READING, Pa. – From the top of the city, the Pagoda looks ready.\u2028But behind the scenes, the work is still not finished.<\/p>\n
City officials say construction should wrap up by Wednesday, when they will start removing the construction fences.<\/p>\n
“There are a few things remaining to be done. There’s a little bit of crack sealing and graffiti coating that needs to be done. And then, we’re ready to turn it back over to the Reading Pagoda Foundation to open it up for public access,” said David Anspach, Capital Projects Manager for the City of Reading.<\/p>\n
There were also concerns about the balconies, but engineers have now cleared them as safe.<\/p>\n
“Our biggest delay actually occurred over the winter when we had that really severe cold winter,” Anspach explained.<\/p>\n
The delay means the planned reopening this week is off.<\/p>\n
“We know the public is very much interested in going inside the Pagoda. If we can’t go inside, we’re going to be doing events on the outside, including coming up on April the 26th,” said Marcia Goodman-Hinnershitz, Vice President of the Foundation for the Reading Pagoda.<\/p>\n
That celebration on Sunday will be at 1 p.m. with a flag raising and community event outside the building. As for going inside\u2026<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing in the Pagoda at this point so that we have to do a lot to be able to refurnish it, to be able to put in displays, to do the things that need to be done to welcome the public back,” Goodman-Hinnershitz said.<\/p>\n
So after the city finishes Wednesday, the final decision to open will be up to the foundation.<\/p>\n
“With the blank space, we’re going to be looking at taking it back to what we believe it originally was intended to be. And a lot of history is going to be recognized. It is on the National Historic Registry,” added Goodman-Hinnershitz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – From the top of the city, the Pagoda looks ready.\u2028But behind the scenes, the work…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[12858,76860,2793,10030,28,736,128,130,129,76859,40034],"class_list":["post-171275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-david-anspach","tag-foundation-for-the-reading-pagoda","tag-marcia-goodman-hinnershitz","tag-pagoda","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-pagoda","tag-reading-pagoda-foundation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}