Reading City

Berks County, Pennsylvania

Reading City Hall is located at 815 Washington Street, Reading PA 19601. Phone: 610-655-6000.

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Photo: The skyline of Reading, Pennsylvania taken from the Pagoda. Photo by wikipedia username:BigCheddah, 2023, creative commons, [cc-4.0], accessed July, 2025.

Neighborhoods

Officially established in 1748 by the sons of William Penn and made the county seat in 1750, Reading [†] was named in honor of their father's birthplace, Reading, England. The county was given the name of Berks for its English equivalent, Berkshire. Laid out on a grid that extended from the Schuylkill River on the west to Mount Penn on the east, the town was modeled after William Penn's plan for Philadelphia and included a large square in the center of Reading that was intended to accommodate civic gatherings and events.

Penn Squaare Marketplace (1766-1881)

In 1766, a charter was granted to hold semi-weekly markets in the downtown. As a result, a market house was erected in East Penn Square. It was an open air building about 120 feet long, 13 to 20 feet wide. Consisting of a double row of square brick pillars, it was covered by a double-pitched shingle roof and contained 32 stalls. A similar building was erected in West Penn Square in 1799, which contained 38 stalls. In 1846 the market buildings were rebuilt as larger structures with iron columns and paved extensions at either end to accommodate more commercial activity.

As the City continued to grow, it was determined that more market houses were needed. In 1871, the Penn Square market houses were sold and removed, and several new private indoor market houses were constructed in other parts of the City. The largest, known as the Farmers' Market House, was located at 9th and Penn. It encompassed four buildings and accommodated as many as 414 stalls. By 1895, Reading had eight private market houses.

As time passed, the crossroads of the City became a hub of government, commerce, and transportation. In addition to the county courthouse (circa 1793), banks, stores, and hotels were erected around the square. The first streetcars were introduced in 1873, when an Act was passed incorporating the "Penn Street Passenger Railway Company," which constructed and operated a Penn Street line from Front Street to 19th Street. Initially the cars were drawn by horses. In 1893, electricity was substituted for horsepower. Throughout the early 20th century, street car lines were extended in all directions, further promoting the growth and development of the City's first suburbs.

Penn Square continued to serve as the commercial center of the City of Reading and its surrounding communities well into the mid-20th century. Large department stores began to appear on Penn Street in the 1870s. Among others, these included Pomeroy's, Lord&Gage, C.K. Whitner, and Woolworth's. Historic photos attest to the hustle and bustle that characterized the downtown.

After the addition of automobiles and buses to the mix in the early 1900s, Penn Street became highly congested. In 1934 a traffic circle was installed in the center of Penn Square to control traffic. Outlined at first with painted lines and later with poles and chains, the circle was designed to slow converging traffic and permit safer left turns. However, maintaining it proved a daunting job as motorists routinely crossed right through these impermanent barriers. The poles and chains were removed and replaced several times over the next two decades until 1954, when concrete pillars were installed to prevent motorists from driving through the circle. These remained in place until 1973 when construction began on the Penn Square Pedestrian Mall.

City Decline and Urban Renewal (1950-1975)

Following WWII, cities throughout the country began to lose population as many of those who could afford to do so moved to the suburbs. Business and industry also migrated out of the city to places where it was cheaper and easier to operate, and which were more accessible to the automobile. Inner-city crime began to spike. Those who could not afford to move out of the city burdened the government welfare and social programs that were put in place to provide assistance. As a result the once prosperous downtowns, including Reading's, fell into a state of disrepair.

Other national trends were also working against the city's commercial core. Title One of the Housing Act of 1949 kick- started the "urban renewal" program that would reshape American cities. The Act provided federal funding to cities to cover the cost of acquiring areas of cities perceived to be "slums." Those sites were then given to private developers to construct new housing. City governments also used these federal funds to raze older buildings and entire city blocks to construct public housing, highways, parking garages, and government buildings. Within Reading, large areas of dense development in the downtown area were cleared and replaced with new structures or surface parking. An aerial photo from 1971 shows those sections of the City that were razed at that time as well as those undergoing various stages of redevelopment. As documented in the City's Comprehensive Plan (2000), these urban renewal projects included:

• Walnut Street Project in the 1950s, which eliminated dense residential development in the block bounded by Walnut, Poplar, Washington, and Reed Streets, and let to the development of the expansion of the Central YMCA, the Walnut Street Pavilion of St. Joseph Hospital, and a major off-street parking garage.
• Court and Cherry Street Projects in the 1960's, which involved the widening of Court and Cherry Streets to provide service access to the rear of Penn Street properties. This project also resulted in the development of Washington Towers, Plaza Madrid, the WEEU Building, the Chiarelli Plaza Parking Garage, the Fourth and Cherry Streets Garage, off-street parking in the 600 block of Cherry Street, the South Penn Garage, Franklin Plaza, and the Rhodes and Eisenhower residential high-rises.
• The Riverfront Urban Renewal Project, which started in 1968, led to redevelopment of the area surrounding Second Street, the Penn Street Bridge, and the Schuylkill River where there was a mix of industry, railroad, and high- density residential uses in deteriorated condition. The redevelopment effort was further "assisted" in June 1972 by Hurricane Agnes, which brought the most serious flooding the City had ever experienced. The low-lying areas along Riverfront Drive were destroyed, clearing the way for the Reading Area Community College campus and the industrial development that now occupy these lands.

Penn Square Pedestrian Mall (1975-1990)

The Penn Square Pedestrian Mall was originally a component of yet another, much larger urban renewal plan. Sasaki Associates' Downtown East Urban Renewal Plan of 1971 proposed an enclosed shopping mall in downtown Reading to compete with shopping malls being built in the suburbs. Penn Mall, which was to span the 600 to 800 blocks of Penn Street, was to encompass a monolithic, cross-shaped nine-story building straddling Seventh and Penn Streets that included both a parking garage and a train station. A large pedestrian space in Penn Square was planned as a landscaped entrance to the enclosed downtown mall. After several delays, the Penn Mall project stalled for good due in part to high interest rates and a slumping economy. When it became apparent that the economics of the downtown shopping mall could not work the project developer withdrew the proposal.

Around the same time, state redevelopment funds became available and the Penn Square Pedestrian Mall was built independent of its larger attraction. Most of the merchants on the square were in favor of the proposal at the time as it was seen as a way to create a visible social center for the downtown and curb the number of young people cruising up and down Penn Street in their cars.

Despite a proposal put forth by the Chamber of Commerce, which was designed by Elmer H. Adams&Associates and included a simple landscaped boulevard with two lanes of traffic in each direction, the pedestrian mall was eventually constructed in a modern design featuring fountains, angular steps, planting islands, and geometric paving patterns within the 400 block of Penn Street. The 500 block of Penn Street was dedicated to surface parking. A narrow, one-way street along the north edge of the pedestrian mall remained open to traffic, but shifting traffic to the north side made it difficult for motorists to see what stores were located on the south side. It also took away on-street parking from the front of these retail establishments and created large areas devoid of customers that were frequented by "vagrants."

At that time, Reading was following a national trend as several cities throughout the country were closing their Main Streets to automobile traffic in order to create shady pedestrian areas—an ambitious and hopeful effort to attract people back to city centers who had fled to the suburbs following WWII. While this trend was met with mixed results in other cities, Reading considered its pedestrian mall to be a failure.

BARTA Plan (1991-Present)

Realizing that the Penn Square Pedestrian Mall was not helping attract business back to the downtown core, the City created the Penn Square Redesign Evaluation Committee in 1990 to explore the best options for re-opening the 500 block of Penn Square.

The committee worked with Wallace Roberts Todd, Landscape Architects for a year to develop the most appropriate design for Penn Square. When the City was unable to allocate funds for the approved concept, a new design for the Square, to include a Downtown Transportation Center, was proposed by BARTA.

The City endorsed the new proposal and construction was completed in 1993. Funding for the plan, officially known as the Penn Square Transportation and Development Project, was primarily provided by federal transportation dollars. The design included eight pull-in parking areas for bus loading/unloading, 48 diagonal automobile parking spaces, a variable width median, geometric sidewalk paving patterns, paved crosswalks, street trees, and raised planters.

By the time the street was reopened, however, the big department stores and many of the smaller retail establishments had already left. Bus traffic resulted in drawing little new investment to the downtown core. Today most of the bus parking spaces and oversized shelters are underutilized as the focus of bus transit has shifted to the BARTA Transportation Center, which was built in 2002.

† Adapted from: City of Reading Pennsylvania, City of Reading Downtown 2020 Master Plan, 2011, readingpa.gov, accessed July, 2025.

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