1936 Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania Flood Photo Album – 22 Original Photographs

Description

On March 20, 1936, the Susquehanna River at Wilkes-Barre crested at 33.07 feet, a level that remains among the highest recorded there. This remarkable album puts us directly onto the streets during that disaster. Its 22 original photographs document floodwater stretching across neighborhoods, commercial streets and the landscape surrounding the river, with views of South Main Street near Academy Street, Hazel Street, Lee Park Avenue at Division Street, Northampton Street, St. Mary’s Road and other locations. Particularly striking are the elevated views toward Kingston from the Coal Exchange Building, with the monumental Market Street Bridge surrounded by floodwater. These aren’t later reproductions assembled as a souvenir: they are period photographs mounted together and carefully captioned as a contemporary visual record of the event.

What makes the album especially compelling is its specificity. Street names and viewpoints turn a group of dramatic flood pictures into a photographic map of Wilkes-Barre in March 1936. Storefronts, advertisements, automobiles, utility poles, houses, churches and pedestrians appear amid streets transformed into rivers—small details of everyday Pennsylvania life caught in the middle of a historic natural disaster. The photographs also preserve the city immediately before the construction of the Wilkes-Barre levee project later in 1936. Kept intact for ninety years, this is both a striking piece of vernacular photography and an unusually concentrated piece of Wilkes-Barre and Luzerne County history.

A remarkable, intact photographic eyewitness record of one of the great Susquehanna River floods—and a piece of Wilkes-Barre history that would be nearly impossible to recreate today.