Quote:
Originally Posted by terrymetal
The fact that this happened downtown is insignificant. I have lived in lots of different places.Crime can happen anywhere at anytime. Me and my wife are looking for apartments in an area of Scranton. I may be getting a a job transfer there. I have been looking in zip codes like 18504 18508 18518....Can anyone tell me if any of these areas are safe to walk at night or whatever? keep in mind i live in Georgia....I have never actually been to that part of PA. I cant imagine crime being any worse than it is in Atlanta...which is pretty high at times. Also can anyone tell me if there is Public Trans in any of these areas? Thanks
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Hello!
What part of Georgia are you coming up from? I have family in Acworth, which is northwest of Marietta. We also have member "Georgia to Northeast PA" who recently made the move to the Lake Ariel/Mt. Cobb area, an outlying suburban area about twenty minutes to the east of Scranton.
18504: (West Side)
http://www.city-data.com/zips/18504.html
18508: (North Scranton)
http://www.city-data.com/zips/18508.html
18518: (Old Forge)
http://www.city-data.com/zips/18508.html
Old Forge (18518) is not a part of the city of Scranton, but rather it is a suburb just to the south of town. It is home to about 8,500 residents and has its own public school district. The town is very,
very heavily white, non-Hispanic, Roman Catholic, and of Italian descent. The town is known as the "Pizza Capital of the World" for its own unique style of pizza with thick rectangular crust, sweet sauce, onions, and gooey cheese. You either "love" Old Forge pizza, or you "hate" it (I'm in the latter category I'm sad to say). Crime is very low here. I would not hesitate to walk around Old Forge at any time of the day or night. The town proper has a rather ugly downtown aesthetically, but it is replete with businesses---bars, pizzerias (of course), funeral homes, florists, gas stations, barber shops, hair salons, and a grocery store (Rossi's).
Here is a link to a photo tour I took in 2006 of Old Forge:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/north...art-seven.html
Not much has changed in town since then. I believe a new townhome community oriented towards senior citizens is being developed, and there are several newer subdivisions with upper-middle-class homes sprinkled throughout the town as well.
The other two zip codes you cited are in the city limits of Scranton. Membe rs weluvpa and LusOnlyVoice are infinitely more acquainted with North Scranton than I am, so I will defer to them. Members blip, FightinPhils, versaron, NYRangers2008, and a few others are our local representatives of "West Scranton" (which can be further broken down into Keyser Valley nearer to McDade Park, West Mountain a bit further up Keyser Avenue headed towards the Morgan Highway, Hyde Park which is the grid-shaped residential area rising up a gentle hill away from its own downtown business district along Main Avenue, Bellevue which is home to the St. Ann's Novena, and Tripps Park, which serves as the boundary neighborhood between West Scranton and North Scranton. The neighborhood of Boar's Head is somewhere in here as well, but I believe it may be closer to Providence Square (Providence is a small section of North Scranton).
It is difficult to predict the future of those two neighborhoods. Mayor Doherty and ex-Mayor Connors are both apparently proponents of focusing all of their time and energies into improving the city one neighborhood at a time, neglecting the others. In the 1990s the Hill Section was given a major overhaul that involved random police saturations and sting operations that drove out the violent presence there. In the early-2000s the continued expansion of the University of Scranton and the revival of once-blighted Nay Aug Park have combined to further help the Hill Section along on its path to recovery. It remains the sort of neighborhood where you can have one block of well-kept historic homes with BMWs in front situated right next to another block where those same historic homes have been subdivided into rental units and now house a mixture of rowdy college students or drug operations. It's a very, very dense and diverse neighborhood for sure.
Now that the administration feels as if it has "fixed" the Hill Section, it has forgotten about it to saturate South Scranton with mass tree plantings, a new dog park, a push for a new library, new green space, etc. in order to gentrify it. South Scranton (really only certain pockets) can be sketchy. There has been a massive influx of Hispanics (some illegal ones I'm sure) into this part of town, especially along the Cedar Avenue and Pittston Avenue corridors, since 2000. This has brought a bilingual flair to the neighborhood, new Latino businesses, and in the case of last month, a very rowdy block party following a Latino Heritage Celebration. Many larger homes here (which tend to have less historic appeal) have also been subdivided into apartments, which has led to crowded situations for on-street parking on many blocks---blocks which originally housed perhaps 20 families in 1950 and now house 35 families in the same amount of space. Probably by the dawn of Mayor Doherty's next term in office (if there is one) he'll announce he's shifting his focus towards Pinebrook (near the upcoming medical college) to help "sell" the city to prospective medical students. Finally after 50 years it will be time to turn back to the Hill Section, which may have undoubtedly fallen into the same state of disrepair it was in during the 1990s when these neighborhood-specific revitalizations began. In my opinion it does no good to just cause criminals to continuously scurry around from one neighborhood to another instead of taking care of the problem at its
root, but what do I know.
Here's a photo tour I did of parts of West and North Scranton back in 2007 (man I really miss doing these tours!)
http://www.city-data.com/forum/north...west-side.html
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