The Iron Furnaces sit just off Cedar Avenue near downtown — four enormous stone blast-furnace stacks, partly overgrown with ivy, the centre of what was once the largest iron foundry in the country. They are now a small Pennsylvania state-owned heritage site with interpretation panels around the base.
A visit takes about half an hour. There is no admission fee. The furnaces are most striking at dusk, when the floodlighting picks out the stone arches against the sky. Combined with Steamtown, the coal mine tour, and the surviving Lackawanna Railroad terminal, they give a good sense of why Scranton was an industrial powerhouse for half a century.