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Reading, Pennsylvania

1743 establishments in PennsylvaniaCities in Berks County, PennsylvaniaCities in PennsylvaniaCounty seats in PennsylvaniaPages with non-numeric formatnum arguments
Populated places established in 1743Populated places on the Schuylkill RiverReading, PennsylvaniaUse mdy dates from April 2022
Reading, Pennsylvani skyline
Reading, Pennsylvani skyline

Reading ( RED-ing; Pennsylvania German: Reddin) is a city in and the county seat of Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States. The city had a population of 95,112 at the 2020 census and is the fourth-largest city in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allentown. Reading is located in the southeastern part of the state and is the principal city of the Greater Reading Area, which had 420,152 residents in 2020. Reading gives its name to the now-defunct Reading Company, also known as the Reading Railroad, and since acquired by Conrail, that played a vital role in transporting anthracite coal from the Pennsylvania's Coal Region to major East Coast metropolitan markets through the Port of Philadelphia for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Reading Railroad is one of the four railroad properties in the classic U.S. version of the Monopoly board game. Reading was one of the first localities where outlet shopping became a tourist industry. It has been known as "The Pretzel City" because numerous local pretzel bakeries are based in the city and its suburbs; currently, Bachman, Dieffenbach, Tom Sturgis, and Unique Pretzel bakeries call the Reading area home. In recent years, the Reading area has become a destination for cyclists with more than 125 miles of trails in five major preserves; the region is an International Mountain Bicycling Association ride center.According to 2010 U.S. census data, Reading had the highest share of citizens living in poverty in the nation among cities with populations exceeding 65,000. Reading's poverty rate fell over the next decade. Reading's poverty rate in the five-year American Community Survey, published in 2018, showed that 35.4% of the city's residents were below the poverty line, or less "than the infamous 41.3% from 2011, when Reading was declared the poorest small city in the nation."Reading is located 38.8 miles (62.4 km) southwest of Allentown and 62.9 miles (101.2 km) northwest of Philadelphia.

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Reading, Pennsylvania
Buttonwood Street, Reading

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Wikipedia: Reading, PennsylvaniaContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 40.341666666667 ° E -75.926388888889 °
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Buttonwood Street 599
19601 Reading
Pennsylvania, United States
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Reading, Pennsylvani skyline
Reading, Pennsylvani skyline
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Hotel Abraham Lincoln
Hotel Abraham Lincoln

The Hotel Abraham Lincoln is a historic building and former hotel in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania. Opened on May 23, 1930, the Lincoln was one of Reading's original nine grand hotels. The hotel was the last of the grand hotels to cease operations, doing so on November 1, 2016.The plans for the hotel were devised by the Reading Hotel Corporation in September 1928. William A. Sharp, vice president of the organization, was placed in charge of building the new hotel. New York architect William Lee Stoddart was hired to design the building, and the Honkin-Conkey Construction Company of Cleveland won the contract to build the hotel. Approximately $2 million was spent on the hotel prior to opening, with roughly half the cost going towards the construction of the building.A public contest was held to determine the name of the building, and the name of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president, was selected. Part of the reasoning behind naming the building after the former president was due to the Lincoln family's connections to the Reading area, with Lincoln's grandfather, Captain Abraham Lincoln, having been born in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania pioneer Conrad Weiser was runner-up for the hotel's name.The Abraham Lincoln hotel was opened to the public with a weekend of activities that began on Friday, May 23, 1930. According to the Reading Times, the opening events were notably devoid of speeches, instead being opened "with fox trots and clapping of hands and murmurs of delight" that were characteristic of ceremonies from the Roaring Twenties, despite the hotel opening seven months after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. Upon opening, the hotel contained 300 rooms across 16 stories, making it one of the tallest buildings in the city. Guests could stay at the hotel for as low as $2.50 a night.The hotel is known for being the place where famous American composer and conductor John Philip Sousa died after suffering from heart failure in his hotel room on March 6, 1932. He had conducted a rehearsal of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" the previous day with the Reading's Ringgold Band as its guest conductor. The hotel was also the site of a visit from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who spoke from a balcony in the Lincoln's lobby. The Lincoln hotel is also the site that The Fabulous Moolah wrote in her autobiography that Andre the Giant drank 127 beers in a Reading, Pennsylvania, hotel bar and later passed out in the lobby. The staff could not move him and had to leave him there until he awoke. After facing financial difficulties in the 1980s, the hotel was closed for nearly a decade. When the building went under new ownership, it was renovated to "recapture the look the Lincoln had when it first opened" and was reopened in 1997. Around this time, several floors of the building were converted into apartments, with only 104 hotel rooms remaining. The hotel operated under the Wyndham Hotel Group until 2013.The Hotel Abraham Lincoln was briefly the city of Reading's only major hotel until the opening of the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Reading nearby. Within a year of the new DoubleTree opening, the Hotel Abraham Lincoln ceased operations on November 1, 2016, citing competition from the DoubleTree. The remaining 104 rooms were converted into around 50 apartments.The building was renovated in 2018 and is now used to house the Lincoln Tower Apartments, containing 97 luxury one and two bedroom apartments. Abe's Restaurant, along with a catering and wedding venue, remained on the lower levels.The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 21, 2017.

Berks County Trust Company building
Berks County Trust Company building

The Berks County Trust Company is a historic building in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania. Originally constructed in 1909, the six-story building was home to a bank known as the Berks County Trust Company and was the second largest bank branch in Berks County. The building still contains the original 1909 bank vault from the York Safe and Lock Company used by the building's eponymous bank. The building had additions built onto it in 1923, 1964 and 1984.The building was later used to house the Meridian Bancorp Inc., which controlled 36 percent of the Berks County banking market and $11.8 billion in assets across the region at the start of the 1990s. However, leading into the turn of the century, the local economy of Reading began to decline and Meridian Bancorp began adding millions of dollars into its bad-debt reserves, in addition to selling its credit card, indirect auto-loan and title-insurance businesses. The building was vacated in the early 2010s, likely due to a greater amount of financial difficulties stemming from the Great Recession which greatly impacted the already economically declining city.The building was purchased in 2018 by the Shuman Development Group with approval from the Reading City Council. The organization began a major renovation and restoration project that was overseen by the National Park Service. In 2021, the restoration project received a $250,000 tax credit allocation and $11,000,000 in estimated construction expenditures from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development and the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission. The restoration project seeks to convert the building into an office building with a food court in the main banking hall.The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 27, 2019.