Cathedral Heights: The Grand Plan That Reshaped North Reading—Just Not as Intended

In late 1925, a quiet real-estate transaction set the stage for one of Reading’s most ambitious—yet ultimately transformed—urban visions. Builder Andrew J. Levengood purchased the century-old Shepp farm—roughly 100 acres straddling the City of Reading and Muhlenberg Township—for $200,000. Soon it emerged that Levengood was acting for the trustees of the Reading Consistory, Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite, Valley of Reading. Their aim: to anchor a sweeping, park-ringed residential enclave with a monumental Scottish Rite Cathedral and related improvements. They called the place Cathedral Heights.

Land with Long Memory

The tract traced to an 18th-century grant to John Potts and Benjamin Lightfoot and a 1797 deed to Conrad Shep/Shepp. For well over a century, the land remained in the Shepp family, who erected a dam on the Schuylkill Canal that lent the area the local name “Shepp’s Dam.” By 1925, Reading’s growth made the riverfront pastures irresistible to planners and developers.

A Cathedral in the Park

On April 15, 1926, the Masons recorded title to the property for their 3,500-member Consistory and announced a bold scheme: a $500,000 cathedral on a 15-acre hilltop site east of Pottsville Pike (Centre Avenue), encircled by landscaped parkland, mirror pools along the Bernhart’s Reservoir overflow, picturesque bridges and dams, and a surrounding “high-grade, rigidly restricted” suburban district. Parking for 1,000 automobiles addressed the modern dilemma that made downtown sites impractical. The balance of the acreage—32 acres east of the pike and 68 west to the Schuylkill—would be subdivided for homes.

John Nolen Draws the Plan

By early 1927, nationally known planner John Nolen—fresh from work at Berkshire Heights, Oakbrook, Wyomissing Park, the Reading Public Museum environs, and West Reading’s playground—delivered a curving, park-centric street plan. It reimagined Front Street, widened Centre Avenue from 60 to 100 feet, and introduced Plaza Road, North and South Oriental Road (a looping boulevard), and Sycamore Road, while proposing a connector to the brand-new William Penn Highway (5th Street Highway). Real-estate ads promised a beautiful community opposite a beautiful park; internal mailers urged members to “put it over BIG!”

Nolen’s 1927 Cathedral Heights plan. Sycamore Road would have been situated roughly in what is now the outfield of FirstEnergy Stadium.

Momentum Meets Headwinds

Grading began August 1, 1927; curbs, sidewalks, and shade trees soon followed—so desirable that thieves uprooted saplings by night, prompting lodge members to mount patrols. Then the Great Depression arrived. Through the 1930s and early 1940s, the project effectively froze. A poignant tableau arrived in July 1933 when a “church on wheels” camped on the vacant grounds—sermons and quartet music drifting across streets laid for houses that never came. Membership fell, finances tightened, and the Consistory shelved its cathedral.

Below: A 1937 aerial, overlaid on a current map, highlights Cathedral Heights and the tree-lined streets of its planned residential district west of the widened Pottsville Pike. The street contours closely follow Nolen’s plan published a decade earlier.

Postwar Pivot: From Cathedral to Ballpark

War-era “Victory Gardens” briefly greened the tract. In March 1945, amid headlines of Allied advances, City Council bought 27 acres in Cathedral Heights to build a municipal amphitheater—quickly refined into a veterans’ memorial stadium proposal championed by the Old Timers Baseball Committee and dozens of civic groups. The site’s proximity to highways, trolley lines, and rail further strengthened the case. By April 1945, Council resolved to erect the stadium on the newly acquired acreage; in June, the deed transferred from the Masons to the city “in consideration” of back-tax relief as the Consistory navigated insolvency proceedings.

Building “America’s Classic Ballpark”

Plans initially envisioned 13,358 seats and parking for 1,690 cars; the finished Municipal Memorial Stadium (dedicated July 15, 1951) seated about 8,000. Happy Chandler—Major League Baseball’s commissioner, former Kentucky governor, and U.S. senator—kept his promise to deliver the keynote on opening day, then retired from baseball the same day. The first game featured the Reading Keys blanking Kutztown American Legion, 11–0. Professional ball returned in 1952 when the Cleveland Indians’ affiliate relocated from Wilkes-Barre, and over time the park evolved into today’s FirstEnergy Stadium—“America’s Classic Ballpark.”

1960s Aerial view of Reading Municipal Memorial Stadium

A Different Kind of Cathedral—Elsewhere

While Cathedral Heights shifted toward commercial and civic uses—Miracle Mart, Cassell’s, the Stadium Diner, Aetna Casualty & Surety, NCR, and, on the very knoll earmarked for the sanctuary, Fromm Electric (1974)—the Masons ultimately realized their dream in a new location. Ground broke in 1987 for a $3.2 million Scottish Rite Cathedral at 7th Avenue and Parkside Drive in West Reading; it opened in September 1988.

Traces on the Ground

Though industry, warehouses, distribution centers, and roads have erased most of the old Shepp farm, the plan still peeks through: Berks Street—once imagined as the grand ceremonial approach—now leads to Fromm Electric’s parking lot; Cathedral Street ties Front Street to Centre Avenue; grassy malls linger at Cathedral and Centre; and a Met-Ed substation occupies 31 acres the utility bought from the Consistory in 1926. Stand in the outfield at FirstEnergy Stadium and you’re roughly where Sycamore Road would have curved beneath the cathedral’s imagined silhouette.

What Might Have Been?

Had the cathedral and its curving, park-bordered neighborhood been built in the late 1920s, Reading’s ballpark—and a good portion of North Reading’s mid-century commercial fabric—would likely sit somewhere else. Instead, the city traded one monumental civic centerpiece for another: a stadium that knit together generations of sport, spectacle, and community life—and, decades later, a cathedral that rose not in Cathedral Heights but still within the region’s civic landscape. In the end, the name lingered even as the plan changed, a reminder that the ways we imagine a city can leave marks long after the drawings fade.