Scroll down to learn more about how you can save the Irem Temple Building or click below to donate today.
The Irem Temple is the most spectacular Shriner’s Temple in the world, saving it will provide a substantial lift to our local economy. The main auditorium will be returned to its original configuration — a flat-floored hall. This would create a multi-use event space, allowing for everything from weddings to farmer’s markets and ring-based sports. It would allow our community to attract the 50% of touring acts that demand this configuration (no seats on the main floor) and be synergistic with existing downtown venues. The rest of the building will be a museum that speaks to the revolutionary history (American and Industrial) of Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley. Heritage Tourism will be a broad-based driver of economic growth in this community and saving this building is the best next step.
The Irem Temple building in Wilkes-Barre is a national treasure and the nation’s most significant example of Moorish Revival Architecture. With its four towering minarets and large stained-glass dome, the building is unlike any other Shriners auditorium in the world and was the crown jewel of Wilkes-Barre for over 60 years. Construction on the building began in 1907 and the building was dedicated in December of 1908. In 1931, the flat floor of the main auditorium was replaced with a sloped floor, auditorium seating, and a stage.
The building was the primary performing arts theater in Wilkes-Barre for much of the 20th century and hosted various ritual and social events for the Irem Shriners and the community at large. Thousands of local residents celebrated weddings and graduations or attended orchestra performances and theater productions within the ornamental Main Hall. The Wilkes-Barre Fraternal Order of Police held their annual fundraiser in the Irem Temple building and the radio show “Welcome Travelers,” hosted by Tommy Bartlett was broadcast live from the stage. Sadly, once newer and better equipped seated-theaters, such as The F.M. Kirby Center, entered the area, the Irem Temple Building was forced to close its doors.
In 2005, the building was bought by the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber of Commerce, who had plans to preserve and revitalize the building. The preservation began in 2008 with critical roof repairs that saved the building from irreparable damage that would have ultimately resulted in demolition of the building. However, following the 2008 financial crisis, the Chamber of Commerce was not able to continue restoration of the building. Today, the Irem Temple Building is listed as part of Wilkes-Barre’s Riverfront Historic District on the National Historical Registry; a designation that requires rigorous evaluation to determine historical places that are worthy of preservation. Now, the Irem Temple Restoration Project, in partnership with key community organizations, are offering this exquisite, one of a kind Shriners auditorium a second, and final, chance at restoration.
The purpose of the Irem Temple Restoration Project (ITRP) is to restore the Irem Temple Building as part of the ongoing revitalization of downtown Wilkes-Barre. The building’s thousands of square feet of usable space will serve two main purposes. By returning the first floor Main Hall to its original configuration and leaving the stage and balcony unchanged, it will be an event and performance space unlike anything in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The remaining 18,000 square feet of usable space will be turned into a 1st-class museum/virtual-learning experience focused on the amazing history of Wyoming Valley and Wilkes-Barre.
With 6,000 square feet of indoor, chair-free space, the Main Hall will offer a unique performance space from other venues in the area and will attract performers that have previously not performed in downtown Wilkes-Barre. Many heavy metal bands, jam bands, and electronic dance music performers now prefer, and in some cases demand, no-seat, general admission venues. This configuration positions the most enthusiastic fans at the front of the stage and allows them to generate excitement for the rest of the crowd. Additionally, this type of admission permits more affordable ticket prices which ultimately draws bigger crowds. In the case of the ITRP, which is situated directly between two colleges and close to several others, affordable tickets will be especially appealing for college students and will draw them to concerts on a regular basis.
Weddings and Banquets will also make up a large portion of events held in the Irem Temple Building. The Main Hall will accommodate over 400 guests for weddings or dinner theater style events with room for a large dance floor. While additional wedding venues already exist in downtown Wilkes-Barre and the surrounding area, few offer a comparable amount of space, making the Irem Temple Building a unique contributor to the local wedding industry. As of 2013, the wedding industry generated $53.4 Billion and since then, the industry has continued to grow as the economy improves and unemployment rates decrease. The ITRP plans to partner with local vendors to extend the overall economic benefit of accommodating weddings to the entire community.
With thousands of square feet of modifiable space and various size rooms among its four floors, the building will also provide venues for small events/group rentals, ring based sports, theater in the round, markets, conventions, and vendor shows.
The Dome will serve both as a museum and a small event space, allowing the community to hold events in which guests are literally surrounded by local history. Again, artifacts and pictures will line the walls and floating display cases will be placed throughout the space. The display cases will be on wheels, so the museum exhibits can be reoriented to fit the type of event and amount of space needed.
Located in the basement, what was once the locker room will be transformed into a dynamic, virtual experience, that begins with guests surrounding the balcony on the 2nd floor and looking to the at first, empty floor below them. They will watch as the floor is transformed into an interactive map and timeline highlighting key places and events in our history. Once the captivating virtual performance is complete, the lights will rise and reveal two floors of pictures and artifacts providing further insight into key places and events.
The main room in the basement will provide two more unique ways to experience the area’s history. On the left side of the room, important cultural and historical artifacts will be arranged on mobile stands, flat panel televisions will line the walls playing brief documentaries, and interactive digital kiosks will provide more information on specific events. All of the displays will be easily transported to ensure they can be moved in less than an hour in the event of rising flood waters.
The right side of the room will contain two circular immersion booths that will provide first-person, 360-degree simulations and recreations of important historical events. Imagine bringing a classroom into an immersion booth and suddenly the students have left the museum and are now soldiers in the Battle of Wyoming or a miner trapped in an anthracite coal mine. Genuine partnerships with local organizations, Native American tribes, and Revolutionary reenactors will allow the ITRP to create these experiences.
The seats will be removed in the 6,000 FT main hall. The floor will be returned to its original flat configuration. It will host a wide variety of events. Rooms in the front of the building will serve as offices and museum space.
12,000 sf of useable basement, 17 foot high ceilings and windows in most rooms. Ideal location for centerpiece local history museum.
Join us at one of our events to learn more about the Irem Temple Restoration Project and how you can help to preserve the history of downtown Wilkes-Barre.
Our group is solely dedicated to creating a sustainable non-profit, that will save this amazing building and repurpose it in a way that drives local economic growth.
Available for purchase are signed and numbered artist renderings of the Irem Temple. Each of the limited quantity renderings will be numbered and signed by artist Phil Hamilton. We also have t-shirts available for purchase. Please show your support and purchase your merchandise today!
The Irem Temple Restoration Project (ITRP) and the Wilkes-Barre Preservation Society will be hosting a Public Square Pop-Up at One South Main Street (Floors 3 and 4) in Wilkes-Barre. The Pop-Up will be held from August-December and will feature items that tell the story of our area’s incredible history.
The goal of this museum is to showcase the full breadth of our history and to demonstrate that heritage tourism can be a shared source of prosperity. A thriving heritage tourism industry can have a significant positive economic impact on our community as well as a positive social impact by reinforcing identity and pride. An improvement in the economy will reduce crime and foster a more ideal work environment, making the Wyoming Valley a coveted place to live.
The Pop-Up will be free to the public and will open on Tuesday, August 21st and will be free to the public. Please check our Facebook page for more information about the Opening Day Celebration!
We are still looking for local business sponsors. If you are interested in learning more about our sponsorship levels, please contact beth@iremtemplerestorationproject.com. Sponsors will be featured on our 9’ x 7’ windows overlooking Public Square for the duration of the Pop-Up.
We believe that our message is an important one and want everyone to hear it. With the community’s support we can build heritage tourism, create a boom in our local economy, and share with others why we are so proud to call this place “home”.
Being a part of the ITRP Street Team means you will take an active role in making this project a success.
You will receive emails from us when your help is needed for specific ITRP events and fundraising campaigns. Sign up to help whenever you are available.
We will enable and empower you to search for and create opportunities to share the ITRP’s message. We will provide all the materials and information you need to go out into your community and share information/fundraise for the ITRP.
Begin today by searching for prospective locations to operate an ITRP Pop Up Booth. You can approach local businesses, such as your local library, or look for upcoming events, like farmer’s markets, that will host you and your pop up booth. You can even share information about the ITRP with family or groups/clubs you belong to.
If you are interested, please download and complete the form below and share your ideas with us! Once it is approved by ITRP leadership, we will give you everything you need to be successful.
If you’re looking for a street team member to attend your event/gathering and share information about the ITRP, please contact beth@iremtemplerestorationproject.com.
Greater than sixty years in the past, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac sat down in long island urban to jot down a unique concerning the summer season of 1944, while considered one of their acquaintances killed one other in a second of brutal and tragic bloodshed. the 2 authors have been then on the sunrise in their careers, having but to write down something of word. Alternating chapters and narrators, Burroughs and Kerouac pieced jointly a hard-boiled story of bohemian manhattan in the course of international warfare II, choked with medications and obsession, paintings and violence. The manuscript, referred to as And the Hippos have been Boiled of their Tanks after a line from a information tale a few hearth at a circus, was once submitted to publishers yet rejected and limited to a submitting cupboard for many years. This mythical collaboration among of the 20th centuries so much influential writers is decided to be released for the 1st time within the fall of 2008. A amazing, interesting piece of yank literary historical past, And the Hippos have been Boiled of their Tanks is additionally an engrossing, atmospheric novel that brings to existence a stunning homicide on the sunrise of the Beat Generation.
Lucien Carr, collage roommate of Allen Ginsberg and pal of either William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, killed David Kammerer in 1944. Ginsberg begun after which deserted a singular in response to the incident; Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated and accomplished this one, which has remained unpublished beforehand. Writing alternating chapters from alternating issues of view, the eventual Beat icons followed a hard-boiled voice with out adopting the conventions of against the law novel. the place such a lot crime novels begin with a homicide, Hippos leads as much as it, and the one rigidity is generated through the reader’s wisdom of what occurred in actual lifestyles. but when it isn’t winning as a criminal offense novel, it’s interesting for the glimpses it offers into the authors’ existence (the aimless partying is extra at the street than the large Sleep) and its symptoms of the writing kinds they might later increase. curiously, whereas references to Rimbaud recommend a parallel to the poet’s risky love affair with Verlaine, the portrayal of Carr, aka “Phillip Tourian,” isn't really romanticized — actually, he may were a good personality for Hammett, Cain, or Chandler to paintings with.
“[A] persuasive portrait of los angeles vie boheme in all its aimlessness and squalor.” –Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe
“Reveals giants-to-be within the improvement phases in their craft…With its evocative rendition of now-vanished saloons, bygone diners, and different landmarks of yesteryear, Burroughs and Kerouac could have inadvertently performed for 1944 Greenwich Village what Joyce did for 1904 Dublin.” –George Kimball, The Phoenix (Boston)
"The visual appeal in print of And the Hippos have been Boiled of their Tanks by means of William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is a literary occasion, not just since it drew of the 3 major Beat writers into confederacy, yet as the ebook informed a narrative – of male friendship, homosexual obsession, and homicide – that got here to fascinate a ranking of yank authors… It’s a desirable photograph from a misplaced period. If you’re trying to find the hyperlink among Hemingway’s impotent post-war drifters within the sunlight additionally Rises, the barflies and Tralalas of final go out to Brooklyn and the zonked-out childrens of Bret Easton Ellis’s lower than 0, glance no further.” —John Walsh, The Independent
“In alternating chapters, Burroughs and Kerouac serve up a noir imaginative and prescient of Manhattan… Of the 2, Kerouac, then in his early 20s, is the extra built author, even though Burroughs, an absolute newbie, already indicates the various pursuits and obsessions that would take place in bare Lunch and somewhere else, to assert not anything of an evidently field-tested figuring out of the way syringes work… For his half, Kerouac recounts wartime reports within the service provider Marine, besides notes at the bar scene that will do Bukowski proud.”
“[Hippos] considerably predates Kerouac’s significant novels and illuminates his dynamic and effective literary friendship with William S. Burroughs. … it's very captivating. … the vanity of switching from side to side among narrators each bankruptcy additionally retains issues dashing along—it creates the semblance that one is hearing a radio broadcast from one station, simply to have the frequency replaced each couple of minutes, with the narrative occasionally overlapping and the 2 voices bleeding into another.”
“If you care approximately both of those beat masters … I don’t see how one can fail to get pleasure from [And the Hippos have been Boiled of their Tanks]. mild because it could seem at the beginning look, it’s a useful rfile of literary heritage, glimmering with nascent genius.”
“Naughtily sexual and emotionally dirty, written is a prose variety that's deadpan-dry and larded with hardboiled surroundings. This oddly titled novel is a fascinating literary and old curio.” —Richard Labone, among the Lines
“Spellbinding. …with spot-on discussion and outlines of seedy bars and jam-packed flats, the authors serve up a desirable examine a time of past due evening events, informal intercourse and a devil-may-care method of life.” —Jackie Crosby, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“An eccentric, enticing, and readable novel… What makes the radical fairly interesting, besides the fact that, is its skill to supply a window into the early autobiographical kinds of either Burroughs and Kerouac as rising, unpublished writers.”
Right here, from Jay Dobyns, the 1st federal agent to infiltrate the internal circle of the outlaw Hells Angels bike membership, is the interior tale of the twenty-one-month operation that nearly rate him his relations, his sanity, and his life.
Getting shot within the chest as a rookie agent, bartering for computer weapons, throttling down the road at a hundred mph, and responding to a full-scale, bloody rebellion among the Hells Angels and their opponents, the Mongols–these are only the various high-adrenaline stories Dobyns recounts during this action-packed, hard-to-imagine-but-true story.
Dobyns leaves no stone of his harrowing trip unturned. At runs and clubhouses, among rides and riots, Dobyns befriends bad-ass bikers, meth-fueled “old ladies,” gun fetishists, psycho-killer ex-cons, or even many of the “Filthy Few”–the elite of the Hells Angels who’ve devoted severe violence on behalf in their membership. ultimately, at events staged in the back of seriously armed protection, he meets mythical membership participants comparable to Chuck Zito, Johnny Angel, and the godfather of all bikers, Ralph “Sonny” Barger. To combination in with them, he will get full-arm ink; to win their admire, he vows to end up himself a stone-cold killer.
Hardest of all is top a double lifestyles, which has him torn among his devotion to his spouse and youngsters, and his pledge to turn into the 1st federal agent ever to be “fully patched” into the Angels’ near-impregnable ranks. His act is so convincing that he comes inside of a hairsbreadth of wasting himself. finally, he realizes that simply as he’s been infiltrating the Hells Angels, they’ve been infiltrating him. And simply as they’re now not all undesirable, he’s no longer all good.
Reminiscent of Donnie Brasco’s uncovering of the real Mafia, this is often an eye-opening portrait of the area of bikers–the such a lot in-depth for the reason that Hunter Thompson’s seminal work–one that absolutely describes the seductive entice legal camaraderie has for males who may rather be powerless outsiders. here's all of the nihilism, hate, and intimidation, but in addition the freedom–and, certain, brotherhood–of the single actually American type of equipped crime.
Presumed accountable exposes stunning, never-before printed, unique info from the trial of the century and the decision that stunned the nation.
When Caylee Anthony used to be pronounced lacking in Orlando, Florida, in July 2008, the general public spent the subsequent 3 years following the research and the eventual trial of her mom, Casey Anthony. On July five, 2011, the case that captured headlines around the globe exploded while, opposed to all odds, safeguard lawyer Jose Baez added one of many largest felony upsets in American heritage: a not-guilty verdict.
In this tell-all, Baez stocks secrets and techniques the security knew yet has now not disclosed to a person before and admittedly finds his reports in the course of the whole casediscovering the proof, assembly Casey Anthony for the 1st time, being with George and Cindy Anthony every day, prime protection process conferences, and spending weeks within the judge’s chambers.
Presumed accountable indicates how Baez, a suffering, high-school dropout, grew to become one of many nation’s such a lot high-profile safeguard lawyers via his tireless efforts to hunt justice for one of many country’s such a lot vilified homicide suspects.