For sale: 40 acres in Nanticoke and Hanover Township containing a 97-year-old historic landmark.
The nonprofit Regional Equipment Center is giving Concrete City, located off Front Street in the Hanover section of Nanticoke, to the Nanticoke General Municipal Authority to sell for economic development. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission designated the experimental former coal-mine housing community a historic site and erected a marker in 1998.
The property consists of seven acres in Nanticoke and 33 acres in Hanover Township.
“You’re going to have property in Hanover Township?” Nanticoke Mayor John Bushko asked the night the authority voted to accept it.
If we can sell it, John, I don’t care if it’s in Russia,” municipal authority chairman Ronald Kamowski said.
The municipal authority is broke, and needs money for maintenance on the mostly-vacant Kanjorski Center on East Main Street — at least until it can be sold to Luzerne County Community College.
The Regional Equipment Center, which was created to allow municipalities to borrow heavy equipment, is closing by the end of the year. Executive Director Joseph Yudichak offered Concrete City for a token payment of $10, Kamowski said.
We were negotiating with the (Nanticoke) historical society at one time, and they wanted to save one building, fence it in,” Yudichak said. “The cost of maintaining one building, and fencing and insurance was just too much for us.”
Municipal authority solicitor Joseph Lach will do a title search on the property. Once the ownership is clarified, authority members hope they can find someone to buy it, Kamowski said. He’s not sure what the authority will do with the concrete structures.
We really have no plans right now,” Kamowski said. “The property became available to us, and we figured it was the last piece of developable land left in the city limits, so we took it.”
Concrete City in wilderness
At the end of a deeply-rutted rocky dirt road loom the shells of what were once considered a unique marvel of company housing for coal miners.
Paintball players, target practicers and partiers have littered the once-immaculate grounds with beer containers, spray paint cans and assorted types of spent ammunition.
Tangles of overgrown foliage give no hint of the lush lawns and gardens residents once cultivated. Graffiti-covered bare concrete is devoid of any trace of the white paint with green trim that once graced the homes.
Concrete City’s 20 two-family residences were built in 1911 by Delaware, Lackawanna and Western railroad’s coal division to house 40 favored employees of Truesdale Colliery. Each house, made entirely of poured concrete, rented for $8 a month — but only to English-speaking, high-level mine employees.
Glen Alden Coal Co. took over Concrete City in 1921. The company didn’t want to put in a required sewer system — each residence had a concrete outhouse — and abandoned the housing complex in 1924.
As legend has it, Glen Alden Coal Co. tried to demolish it, but gave up when they discovered even 100 sticks of dynamite didn’t dent the buildings.
“Well, they could today,” Yudichak said.
The houses are weathered and crumbling, and years of use as a training ground and shooting range by firefighters, police and the military — as well as damage by vandals — have taken their toll.
“The problem with it is, the buildings are a disaster waiting to happen. Someone has to take it over and do something,” Yudichak said. “Someday there will be a major accident there.”
eskrapits@citizensvoice.com, 570-821-2072