A Temple Front on Vine Street

First Church of Christ, Scientist was built in 1915 at 520 Vine Street, a block already lined with Scranton institutions. The Albright Memorial Library stood next door. The Lackawanna County Courthouse, churches, clubs, and public buildings were all within walking distance. A Christian Science congregation that had formed in Scranton in 1879 chose that setting for a permanent home.

The church did not try to disappear into the street. It rose above the sidewalk on a broad staircase, with a columned portico, a pediment, and an Indiana limestone facade that made the building read more like a public monument than a neighborhood chapel. The front was formal, almost severe: steps, columns, stone, doors, and a roofline arranged like a small Roman temple.

A Congregation With Public Backers

The building opened on February 21, 1915. The Scranton Christian Science congregation had backing from people with public standing. Judge Septimus J. Hanna and Louis A. Watres, a former Pennsylvania lieutenant governor, were among the local figures associated with raising money and organizing the Vine Street church.

That helps explain the scale. The congregation was not building a modest meeting room. It was placing Christian Science in the same institutional district as the library, the courthouse, and the older downtown churches. Whether credited to Albert J. Ward alone or to Snyder & Ward as a firm, the building belongs to that local architectural circle. The design itself is the clearest evidence of the ambition: the congregation built as if it expected to stay.

The Church Years

For more than six decades, worshippers entered from Vine Street, climbed the stairs, and moved from the heavy limestone exterior into a sanctuary finished with stained glass, wood molding, and plaster detail. The church’s massing was formal, but it sat at a practical downtown address, close to the trolley-era city and later to the offices, schools, and libraries that kept the neighborhood active during the day.

By 1981, the congregation had become too small for the building. Services moved to a smaller Christian Science site on North Washington Avenue, and the Vine Street church went up for sale. An empty limestone church on Vine Street would not have been easy to reuse.

A Library Instead of a Shell

The building was saved because its next use made sense. The Albright Memorial Library next door was crowded, and Lackawanna County needed dedicated children’s space. In 1987, the Lackawanna County Library Board bought the former church and turned the main floor into the Lackawanna County Children’s Library.

The conversion did not ask the old church to pretend it had never been a church. The public still entered through the same monumental front. The large volume that once held worship became a room for children, books, and programs. The mezzanine became office and meeting space for the library board. The building changed function, but it stayed public, stayed educational, and stayed tied to the library block that had helped define the site from the start.

The former church was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 9, 1988. That listing recognized the architecture, but the more important local fact is what happened around the same time: Scranton found a daily use for a building that might otherwise have become a costly empty shell.

Children’s Library Today

The Lackawanna County Children’s Library still operates at 520 Vine Street. The building hosts story times, children’s events, and library programs under a roof built for a very different kind of gathering. Parents and children now cross the same front threshold that worshippers used in 1915.

Scranton kept the stone church by filling it with children instead of pews.