Concrete City
Nanticoke, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Notable for early use of International Style architectural concepts in creating "model" industrial housing. Located 1/4 - mile north of here. The homes, built by the D L & W Railroad's Coal Division for forty Truesdale Colliery employees, were opened in 1913. Constructed of poured concrete, the twenty two-story rectangular double houses surrounded a park. Controlled by the Glen Alden Coal Company after 1921; abandoned in 1924.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1913, the coal division of the D L & W Railroad built an unusual experiment in worker housing north of Nanticoke. Twenty-two identical poured-concrete double houses, arranged around a central park, drew on emerging modern design ideas to shelter miners of the Truesdale Colliery. The community was short-lived, abandoned by 1924, its bare concrete shells left standing.
Why it matters
Concrete City captured the Progressive Era's faith that better-planned industrial housing could improve workers' lives, and its ruins remain a striking monument to that ambition.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early twentieth century, the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania was one of the busiest industrial landscapes in America. The hard coal beneath Luzerne County heated homes and powered railroads across the East, and the collieries around Nanticoke ran day and night. Coal was king here, and the companies that mined it shaped nearly everything above ground as well as below.
This was also the height of the Progressive Era, a time when reformers, engineers, and industrialists alike were fascinated by the idea that better planning could solve social problems. Crowded, hastily built mining towns—the "patch towns" that grew up beside the breakers—were notorious for cramped, flimsy housing. The notion that a company might design something cleaner, healthier, and more permanent for its workers fit the optimistic spirit of the age.
Into that moment came a bold experiment just north of here, opened in 1913: a small community of poured-concrete homes arranged around a shared green. It was an unusually deliberate piece of design for a coal patch, drawing on emerging modern ideas about form, function, and honest use of materials.
People & events
The homes were built by the coal division of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad—a railroad that, like many of its era, was also deeply invested in mining the coal it carried. The houses were meant for employees of the nearby Truesdale Colliery, and there were enough of them to shelter dozens of mining families.
What made the place remarkable was how it was built. Instead of wood frame construction, the builders used poured concrete to raise a set of identical two-story double houses—each one a solid, rectangular block. They were laid out around a central park, giving the little settlement a sense of order and shared space that ordinary patch towns rarely had.
The experiment did not last. Control of the community passed to the Glen Alden Coal Company in the early 1920s, and within a few years the houses stood empty, abandoned by 1924. What had begun as a forward-looking model of industrial living became, in barely more than a decade, a ghost of an idea.
Its place in the American story
Concrete City belongs to a larger American story about how industry tried—and often struggled—to house the people whose labor it depended on. Across the country, mill towns, mining patches, and company villages rose and fell with the fortunes of a single employer, and the housing built for workers was as much a business calculation as an act of care.
What sets this site apart is its ambition. Reaching for durable materials and a planned, communal layout, its builders were testing the same modern design instincts that would reshape architecture in the decades to come. That such thinking appeared in a Pennsylvania coal patch, and not just in a big-city studio, shows how widely those ideas traveled.
Its quick abandonment tells the other half of the story. Grand plans for worker communities often ran aground on the hard economics of extraction—on shifting ownership, changing mining conditions, and the simple fact that a company town lives or dies by the company. The bare concrete shells left behind are a monument both to an era's faith in planning and to the limits of that faith.
If you visit
This is a place that rewards imagination more than it rewards signage. The marker sets the scene, but the story lives a short distance north, where the concrete structures were built around their central green. Approach it as an explorer of ruins rather than a sightseer expecting a polished attraction.
Look for the rhythm of the place—the repeating, boxy forms and the way the houses were arranged to face one another around shared open ground. Even weathered and stripped, the geometry tells you this was designed, not thrown together. Picture the park at the center as it might have looked when families first arrived, and the raw concrete when it was brand new.
If you're building a road trip through Pennsylvania's anthracite country, this makes a thought-provoking stop alongside the region's breakers, mining museums, and old patch towns. It's quiet, a little melancholy, and genuinely unusual. Wear sturdy shoes, be mindful of uneven and overgrown ground, and treat the site with the respect you'd give any place where people once made their home.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Sephaniah Reese
Plymouth, PA · est. 1992
In the coal town of Plymouth, Sephaniah Reese built and drove a three-wheeled, one-cylinder motor vehicle on the streets in 1887–88, making him one of America's earliest automobile experimenters. His machine shop, incorporated in 1888, was also an early bicycle manufacturer. The firm remained a fixture here for more than eighty years.
Lyman H. Howe (1858-1923)
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2000
From his base in Wilkes-Barre, Lyman H. Howe ran six touring companies that carried the new marvel of motion pictures to small towns and rural audiences across America. Billing his programs as "high class," he paired films with coordinated sound effects and captured world and local events alike—including President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 visit to the city. For many Americans, a Howe show was their very first movie.
Jesse Fell (1751-1830)
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1997
In 1808, tavern-keeper and judge Jesse Fell managed something others had struggled with: he burned hard anthracite "stone coal" successfully in an open grate, proving it could heat a home without a forced draft. Word of his simple experiment spread quickly, helping ignite the anthracite industry that would transform the Wyoming Valley into a coal powerhouse. Fell was also a civic leader, serving as a judge and as Wilkes-Barre's first burgess.
American Institute of Mining Engineers
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2016
By 1871 the anthracite fields of northeastern Pennsylvania powered much of American industry, but mining remained deadly and technically primitive. That year twenty-two mining professionals met at the Wyoming Valley Hotel in Wilkes-Barre to found the American Institute of Mining Engineers, one of the nation's first engineering societies, aimed at improving safety, training, and technology. From that meeting grew an organization that today counts well over a hundred thousand members worldwide.