I often heard about how grand the city had been when coal reigned, but I also learned about the thorny underside of the coal industry. My great-great-grandfather worked as a breaker boy and lost his leg in the mines when he was just 12 years old. The dark history of the coal industry and the nostalgia for the riches it produced are still fighting each other, smoldering in the few remaining mining sites.<\/p>\n
Reading, Pa., about 90 miles south of Wilkes-Barre, is another town tinged with this double-edged nostalgia. When the coal industry was booming, Reading thrived too. Train cars of coal would travel from Northeastern Pennsylvania to the Reading Railroad Station, where it was distributed around the country along with the specialty goods manufactured in Reading\u2019s many factories. But by the time I was a kid, it was already a shell of its former self. I remember how, when my family would drive to Reading to visit my father\u2019s cousins, we\u2019d often stop at clothing outlets, where racks of clothing and shelves of discounted goods stood inside the former factory buildings and manufacturing sites that once sustained the city\u2019s economy. <\/p>\n
This past weekend, my parents and I visited the Vanity Fair Outlets again. But this time we came for a piece art: an installation called \u201cThis Is Reading<\/a>.\u201d This seven-part multimedia show is a love letter to the city of Reading and to the steel factory workers who inspired Lynn Nottage\u2019s <\/a>Sweat. The Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which bowed on Broadway this spring, follows a group of Reading steel factory workers during the early-2000s deindustrialization of the Rust Belt city.<\/p>\n This Is Reading\u00a0is up at the Franklin Street railroad station (July 14-16, 21-23, and 28-30), a stop on the defunct Reading Railroad. While Reading Railroad is immortalized on the Monopoly board, the Franklin Street station can\u2019t be found on Google Maps\u2014not even the postal carrier could point us in the right direction.<\/p>\n When we did arrive, I was greeted by Nottage and her hearty team of volunteers. There were strings of blue and purple lights illuminating the station, which closed in 1981. \u201cWe thought if we reanimate this space and bring it back, that symbolically it can sort of point to a rebirth in this city,\u201d said Nottage.\u00a0<\/p>\n I sat with Nottage on the train platform before the show. She pointed to a palpable example of rebirth, a building adjacent to the station. It was painted with a black and white mural with doodled knobs, pulleys, factory lines, dollar signs, and pretzel twists\u2014the story of Reading told in hieroglyphics. \u201cWe painted this mural on this building, which was a SRO [single room occupancy hotel], really struggling, and considered one of the real sore spots of the community,\u201d said Nottage. \u201cThe people who live there were so excited that something was being done to their building that they poured out and helped the muralist (Katie Merz<\/a>) paint. This one guy actually spent the week and a half that it took paint out there every single day with a paintbrush. All of them have come and seen the play. Just based on the little freshening up of the building, the landlord decided that he was going to replace some of the windows and paint the lobby.\u201d Merz\u2019s drawings also served as the backdrop for the program and site map, outlining the various rooms inside the station.<\/p>\n \u201cI encountered a large swath of people who were living and thriving and making their home in Reading,\u201d Nottage continued. \u201cI wanted to do something that was very much in dialogue with them and figure out how to create a piece of art in a city that has fault lines\u2014those fault lines are economic, and they are social, and they are racial.\u201d <\/p>\n When I read Sweat, I thought of the fault lines in Wilkes-Barre. Both Reading and Wilkes-Barre fell victim to urban blight and floundered after their industry-based identities crumbled. I grew up in an area that struggled to move forward, stuck in the past.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we first came into Reading, one of the things that we always encountered was people speaking of the city in a very nostalgic way,\u201d said Nottage. \u201cAlways speaking in past tense. We wanted to begin with that. What was this city? What was it that people were holding onto? Get through that and revisit the ghosts that are not only inhabiting this station but the entire city.\u201d<\/p>\n Pre-show goodies included mini bags of local pretzels, frozen treats from a local ice cream shop, and local performers. A singer\/songwriter roused the crowd with folk tunes. Next, a group of \u00a0young Latin dancers in sparkly tulle took the stage. \u201cThe arts are alive in Reading,\u201d effused the dance instructor. Entertainment continued inside the station before the scheduled showtime. I entered into the station, which was lined with an impressive amount of scaffolding and lighting plots,\u00a0and bee-lined for \u201cThe Reading Room\u201d (a pun on the city\u2019s name, which is pronounced \u201credding\u201d), stacked with shelves of sketchbooks on loan from Brooklyn\u2019s\u00a0Sketchbook Project<\/a>. Hundreds of little notebooks were filled with drawings of historic sites by Reading-based artists. I joined a group of kids drawing in the blank notebooks and added a sketch of the train station to the page. In the station\u2019s old lunchroom, piles of old suitcases were topped with screens showcasing interviews with Reading residents about the city. <\/p>\n An announcement was made to take a seat\u2014the train was about to leave the station. About 200 people settled on the station benches. A train whistle blew, and smoke billowed out from under the seats and along the station floor as performers from Reading and the LAByrinth Theater Company<\/a>\u00a0slowly entered the space in a line. First stop: the past, with a section called \u201cReading Was.\u201d <\/p>\n Video showing the city in its heyday was projected on the station walls as the performers recited memories of growing up in Reading. Next up was a film titled \u201cBehind Closed Doors,\u201d by Tony Gerber with\u00a0Market Road Films<\/a>, which followed a girl\u2019s quincea\u00f1era, a young woman\u2019s day working at a chocolate factory, a masonic meeting, and a church service, all in Reading. The little girl seated behind me excitedly yelled, \u201cThat\u2019s my grandma\u2019s church!\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Reading_Considine-2.jpg\")
Me in front of the mural.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/This-Is-Reading_11-2.jpg\")
Jaymes Williams and Joshua Culbreath, in the \u201cReading Was\u201d movement. (Photo by Max Acra, Inc.)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/This-Is-Reading_70-2.jpg\")
Samantha Shepherd, dancer and assistant choreographer, in the Reading Soars movement of \u201cThis Is Reading.\u201d (Photo by Max Acra, Inc.)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/This-is-Reading_dance-party_4840-2.jpg\")
Christopher Roche and Jaymes Williams dance with the audience at the Dance Party finale of \u201cThis Is Reading.\u201d (Photo by Tony Gerber)<\/p>\n