The remodeling and retrofitting of the former CNA building at 401 Penn Street in downtown Reading has started. Alvernia University finalized the purchase of the building on June 30, 2020. Below: CNA building at 401 Penn Street in downtown Reading. Click images to [...]
The Madison Building at 400 Washington Street was sold for $2,500,000. Developer David Hasenfeld, owner of Madison 2020 LLC, New Castle, Delaware, has an adaptive reuse plan to create 85 high-end apartment units with both one and two-bedroom floor plans. [...]
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 [...]
Pappy's Pizza was a restaurant chain based out of Newark, Delaware...the territory ran from Ohio to Delaware and Allentown to Maryland. The chain was owned by a man and his two sons; one of the son's names was Mark Balick. Pappy's Pizza in [...]
In 1914, the youth group of First Baptist Church, Reading, began the annual Easter Dawn Service on top of Mount Penn, Reading. Below: Easter Dawn Service at the Reading Pagoda, 1914. The first service was held at the Pagoda, drawing several hundred people [...]
Coronavirus kept Santa from making his traditional appearance in the Reading Holiday Parade this year, but they made up for on Friday by touring the city in a fire truck. Santa Claus visited neighborhoods on Friday, December 18, 2020, in a caravan by [...]
The Beneficial Society Victor Emmanuel II was founded in 1915 by twenty-one men of Italian heritage who joined together for the purpose of aiding members in need due to sickness or death, and to participate in the moral and social improvement of the [...]
In the early 1900s, when hosiery mogul Jacob Nolde acquired the land on which Nolde Forest Environmental Education Center now stands, there was only one white pine tree growing among the grassy meadow. He hired an Austrian forester to create an entire forest [...]
The Goshenhoppen registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths are the sacramental records of the Catholic mission at Goshenhoppen, now Bally, in Washington Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1741, the year the mission was founded, and extending, with some gaps, to 1819, these [...]
As a number of immigrants from Eastern Europe continued to migrate to the shores of the United States in the early pan of the twentieth century, a group of people of Polish descent sought to establish a second Polish parish in Reading on [...]
