Lackawanna County plans for new Biden Expressway murals

Borys Krawczeniuk, The Times-Tribune, Scranton, Pa.
Updated ·2 min read

Apr. 7—Maureen McGuigan and Traci Harte want to freshen up downtown Scranton's entrance.

The Lackawanna County officials are in charge of finding an artist or artistic team to update the 16-year-old murals on the retaining walls near where the Biden Expressway spills into downtown. By the deadline Friday afternoon, they had 16 potential artists or teams submit letters of interest with qualifications.

"It's been there since 2006," said McGuigan, the county arts and culture director. "We're definitely doing a new one. It's definitely time to update it. And I think that it's a good time to do that; a lot has changed since 2006."

Harte, the deputy chief of staff, said the existing murals look drab.

"It's in need of a facelift," she said.

Changing times

The existing mural, painted at a cost of $125,000 and finished in December 2006, includes a red electric trolley waiting outside a storefront, the Electric City sign rising to stars and a silhouette of the Harrison Avenue Bridge. Coincidentally, that bridge is gone, replaced by a new one in December 2017.

The Electric City sign underwent an upgrade last year. Last spring, when the county patched cracks and shored up the retaining walls, officials started thinking about new murals.

"If our agreement with PennDOT is we have to maintain the wall, why not take advantage of that as an opportunity to do something fresh?" McGuigan said.

In addition to preferring Pennsylvania-based artists, the county is requiring the project to employ local mural artists. Artists must have experience painting large, outdoor murals, according to a county request for qualifications.

The mural on the outbound expressway retaining wall is 5,570 square feet; the inbound wall is 6,654 square feet.

The county has budgeted $75,000 to $100,000, depending on the level of detail in the chosen design, McGuigan said.

Artist timeline

According to the current schedule, the county will select finalists by April 24. The finalists will have to submit their conceptual designs by May 19 and the county will choose the winning design by June 7. Nov. 1 is the target date for completion.

The concepts will remain up to the artists, but the murals will reflect county surroundings.

"We definitely want to celebrate Lackawanna County, so maybe it's a mixture of things. Certainly our history is important but we have seasons here, we have attractions," McGuigan said. "In our RFQ, we did put stuff in about Lackawanna County, just so people applying would kind of know. That's kind of the focus of the mural. ... What is the essence or what do we think celebrates our county, our history and our present?"

Contact the writer:

bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9147;

@BorysBlogTT on Twitter.