Wedding DJ at The Abraham Lincoln in Reading, PA

The Space

The Abraham Lincoln opened on May 23, 1930, just seven months after the Wall Street crash that signaled the Great Depression, an ambitious $2 million building from New York architect William Lee Stoddart that became one of Reading’s original grand hotels. At 16 stories and 300 rooms when it opened, it stood among the tallest buildings in the city, and the tower remains Berks County’s tallest privately owned building today.

The building carries its Art Deco character through a grand lobby with palladium windows, ornate columns, and terrazzo floors, the kind of detail a 1930 hotel built on that scale could afford. Named for Abraham Lincoln in recognition of the president’s grandfather, Captain Abraham Lincoln, who was born in Berks County, the hotel closed to overnight guests in 2016 but its lower levels continue operating as Abraham Lincoln Events, restored to their original grandeur.

Capacity & Layout

The Presidential Ballroom holds up to 300 guests, while the George Baer Chapel seats up to 450 for a ceremony and includes a separate 150-seat reception hall on its first floor, giving a couple two distinct scales of space depending on guest count and whether the ceremony and reception happen in the same room or different ones. Intimate salons seating around 40 guests handle smaller gatherings within the same building.

The ballroom itself carries six gilded chandeliers over its dance floor and stage, with an adjoining bar room, so cocktail service and dancing have separate but connected footprints. The Roosevelt Room is set aside for cocktail hour, letting a couple stage the reception in sequence, cocktails in one room, dinner and dancing in the ballroom, without guests standing around a room mid-transition while it is reset.

Amenities

An attached parking garage with wheelchair accessible spaces solves parking for a downtown venue without guests needing to find street spots in Reading. The building overall is wheelchair accessible with an ADA-compliant main entrance, worth knowing for guests who need it in a building with this much history and this many original architectural features still intact.

The upper floors, converted to Lincoln Tower Apartments with 97 luxury units, operate separately from the event spaces below, so residential traffic in the tower does not overlap with a wedding happening in the ballroom or chapel. The building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places, dated December 21, 2017, reflects a restoration that returned the lobby and event floors to their 1930 appearance rather than modernizing over the original details.

Location & Getting There

The Abraham Lincoln sits in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania, a city location that puts guests within walking distance of other downtown hotels and restaurants for a wedding weekend rather than an isolated rural drive. The building’s own history, John Philip Sousa died in a room here in 1932, Eleanor Roosevelt once spoke from the lobby balcony, gives the venue a documented past that shows up in the preserved architecture rather than in a plaque alone.

Guests parking in the attached garage walk directly into the building rather than crossing an open lot, useful in Reading’s weather at either end of the year. Inside, the ballroom’s high ceilings and hard terrazzo floors, combined with its enclosed, separate footprint from the Chapel and salons, mean a DJ’s sound stays contained to that room, letting one wedding’s reception music run at full volume without carrying into a smaller ceremony or gathering happening elsewhere in the building at the same time.