Most weekends, cars pointed toward the Lackawanna River Heritage Trail drive right past the borough that holds its first developed mile. They park in Scranton or Olyphant or Archbald because those trailheads have signs. Taylor residents live above the actual starting line and often forget it is there.
That is the frame worth carrying into July and August. This is not a guide to a place you might visit. It is a routine you can build on foot or by bike from your own front door, using the same corridor that pulled roughly 450,000 visitors into Lackawanna County last year, according to VisitNEPA, which counts more than 30 miles of developed trail from Taylor to Simpson, a connection to the D&H Rail Trail that extends the network to 70 miles across four counties, and about 450,000 annual visitors.
The trailhead most of the borough drives past
The Depot Street access sits off North Main, tucked into working infrastructure rather than a park entrance. The Lackawanna River Heritage Trail begins near the confluence of the Susquehanna and Lackawanna Rivers in Pittston, and the first developed section of trail is in Taylor, 6.5 miles north of the confluence near Keyser Creek. That is the fact most maps bury. The trail's origin story is Taylor's back door.
It is also a back door with quirks. The Scranton Section runs from Depot Street in Taylor to Dean Street in Scranton for 6.1 miles across levees, unimproved trail, and the newer Scranton Riverwalk. The Depot Street trailhead is only accessible through the Norfolk Southern train yard with heavy truck traffic and active train crossings, parking is limited, and walking to the trailhead through the yard without high-visibility clothing is not recommended. One TrailLink reviewer noted the surface itself is not what the older signs suggest: the trail was described as crushed stone but is actually macadam.
Practical read: drive in early, park compactly, wear something bright, and treat the first hundred yards as a rail yard, not a park path. Everything past that opens up.
A Saturday loop built for a borough that's 5.2 square miles
Taylor covers 5.2 square miles about three miles southwest of Scranton along the Lackawanna River, with a 2020 population of 6,302. That scale is the whole point. Almost every block sits inside a fifteen-minute walk of a park, the library, a main-street kitchen, or the river. A weekend routine here does not need a car.
One version that works from May through September:
- Coffee and a hot breakfast sandwich early at Taylor Deli, 125 N Main Street, before the 3 p.m. close.
- A river-side out-and-back from Depot Street, north as far as your legs want. Turn around before the Scranton Levee if you want gravel-free tires under you.
- A cooldown loop through John Derenick Park or David Noakes Park, both listed among the borough's community spaces on the Taylor Borough website.
- Lunch or an early dinner at Lucca Restaurant, 802 S Main Street. BYOB, and their in-house tradition is the Lucca Lobster on Wednesdays and Fridays.
- Library run on the way home. The Taylor Community Library is on the borough's community page next to the parks list, and it is the shortest walk on this loop.
The loop is intentionally short. It is meant to be repeatable, not a bucket-list day.
Three doors on Main, and what they actually do
Restaurant roundups tend to blur the specifics. For a resident audience, the specifics are the point.
| Stop | Where | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Taylor Deli | 125 N Main St | Breakfast through mid-afternoon; hoagies, homemade soups, Texas Weiner, fried pierogies. Closes at 3 p.m. daily. |
| Lucca Restaurant | 802 S Main St | Full sit-down Italian, BYOB, closed Mondays. Lucca Lobster dinner runs Wednesdays and Fridays. |
| The Depot Street path | Off N Main St | Not food, but the reason the other two stops feel earned. |
Two things to notice on the map. First, North Main and South Main frame the borough end to end, which means you can build the day around either direction of the river. Second, both restaurants are old enough to have earned their reputations locally without national ratings doing the work. That is the kind of continuity a resident audience already trusts.
The parks are getting quiet attention this year
On May 20, 2026, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Financing Authority approved two Taylor Borough items in the same board meeting: a $100,000 body-worn police technology purchase and a $6,175 Taylor Borough Safe Parks Initiative. The dollar amounts are not the story. The pairing is. Body cameras and a parks safety line item, funded in the same session, is a small signal that the borough is thinking about David Noakes Park, John Derenick Park, and the Underwood Skatepark as public infrastructure worth measuring, not just mowing.
For a resident, the practical effect is modest and near-term. Expect small physical changes at borough-owned park entrances and pavilions this season. If you use the parks regularly, you will notice them before anyone with a Scranton zip code does.
The history you can see from the seat of a bike
Taylor is one of those NEPA boroughs whose name is a footnote to a bigger story. The borough was settled in 1790 by Cornelius Atherton, incorporated in 1893, and named for Moses Taylor, a financier and president of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Much of the borough is built over abandoned mine lands, reflecting its coal-era past.
That is not trivia when you are on the trail. The reason Depot Street sits where it does, the reason the corridor runs so cleanly north to Scranton, the reason the Norfolk Southern yard is still active on your left as you ride out, all of it traces back to the same rail geometry Moses Taylor and the DL&W built into the valley. The Lackawanna River Heritage Trail is essentially the anthracite era's freight spine converted to pavement. LHVA notes the corridor connects more than 30 communities across Luzerne, Lackawanna, Susquehanna, and Wayne counties. Taylor is where that thread starts.
Ride slowly enough and you can see the geology in the ground itself. The old mine footprint is why some parts of the borough have unusual grading, why certain lots sit a foot higher than the sidewalk, and why the trail feels flatter here than almost anywhere else. Rail bed logic.
What to actually put on the calendar
A short list of moves worth making this month:
- Walk Depot Street once in the morning and once at dusk. The rail-yard light is completely different in each direction, and the river reads as two different rivers.
- Do the Scranton Section as a one-way if you can arrange a pickup. Six point one miles from Taylor's Depot Street to Scranton's Dean Street is a comfortable morning ride and an ambitious walk.
- Stop at Lucca on a Wednesday for the Lucca Lobster and bring your own bottle. It's the kind of standing weekly special that residents forget is unusual.
- Check the Taylor Borough website's community page before school lets back in. Park signage and pavilion updates from the Safe Parks Initiative will start appearing there before they hit any regional coverage.
The point of the routine is not that Taylor has more to offer than the rest of NEPA. It is that Taylor has the trail's origin, its old rail geometry, and a walkable Main Street inside a five-square-mile footprint. Most residents live within ten minutes of all three. That combination is unusual, and it belongs to the people who already live here before it belongs to anyone else.
If you own a home in Taylor and are thinking about the next chapter here, or you own rental property along Main and want a partner who knows how the borough's parks, trail access, and Main Street corridor factor into value over time, Luxe Homes Real Estate is based one town over in Olyphant and works this market weekly. Schedule an Investment or Property Consultation when the timing is right.
