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Sunday, January 17, 1993     Page: 1 & 14A QUICK WORDS: WYOMING AVENUE

WYOMING AVENUE — When 100-year-old Salina Williams closes her eyes, she
sees Wyoming Avenue the way it was when she was a child: a dirt road running
through a grassy field close to the Susquehanna River.
   
“Wyoming Avenue was just like a tree here and a tree there,” said Williams,
a petite woman who has lived on the avenue for half a century. “It didn’t have
any sidewalks. It was all wilderness.”
    She’s seen the avenue evolve from a dirt trail bustling with horse-drawn
carriages to a paved, multi-lane thoroughfare that carries 30,000 cars past
her brown-and-yellow Wyoming home each day.
   
Called “The Great Road” in the 1700s, Wyoming Avenue was once an Indian
trail and now connects West Side towns like a long string of pearls.
   
Wyoming Avenue, the 7.4 mile stretch from Kingston Corners to West
Pittston, was laid out in 1770 by six Kingston men who wanted to build a road
to better defend themselves and to transport goods.
   
Today the avenue is lined with 11 funeral homes, 12 churches, 13 auto
dealerships, a synagogue, a hospital, an airport, shopping centers, historical
landmarks, schools, scores of eateries and homes representing almost every
architectural period.
   
“It’s not a boring road,” said Michael J. Cefalo, 52, an attorney whose
100-year-old Wyoming Avenue office was built for a coal baron. “It’s got
churches and cemeteries and car washes. It’s the main drag.”
   
The avenue, teeming with history, was an escape route to freedom for slaves
during the days of the Underground Railroad. It also was the site of a
massacre in the late 1700s, a Ku Klux Klan march in the late 1920s and visits
by several U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, Franklin
Roosevelt in 1936 and John F. Kennedy in 1960.
   
In the early 1900s, the road, one of the oldest in the valley, became part
of state Route 11.
   
Over time, diners came and went; movie theaters opened and closed; and many
of the stately, old homes with wrap-around porches were converted to offices.
   
As the face of tree-lined Wyoming Avenue slowly changed over time, one
thing remained constant.
   
It still is The Great Road, a main artery for many residents who work, live
and shop along the thoroughfare.
   
Bricks to pavement
   
In 1930, William Brewster, a Kingston author and attorney, summed up the
vision of the men who planned the avenue:
   
“This magnificent highway, the grandest stretch of road in all Northern
Pennsylvania, and with few equals in the whole United States, was the
conception and achievement solely of Kingston men, who … had in view the
wide thoroughfare of a busy city.”
   
The road snakes over flooded coal mines and runs through five West Side
towns — Kingston, Forty Fort, Wyoming, Exeter and West Pittston.
   
“When the people come to visit, they don’t realize that each town runs into
the next one, and they don’t know which town they’re in half the time,” said
Oliver London, 78, a former pharmacist who lives in Kingston with his wife.
   
In London’s community, businesses line the thoroughfare and homes are
tucked away on side streets. The pattern changes quickly in Forty Fort and
Wyoming, where homes dominate. Businesses take over once again in Exeter,
giving way to homes at an angle in West Pittston.
   
Residents, like London, have traveled the road by horse and buggy, trolley
car, boat, electric bus and automobile. London recalls paying eight cents in
the ’30s to ride a tan trolley that jostled down the avenue from Wilkes-Barre
to Kingston, then to Harveys Lake.
   
Today, the 35 mph avenue, one of the widest streets in Northeastern
Pennsylvania, is both beautiful and congested.
   
It’s 34 feet wide in West Pittston and opens to 72 feet in Kingston and
Forty Fort, nearly three times the width of Interstate 81. The Pennsylvania
Department of Transportation, which pumps about $16,000 into the avenue each
year, will pave part of the road this year.
   
“The bricks are still underneath here,” said Eddie, 71, a school crossing
guard in Wyoming who declined to give his last name. “They never took them
out. It’s a good foundation.”
   
Those bricks made for slippery roads, said Forty Fort Police Chief Robert
Sulitka, 57, who grew up in Kingston and now lives in Forty Fort. In recent
years, he’s detected a change in motorists on the avenue.
   
“One thing that amazes me is I see more young ladies driving the avenue in
the early morning hours,” Sulitka said. “I think it’s because of working
conditions and lifestyle changes.”
   
Sulitka and Kingston Police Chief Gerald O’Donnell said speeding and
traffic are challenges police face today.
   
“It seems that people just ignore the 35 mph,” Sulitka said. “When traffic
lightens up, they just forget and think they can go 45 or 50.”
   
Magnificent mansions
   
All along the avenue, architectural styles run the gamut from Victorian to
Georgian, Greek Revival to Art Deco, and English-Gothic to 1970s commercial
strip centers.
   
Near Pierce Street in Kingston sits the Holiday Towne House motel with its
yellow-and-red lettering and gold archway. It resembles a casino-hotel in Las
Vegas.
   
Across the avenue from the motel is the recently renovated Kingston Post
Office, a ’30s Federalist style building modeled after banks and federal
offices.
   
Some of the homes are huge.
   
“You wanted to show power, you wanted to show wealth and stature in the
community,” said Michael Thomas, a local architectural expert, of the coal
barons and entrepreneurs who built magnificent mansions on the avenue.
   
“I like the old homes all along the avenue because they make it a very
diverse street,” said Kingston veterinarian Richard Kaufer, 40, who bought a
coal baron’s home built in 1923.
   
“You’ll have offices, but then you’ll have these big, old homes structured
according to who owned them.”
   
It was an old, old house that attracted Michael Cefalo Jr., 25, and wife
Karen, 26, the son and daughter-in-law of attorney Michael Cefalo, to Wyoming
Avenue in Wyoming.
   
The Cefalos live in a mansion built in the mid-1800s for banker Payne
Pettebone, a tall rail-like man, and his wife, Caroline Swetland.
   
Caroline’s father, Luke Swetland, a farmer and businessman, was Pettebone’s
partner. Swetland had the house built as a wedding gift for his daughter and
Pettebone.
   
The 25,000-square-foot, 13-room home with five fireplaces reportedly served
as a hideaway for slaves during the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s.
   
“I’ve never found secret passageways or anything like that,” Karen Cefalo
said.
   
But, in the attic, she did find a glass whiskey flask with a cork wedged in
the top. And under flooring in the bathroom, she found yellow copies of New
York Times newspapers from the early 1900s.
   
“That’s a significant piece of architecture and part of our history,” said
Mary Ruth Kelly, director of the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society.
“It’s great that private individuals recognize that and are taking care of our
heritage.”
   
The Cefalos live on the second floor of the house, while renovation
specialists refurbish the first. Original wood planks still cover the first
floor.
   
In the kitchen, which is as large as a living room, sits a working wood
burning, cast iron Stag’s Head stove from the National Stove Company, New
York, 1873. The Cefalos will make it part of their kitchen.
   
A photo of Pettebone and a sketch of his house on the avenue hang over a
fireplace.
   
“I’m preserving what their heritage was,” Karen Cefalo said. “This home
meant a lot to them. It feels as though you keep part of their heritage
alive.”
   
In the 1800s, the home was cooled with one of the first forms of air
conditioning. Ice was hoisted through an attic window and cooled in galvanized
tin.
   
“The ice would melt and cool the house, then they’d use the ice water,”
Karen Cefalo said.
   
The builder left an imperfection to ward off evil spirits: A door in a
second-floor study is crooked.
   
“We have no evil spirits, so it must work,” she joked.
   
Unlike the Cefalos, Jim and Erin Gallagher moved to their Wyoming Avenue
home in Forty Fort for location and the convenience of having everything
within a few blocks.
   
The Gallaghers live in a home built for former Forty Fort councilman Adam
Heisz, who helped buy the stone for the Wyoming Battle Monument, which
commemorates fallen soldiers in Wyoming.
   
“I guess you get a good bird’s eye view of life on the West Side,” said
Erin Gallagher, 49, a homemaker and active volunteer. “You see so much of it
go by.”
   
Today, the house is sandwiched between a funeral home and law office,
unlike 20 years ago when families lived next door.
   
“It was like our own little neighborhood,” Erin said. “I didn’t need a
car.”
   
The Gallaghers raised five sons in the three-story, 10-room house, and what
they find so amazing are the wooden front doors.
   
They’re the original 10-foot-tall, 2-inch-thick doors, dating back to 1869
when the home was built.
   
“Picture the people who have knocked on these doors and what their messages
were,” said Jim Gallagher, 49, a marketing manager for Merrill Lynch.
   
Bustling business
   
From the earliest days, Kingston Corners, the southern end of the Great
Road, bustled with tobacco and silk shops.
   
“Kingston Corners was the pocket of the business area,” said 86-year-old
Edgar Wood, co-owner of Wood-Tip Realty Co. in Kingston. “It was the central
location of the whole West Side.”
   
In 1787, Lawrence Myers built a tavern there and persuaded the county to
lay out town roads to converge at his establishment. One of the West Side’s
first barbers opened at the corners in 1885, and the F.W. Woolworth became a
mainstay in 1935.
   
Just north of the corners stood Willard & Howard Stull’s toy store and the
Top Hat Diner, two popular institutions. Stull’s, built in 1921, featured toys
at discount prices.
   
It was “one of the first stores in the Wyoming Valley to establish a
complete toy land in which particular stress is laid on the sale of toys the
year round instead of just during the holiday season,” wrote one historian.
   
“My parents bought my first bike there,” said Randall Glidden, 36, an
associate with Wood-Tip Realty.
   
Stulls closed after the 1972 Agnes flood.
   
The Top Hat Diner, a 24-hour restaurant known for its packed lunch hours,
sat where the UGI parking lot is today.
   
“It was very popular,” said London, a former pharmacist from Kingston.
“Every time anybody went anywhere they had to stop in the Top Hat and have
something to eat. Everybody knew about it and everybody went there.”
   
The toy store and restaurant are gone, replaced by a parking lot, Video
World, Star Technical Institute, West Side Window Cleaning, and many more
offices.
   
Business people say they’re on the avenue because the location is a free
advertisement.
   
It means exposure for Tom Weiss, who sells antiques in West Pittston, and
Robert Ceccoli, who owns the Victory Pig Barbecue in Wyoming.
   
They rely on traffic for business.
   
“You get the travelers,” said Weiss, 52, who moved his antique shop along
the avenue three times in 15 years. “I get a lot of people from out of the
area passing by, and they just stop to look in.”
   
Weiss’ shop, Antiques & Non, resembles a country store with wood cabinets,
clocks, rare books and phonographs.
   
Ceccoli, 58, who took over Victory Pig in 1942, remembers the restaurant as
an outpost amid a cornfield.
   
Today the Pig looks like it did 50 years ago, and pizza is baked in the
same ovens as half a century ago. The restaurant is Art Deco style with 20
windows, one after another, circling the restaurant so diners have a panoramic
view of the avenue.
   
In the ’40s, a trolley car ran by the restaurant, which, like today,
featured curb-side service and was open only Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
   
“The first night we opened we made 10 pans of pizza and we threw eight pans
away,” Ceccoli said. “Nobody knew what pizza was.”
   
The avenue kept the West Side towns alive, especially during tough economic
times, like the collapse of the coal mining industry.
   
“People would travel that route and stop at the diners and stores and it
kept them going,” said Paul Zbiek, 40, an assistant professor of history at
King’s College, Wilkes-Barre.
   
Parade of history
   
From a battle to a Ku Klux Klan march, Wyoming Avenue has practically seen
it all.
   
Claire Hart Cummings, now 73, hid near the Forty Fort United Methodist
Church when she was a little girl to watch the Klan in the late ’20s.
   
“We watched them go down the street in their garb,” said Cummings, who grew
up in Kingston and now lives in Wilkes-Barre. “Some were on horseback and some
were walking.
   
“There was a man who wore his shoes too big and they curved at the toe.”
   
All along the avenue are landmarks and reminders of milestone events. Among
them are:
   
Kingston, named after Kingston, R.I., by a woman who was given a quart of
whiskey for thinking of it, is home to Nesbitt Memorial Hospital, the first
hospital on the West Side.
   
In 1912, Abram Nesbitt bought an old Victorian home along the brick avenue
and started Nesbitt West Side Hospital.
   
In its first year, 632 people were admitted and 409 operations were
performed.
   
In 1991-92, Nesbitt admitted 10,703 people and operated on 10,203.
   
Just past the Forty Fort borough building spreads the Forty Fort Cemetery,
one of the oldest burial grounds in the Wyoming Valley, that dates back to
1770.
   
The whirl of traffic and call of crows are heard over the peaceful cemetery
whose tombstones, many unreadable, have been weathered by two centuries of
Mother Nature.
   
Some markers are slate-thin, while others are as tall as lampposts and as
elaborate as a Greek temple.
   
“Life’s work well done. Life’s crown well won,” reads one Swetland family
stone.
   
Pettebone, Swetland, Heisz, Shoemaker, Denison, Jenkins and Nesbitt are
some of the hundreds of family names in the small cemetery, where a dirt road
curves around the plots.
   
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Henry Martyn Hoyt, who was born along the avenue,
rests there.
   
And, according to legend, two Indians are buried near the black iron fence
which runs along the avenue.
   
During the Agnes flood of 1972, the Susquehanna River swelled, sending
about 2,500 corpses over Wyoming Avenue.
   
“All you saw were caskets and vaults,” said Francesco Araya, of
Wilkes-Barre, who was a young boy living in Forty Fort during the flood. “They
were tumbling like bowling pins upon a wave of water. The vaults kind of
looked like phone booths floating.”
   
The Wyoming Battle Monument sits along the avenue in Wyoming.
   
Built in 1840, the monument stands 62 feet tall and contains the bones of
96 men who were killed in the Wyoming Massacre in 1778.
   
With flags waving, drums beating and fifes playing, about 375 Wyoming
Valley settlers marched along Wyoming Avenue. They started in Forty Fort and
marched to where Exeter’s St. Cecilia’s Church now sits to fight Indian and
British forces.
   
Within 30 minutes, 180 people were dead, and the settlers suffered a
crushing defeat. After the battle, many of settlers left the valley, and there
were no colonizations for many years.
   
The nation, shocked by the massacre, retaliated against the Indians by
wiping out the Indian population in the Wyoming Valley.
   
Just north of Wyoming Battle Monument is the Wyoming Valley Airport, which
lies in both Forty Fort and Wyoming.
   
Built in 1929, about 17,000 people went to see the first air show at the
airport, which was performed by male and female fliers.
   
The Swetland Homestead, 1797, now a museum, and the Swetland store, both in
Wyoming, sit just past the Midway Shopping Center.
   
The store, part of which still stands, is now Panache, a small shop that
sells baby clothing.
   
Back in 1815, settlers bought bacon and pork for six cents a pound and a
dozen eggs for 11 cents.
   
In the late ’30s, the bones of the victims of the Wyoming massacre were
stored in packing cases until the vault at the monument was finished.
   
Salina Williams, who will celebrate her 101st birthday Feb. 18, used to sit
on the grass near the Wyoming Monument with her husband, Fred, whom she
married when she was 24.
   
She is the woman who first noticed the 350-pound, pure bronze statue of a
Labrador Retriever missing from the avenue’s Wyoming Cemetery.
   
She reported the missing statue to state and local police.
   
The statue, which now sits on the Davison family plot, was stolen in 1975
by a ring of thieves and found in Connecticut among $1 million worth of stolen
antiques.
   
Salina Williams, who has five grandchildren and was active in the
community, chipped in part of the $100 needed to reinforce the statue in
concrete.
   
Today, her ankles are swollen and she doesn’t get out much because she
walks with a steel walker.
   
She spends most of a day sitting in an old chair by the front door,
thinking of the old days and watching Wyoming Avenue.