Penn Werner Hotel

The Penn Werner Hotel sits at 5 East Penn Avenue in the center of Wernersville, a borough about ten miles west of Reading. The name is a holdover: today the Penn Werner runs as a neighborhood bar, and its own Facebook page lists it simply as a bar. There is no kitchen, so come for a drink and a game rather than for dinner.

The bar

This is a local room in the plainest sense of the phrase. There are pool tables, Pennsylvania skill games are ready to play, and indoor smoking is still permitted, which has become rare across the county. The crowd is a regular crowd, the kind where people know each other's names and a newcomer gets folded in without much ceremony.

The Penn Werner is one of a handful of Berks County bars that still combine all three of those things. It appears alongside Victor's Cafe in West Lawn, Jack's Pub and the Van Reed Inn in Reading in our guide to Berks County bars with skill games and indoor smoking.

The rooms

The upstairs rooms are rented by the month rather than by the night, so the Penn Werner is not a stop for travelers looking for a place to sleep. What the building offers instead is long-term housing at a modest price in the middle of the borough, within walking distance of Penn Avenue.

The building and the town

Wernersville was a noted resort community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. City dwellers, particularly from Philadelphia and New York, rode the Reading Railroad out to the borough to rest and take the cool mountain air of South Mountain, and a number of large resort hotels went up to house them, among them Galen Hall, Bynden Wood, Grand View and the Highland Hotel.

The Penn Werner belongs to that stretch of the town's history. It has stood on Penn Avenue since the railroad years, under an earlier name before the one it carries now, and it is the sort of Pennsylvania hotel where lodging, drink and a public room sat under one roof regardless of how much lodging was actually going on. It was still being described as the historic Penn-Werner Hotel when the property changed hands in 2003.

Visiting

The Penn Werner sits on Penn Avenue, the main road through Wernersville, with easy access from Route 422 and street parking along the avenue. It draws from Wernersville and the surrounding west-end communities, including Robesonia, Sinking Spring and West Lawn.