When I was a kid growing up in Allentown, we would visit my cousins in Reading. Allentown and Reading seemed very similar, row houses and corner stores. My aunt owned a corner soda fountain. Those Sunday trips were special, because I could sit at the soda counter, eat ice cream and read comic books, to my content. Outside the store, you could look up and see the Pagoda, seemed sorta magical. This weekend I returned to visit the Pagoda and the neighborhood. While the Pagoda pretty much hasn't changed, downtown Reading is devastated. Block after block is run down, with no revitalization in sight.
While this blog misses the Allentown center city of years ago, Reading doesn't even resemble its former self. If you visit, I suggest viewing it only from the pagoda. From that height the city looks as it always did, up close it gets very rough.
molovinsky on allentown is produced every weekday, year-round.
Berks County functionally isolated Reading from the rest of the world when they did not fight for Route 222 improvements between Reading and Allentown as the same time as the expressway to Lancaster was built. The sale of the Bieber bus system to people too focused on profit and inattentive to maintenance and tax payments were another nail. The boroughs and townships surrounding Reading have a drawbridge mentality. Did you know that Wyomissing’s parks are posted as for borough residents and guests only?
ReplyDeleteReading is desperately poor and locked into a poverty cycle I don’t see as fixable unless every municipality in the county consolidated into one entity (as in Philadelphia City/County). And that will never happen.
Thank God for the Boscov family’s philanthropic work over the decades. Al and family have kept the city on life support.
We may bitch and complain about traffic in the Valley. At least there are many reasons to come here - and leave from here to NYC.