There Was a Party Outside Joe Biden’s Childhood Home Yesterday
The city never forgot how the president-elect clung to his local roots
On North Washington Avenue, they cheered, they hugged, and they wept. Joseph Robinette Biden, raised in a modest blue house on this street in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was just elected to become the next president of the United States. For the dozens of people gathered outside Biden’s childhood home on Saturday afternoon, the victory didn’t just represent a rebuke of Donald Trump’s autocratic brand of democracy, it was also a wistful moment of hometown pride.
“I have some nostalgic attachment to him,” said Helen Bittle, a 49-year-old assistant professor who teaches at nearby Marywood University and lives in the Green Ridge neighborhood where Biden grew up. “I work up at Marywood, and Biden received speech therapy there when he was a kid. So, he has connections specific to our university and our neighborhood.”
Scranton and the encompassing Lackawanna County pulled through for Biden in a major way. He beat Trump here by 10,000 votes, a big increase over the shocking 4,000-vote margin with which Hillary Clinton won the traditionally blue county in 2016. Over half of Biden’s votes came from the city of Scranton itself. A win in Lackawanna was never really in doubt, but Biden…
