agreement for the former Globe Store at 123 Wyoming Avenue, intending to consolidate several county offices into one central location. A Times Leader report noted that the building had most recently been occupied for about 15 years by Diversified Information Technologies before that company left in 2014.

Keystone Edge described the reuse project as a six-story, 250,000-square-foot building that had been largely vacant since 2014. The county planned to consolidate operations spread across eight locations, with a projected cost of $17 million and as many as 700 employees working from the renovated center. The Lackawanna County Controller’s 2019 annual auditing report says the building had been renamed Lackawanna County Government Center at The Globe, relocation began in December 2018, and scheduled office moves were complete by the end of January 2019.