The Engine Of Change

The locally iconic and beloved 72-foot-tall pagoda is one of those quirky, incongruous landmarks whose very weirdness certifies its locale as authentically American. A hundred years ago an industrialist thought his quarry was rather ugly so, hey, he erected a pagoda. The five stacked terra-cotta slanted roofs are symbolically stylized on all the city's printed propaganda. At first you think the images are Christmas trees, except they are pagoda-red. At night, the roofs are edged in red lights so the pagoda looks like signal-strength bands on a cellphone. It's Japanese art repurposed as American kitsch.

So here we are in the shade of the pagoda (way up the hill where they used to test Duryea autos, which were made here for a time), with graffiti in English and Spanish on the parapet, and Reading spread below.

The few tall buildings of the county seat are at the center of the tableau. Huddled beside them are the streets of handsome limestone and granite edifices, four stories with elaborate cornices, built generations ago for bankers, lawyers, insurance men, now with nail salons and orthopedic shoe places on the ground floors.

From there fan out the blocks and blocks of rowhouses, once good homes for German American factory workers, now affordable real estate for the Spanish-speaking exodus from gentrifying Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.

To the west snakes the Schuylkill River, beckoning with its promise of a waterfront future.

On the outskirts of town are the big industrial carcasses, fabulous brick Gibraltars with faded white painted letters giving the names of things, a catalogue of the order of the industrial universe, like something from the Bible, bespeaking a time when this country hammered, welded and created form out of the void: "Reading Foundry and Supply Co.," "Reading Company," and so on.

Updike set his "Rabbit" novels hereabouts.

From "Rabbit Is Rich" in 1981: "Everywhere in this city . . . structures speak of expended energy. . . . All this had been cast up in the last century by what now seem like giants."

Those giants are gone, but perhaps new ones walk among the 83,463 people living in the valley below the pagoda.

'Entra, Entra'

Principal Wynton Butler shoulders his way with amiable authority through the teeming halls of Reading High School between classes.

"Get rid of the headphones," he says to students right and left. And, trying some Spanish, he motions like an usher to a classroom: "Entra, entra."

In many ways the future of Reading is here, in Pennsylvania's largest high school, which looks enough like a castle to be called "The Castle." About two-thirds of the 4,300 students are Latino. The dropout rate is 67 percent. Counting the elementary and middle schools, about three-quarters of the students in Reading are Latino. Yet none of the nine school board members is Latino.