When neighbors on Depot Street started asking what would happen to the memorial plaque bolted to Clarks Summit's clock tower, the answer they got wasn't a groundbreaking or a design contest. It was closer to recognition. The plaque honoring Laura Lee DeFazio Morabito, the Clarks Summit native killed on September 11, 2001, needed a new home because the tower itself was coming down after 40 years on a private lot at State and Depot Streets. The spot residents settled on already had a version of that clock painted onto its fence, done a decade earlier by kids who never knew they were preparing a landing site.
That's the part of this story that gets lost when it's told as a single headline about a landmark disappearing. The clock came down. The plaque didn't wander looking for a home. It went to a pocket park that had been quietly rehearsing this exact moment since 2015.
What Actually Came Down on Depot Street
The clock had stood at the convergence of State and Depot Streets since 1986, when the Rotary Club of the Abingtons built it and donated it to the borough. For most of that run it kept time without controversy. The complication was always the ground under it: the tower sat on private property, owned since 1989 by Jack Decker, while the borough's public works crew mowed the grass and shoveled the sidewalk out of habit rather than obligation.
That arrangement held until it didn't. Borough manager Jennifer Basalyga told WNEP in February 2026 that the clock hadn't worked properly in years and that repairs would cost the borough thousands it couldn't spend on a structure it didn't own. Decker, for his part, pointed to a separate falling-out over rising sewer rates and a breakdown in communication with the borough as what actually forced the issue. Neither side described it as a fight over the clock itself. It became one anyway, because fixing the hands meant getting onto land the borough had no legal right to touch.
By October 2025, council members were already telling contractors to price out removal, not repair, with quotes running around $5,600 to relocate a power box and another $2,000 to take out the clock and concrete. The tower came down in mid-August 2026, removed by Ron Parasole and his crew. The plan now is storage for about two years while the face gets replaced and the structure gets refurbished, with an eventual return to the corner of Center and Bedford Streets, where a new apartment complex and community center are planned.
Two Objects, One Removal, Two Different Addresses
The clock and the plaque that hung on it are no longer traveling together, and that split is the part worth tracking if you live nearby.
| Status as of September 2026 | Where it's headed | |
|---|---|---|
| Clock tower | In storage with contractor Ron Parasole for refurbishment | Center and Bedford Streets, alongside a planned apartment complex and community center |
| 9/11 memorial plaque | Already installed at the Finish Shop Pocket Park on Depot Street | Staying at the pocket park permanently |
That wasn't the only option on the table. Council had floated Veterans Park as a possible landing spot for the memorial back in the fall of 2025, and staff had even identified a contact in the DiFazio family to talk through a rededication timed to 2026's 25th anniversary of the attacks. The pocket park won out instead, pushed forward by resident Mike Parry, who brought the proposal to council in April and got the DeFazio family's support along with offers of help from nearby businesses. Council hadn't taken a formal vote by the time WNEP covered the story that spring, but the plaque is there now, and Parry's pitch included more than just the relocation: paving stones sponsors could dedicate, a chain-link fence swapped for white vinyl, added landscaping around the memorial itself.
The Mural That Was Already There
Here's what makes the pocket park a stranger choice than it first appears, in the best way. In the summer of 2015, campers from the Abington Art Studio spent a week painting murals for the park's fence. Studio owner Diana Lombardi had them start by visiting the Clarks Summit Borough Building, where staff walked them through old photographs of the town before they picked up a brush. What the campers chose to paint onto that fence was the clock tower, a locomotive at the old train station, the town's original fire station, the Tennant Hotel, and a trolley car. Borough history, rendered by kids ages 9 and up, more than a decade before the real clock came down a block away.
That mural has been facing the park's interior since 2015. The actual memorial plaque now sits in the same space, in front of a painted version of the very structure it used to hang on. Nobody planned that overlap when the mural went up. It's just where the two histories landed.
How the Park Got Its Name and Its First Party
The Finish Shop Pocket Park exists because a Clarks Summit resident named Sarah Dawgert wrote a letter to borough council in January 2013 proposing a small green space downtown, somewhere people could sit with coffee or meet friends without needing a full park. The land came from the Maria Family as a donation, and the project got built out with help from a Lackawanna County Re-invest Program grant, private donations, and support from then-mayor Patty Lawler and the borough council.
The first group to actually reserve the space, according to borough manager Virginia Kehoe at the time, was Serenity Martial Arts, whose instructor John Smith held an end-of-summer superhero-themed party there for his young students in August 2015, the same summer the murals went up. Water balloons, bobbing for apples, a squirt gun battle among four-to-seven-year-olds. Small stuff, but it marks the park's first use as exactly what Dawgert had described in her original letter: a place for the borough to actually gather, not just walk past.
Where the Clock Itself Is Actually Headed
The tower's own path is longer and less finished than the plaque's. Parasole's plan calls for roughly two years in storage while the face gets replaced and the frame gets refurbished, with the eventual destination being the corner of Center and Bedford Streets, the site of a planned apartment complex paired with a community center. That timeline puts a returned, restored clock somewhere around 2028, presumably as a fixture of whatever gets built there rather than a freestanding tower on a lot the borough doesn't control.
It's a different kind of ending than the plaque got. The memorial found a permanent, already-prepared home within months of the controversy going public. The clock is on a slower track tied to a development that hasn't broken ground yet, in a location that didn't exist as an option when this all started as a dispute over sewer rates and a broken pair of hands.
Why This Matters for Anyone Walking Depot Street This Fall
The easy version of this story is that Clarks Summit lost a landmark. The more accurate version is that the borough had already built redundancy into its own memory before it needed it. A park proposed in 2013, painted with borough history in 2015, was sitting ready in 2026 when a very different piece of that history needed somewhere to go. The clock will come back eventually, in a new spot serving a new building. The memorial didn't wait for that. It's already there, a block from where it used to hang, in front of a fence that painted its portrait years before anyone knew it would need one.
If you're weighing a move to Clarks Summit and want the kind of neighborhood-level context that doesn't show up on a listing sheet, from how a downtown corner actually functions to what a development at Center and Bedford might mean for the streets around it, Luxe Homes Real Estate knows this borough block by block. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.
