The Venue
The drill hall as a 2,000-guest ballroom in a market with no equal. Weddings, galas, premieres.
Scranton, Pennsylvania · Established 1900
“Buildings choose people.”
Cross the threshold
“The Armory has such a life of its own — it’s almost like I don’t exist.”
An original 1870s swimming pool sits in the basement, watched by a bust of Zeus. Tunnels run for miles beneath the floor.
03 Inside the walls
Original carved hardwood, rising the full height of the castle head-house.
Salon-scaled rooms built to hold a regiment’s ceremony — later, a painter’s entire collection.
Lowered ceilings and linoleum stripped away to reveal the architecture beneath.
Dozens of rooms across four floors, each waiting on a use no one has imagined yet.
01 The premise
A Romanesque fortress raised in 1900 on land the Lackawanna Iron & Coal Company gave to the 13th Regiment. Five presidents spoke beneath its arches. Rachmaninoff played its drill hall. For a decade the painter Hunt Slonem filled it with thirty years of canvases. It has never once been ordinary, and it will not lease like it is.
02 A century of consequence
Architect Lansing C. Holden raises a Romanesque castle for the 13th Regiment, Pennsylvania National Guard — brick, stone, crenellations, twin turrets.
“New Armory, 13th Regiment” runs in the Scranton press. A civic monument from its first day.
Roosevelt, Wilson, Kennedy and more speak here. Rachmaninoff performs in the drill hall. JFK rallies the city in 1960.
Hunt Slonem takes the building, moves 500 truckloads, and unrolls thirty years of paintings into a private museum the public never saw.
The Armory stands empty for the first time in a decade — restored, photographed, and waiting for the one tenant equal to it.
A postcard of the “13th Regiment Armory, Scranton, Pa.” — printed within a few years of its completion, when the fortress was the newest landmark in town.
Photographed for its addition to the National Register of Historic Places — twin turrets, crenellations, and the great arched entrance unchanged in ninety years.
The central drill hall spans without a single column — a volume almost nothing built today can match. A ballroom. A soundstage. A sanctuary. An immersive world. It has been a gymnasium, an auditorium, and a parade ground. It is, quite simply, the rarest room in the city.
04 Why this ground
It was sited, oriented, and proportioned with intent — donated land at the seam of the anthracite fields, raised over a city built on coal by an architect whose client would, the year the cornerstone was laid, become Grand Master of Pennsylvania’s Freemasons. A survey of the building turns up things that are difficult to call coincidence.
The men who raised it left no explanation. We have only the measurements.
For the right buyer, the meaning is the asset — and meaning is the one thing a new building can never manufacture. Request the full survey →
41.4153° N / 75.6523° W · NRHP #89002081
05 What it becomes
The drill hall as a 2,000-guest ballroom in a market with no equal. Weddings, galas, premieres.
Castle floors become keys; the pool becomes a spa; the hall becomes the lobby no chain could build.
A 52-ft column-free soundstage, with Pennsylvania’s 30% film production credit on top.
An immersive world inside a real fortress — the canvas operators like Meow Wolf are hunting for.
A monumental hall already built for gathering, gravity, and awe.
Eligible for the federal 20% Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit and Pennsylvania’s Historic Preservation Tax Credit.
Private walkthroughs by appointment
We don’t send a brochure. We open the doors for the people who already understand what this is. Share your vision for the Armory and we’ll arrange a private tour.
Lease & sale · price upon request