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” [...]
In 1864, Frederick R. Frill purchased from William Leinbach a farm of 116 acres. In 1873, he laid this land off into lots, and most of the lots in the blocks south of Penn Avenue and east of present-day Fifth Avenue were numbered [...]
Until 1964 the most familiar structure in West Reading was the West Reading Hotel on the north side of the Penn Ave. between 5th and 6th. Below: West Reading Hotel, northeast corner of Sixth and Penn Ave. The three-story structure had [...]
John Nolen (1869–1937) was the first American to identify himself exclusively as a town and city planner. Nolen was orphaned as a child and placed in Girard College. After he graduated first in his class in 1884, he worked as a grocery clerk [...]
