The Pagoda on Mount Penn: A Japanese Fantasy Above a Pennsylvania City
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
From almost anywhere in Reading you can look east and see it: a seven-story pagoda perched on the southern end of Mount Penn, its rooflines stacked in diminishing tiers, outlined at night in lights. It looks, frankly, like something that got misplaced. A Japanese-style tower on a Pennsylvania ridge, overlooking a mid-Atlantic river city, six hundred and twenty feet above the streets below. The story of how it got there is almost better than the building itself.
A local businessman built the structure between nineteen seven and nineteen eight, spending fifty thousand dollars on what was intended to be the centerpiece of a luxury resort hotel. The hilltop, he believed, was the perfect site for a grand destination, a place where wealthy visitors would come for the views, the mountain air, and the novelty of an orientalist fantasy. The resort never materialized. The investors backed out, the hotel never rose, and he was left with a Japanese-inspired building on a cliff that he could not profitably use.
In a fit of pragmatism, he donated the pagoda to the city of Reading in nineteen eleven. The city accepted, and it has been a public landmark ever since, added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two.
The building contains something remarkable in its top story: a large bell, cast in the Japanese prefecture of Mie in the year seventeen thirty-nine, that once hung in a Buddhist temple. The temple was closed in eighteen eighty-one and later destroyed. The bell's sides bear inscriptions listing its forty-eight donors and, according to tradition, a prophecy about the end of time.
How a bell from an eighteenth-century Japanese Buddhist temple ended up in a resort pagoda above a Pennsylvania coal-railroad city is not entirely explained by the historical record. But there it hangs.
