Concrete City

The story

Concrete City was a experiment in company housing: twenty concrete double houses arranged around a central courtyard with tennis courts and a ball field, built in 1911 by the coal division of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad for select workers at its Truesdale Colliery. Each unit had two stories, several bedrooms, and a concrete outhouse — solid, fireproof, and modern for its miners, most of them Eastern European immigrants.

The whole project lasted barely a decade. In 1924 the local township demanded a proper sewage system, and the roughly $200,000 cost was judged not worth it; the company simply abandoned the village. Later owner Glen Alden Coal tried to demolish the houses and gave up after some hundred sticks of dynamite failed to bring even one of them down.

So the shells still stand in the woods at the edge of Nanticoke — roofless, doorless, elaborately graffitied concrete boxes around an overgrown courtyard. The land belongs to the city, which has used it for fire and police training, and the ruins draw urban explorers and paintball players. There are no signs, no railings, and no maintenance; the structures are genuinely unstable.

What remains today

Around twenty roofless concrete double-house shells and the outline of the central courtyard, heavily graffitied, in woods on the southeast edge of Nanticoke.