This building's demolition was a crime against architecture and humanity. It's "legacy" is the vacant lot which will come to symbolize Downtown Wilkes-Barre for decades; a city with no future which has destroyed its past as well.
Tom Mooney gave a good summation. As a Wilkes student 1960s, I would do some of my studies in the lobby, play the pinball in the coffee shop. That little coffee shop had a lot of traffic. Sordoni's, Bill Scranton, Dan Flood, Gov. Leader. Thanks for the memories.
Thank you for this! My family is from Wilkes Barre and we use to go up every summer to visit. The Sterling used to 'flavor' alot of my grandparents stories (along with Meyers High). It saddens me that no one took care of this building and it basically went into ruins before being demo-ed.
Thanks for the insight of the hotel sterling,I myself do not live in the usa,but like all historic buildings from the late 1800's and early 1900's they are too many being demolished and we should try to Preseve as much as we can for future generations.
Thanks, guys, a really nice job and proud of you! Went to King's, '55-'59, now living in CA for 36 years. Was great seeing this today, bringing back many memories of home on my 79th birthday. May the four of you have a successful and happy life.
Rise and Demise... Great idea! This would be a really interesting series. Pick a city, talk to some locals and find similar stories and do a similar concise and direct report. It could be a biweekly or monthly feature... I would watch a series like that, and I bet lots of people would...
I can't believe they couldn't secure private or federal funding for a full restoration, even at the top level price tag of $35M. The money they would have made in the first ten years alone would have been enough to pay it back. I think they really dropped the ball.
Thank You all for this excellent piece on a truly magnificent structure. Sad that we had to loose it, however, your work on this film will be remembered and appreciated by many.
And the city paid how much for that feasibility study? Two pictures with the top floors going to be apartments middle offices and bottom shops. A second grade class probably would have drawn that up for free!
I used to hang out in the coffee shop there in the early to mid nineties when it was still open. Besides being a great spot to meet up with other like minded individuals, free thinkers, poets, artists, punks or whatever your clique might have been, they had great food! Couple of friends and I knew an elderly lady up on the second, maybe third floor. We would go up to her apartment and would talk about years past and how glorious the hotel had been. She was a marijuana smoker and this was our intent there, so we would quite often stay for hours listening to her talk. Truly something amazing that I got to experience! Also at that time we were free to wander the whole hotel, and we did, all the way to the top stopping at every floor, which was an experience that I will remember and cherish forever. Even under all the dust and destruction it was eerily beautiful and we often wondered what had happened that it had become like this. To see the Susquehanna and surrounding area's of the city was truly best seen from the top floor of the Sterling, but we honestly got a little bugged out being up there as it was something out of a video game that might start the character off in an abandoned overgrown mental ward. Almost like we felt several presences in the room with us. Very creepy. Sad to see it go as I had some of the best memories of life driving down that little alley and parking in the pothole and crushed stone riddled parking lot adjacent to the barely lit backdoor entrance to my favorite coffee shop of the nineties.
An old "Pennsylvania Dutch" saying perhaps applies here: Vee get too soon oldt, undt too late schmardt." (We get old too soon, and smart too late")... Unable to understand the value of our collective cultural past, we can't comprehend how it serves as a weathervane to our future. So, we simply (and mindlessly demolish it. R.I.P. Hotel Sterling.
How long ago did he pass? There really aren't any gentlemen who speak like this anymore. I'm old enough to remember plenty of them still around when I was a kid, and it's just one of many things that makes me find more in common with people older than myself, and unable to find really much in common at all with younger people who weren't around for any of it. It's not their fault of course; it's just a huge knowledge and reality gap that really can't be bridged when you know and care about things they can never possibly comprehend, can't relate to or would otherwise find offensive or politically incorrect instead of valuing it the way I do as a better time to have been alive.
It seemed somewhat strange that the city officials were willing to have their voices recorded and their names and titles used, but would not allow their faces to be shown on-camera.
Not strange at all. They were thieves. They and others pocketed 6Mil in monies given to City -Vest to restore it. It was in the works when this video was made. Believe me, they knew what they were doing. RIP Sally, you knew what they were doing.
Oh yeah, I remember the whole "somebody forgot to bring Sammy Kaye his newspaper" fiasco. Boy, was that an embarrassment on Sterling Hotel's good name.
I was visiting as a tourist the town of Wilkis Barre and searching the history of this beatiful city i see about this building, it is shame that this building is no more has a lot history if this building the Hotel Sherling was In New York It would be an icon in the city and it would never be demolition. Also will be have a lot jobs in Wilkis Barre. This comment are from this year 2021
On the DIHYW film on you tube they went through the Sterling before it was torn down, and it was obvious that almost everything was already removed from the building. I wonder where it went?
Nobody from here that I've ever known has pronounced it 'Barry'. Plenty of people, including my maternal grandmother, used to pronounce it 'Berry', but always with heavier emphasis on 'Wilkes'. However, most people I know, including myself, as a lifelong or nearby resident up until just a few years ago, with family dating back to the 1850s, have always pronounced it like Bear (or Behr), but said fast and as one word without hanging on or otherwise overenunciating the last word, with the stress always being on the word 'Wilkes'. WILKES-behr, sometimes with an 'uh' sound at the end. Maybe you think that's dumb, but the é in Barré would not be a long ee sound anyway.
