Generally situated to the south of the Lebanon Valley Railroad between Schuylkill Avenue and North Second Street, the Ricktown Historic District extends south to the vicinity of Washington Street. The neighborhood is basically residential in character, although much of the residential development occurred [...]
The Prince Historic District was established on May 5, 1982. The backbone of this neighborhood is South Sixth Street (originally called Prince Street). The District extends along South Sixth Street from Cherry Street south to Canal Street and branches out for about a [...]
Although a few houses were built along Kutztown Road before 1838, it wasn’t until that date when a blacksmith by the name of Jacob Lutz secured a parcel of land and thereupon erected two stone buildings at the comer of what would become [...]
The 1960s and 1970s were marked by the effect of Federal urban renewal programs upon the City. Although it later became fashionable to criticize the effects of the wholesale demolition and, reconstruction that these programs sponsored, there is little doubt that Reading gained [...]
The Penn’s Common area of the city, or “City Park” to the unenlightened, took on a mix of characters during various phases of its development. When much of the city east of the Seventh Street railroad tracks was largely undeveloped for most of [...]
The city adopted its flag in 1898. The flag as it is today was executed by Bailey, Banks & Biddle, of Philadelphia, and was adopted by Councils as the official standard of the city. The flag consists of three vertical stripes, red, white [...]
The Rainbow District of the city had a rather inauspicious start, though it later grew to house the seats of city government and education, and many major industries. The area got its name from the Rainbow Fire Co. which was formed on March [...]
After Reading was sketched out by Thomas Penn in 1748, most of the development centered around Market Square (present day Penn Street) and west in almost a straight line to the Schuylkill River. For the next 100 years, development stayed mostly in that [...]
When Thomas Penn laid out the town in 1748, he chose the site of an old Indian ford on the Schuylkill River. The ford served an old Indian trail which had become one of the major routes north and west from Philadelphia. Penn’s [...]
In 1913, the textile magnates Ferdinand Thun (1866-1949), Henry Janssen (1866-1948), and Gustav Oberlaender (1867-1936), formed the Wyomissing Development Company and began three years of preparatory work leading to the selection of Hegemann and Peets in 1917 to plan a “Modern Garden Suburb” [...]
