The Gladwyne Village Reset: What's Actually Changing This Fall, and What Isn't
Walk the corner of Righters Mill and Youngs Ford on a Saturday morning in early August, and the village looks like it always has. A line out the door at Homeroom. The shuttered windows of the old Gladwyne Market. The Union League's Guard House sign, still closed to non-members. Overhead wires still sagging across the intersection.
What is different is underneath that surface. Between January and June of this year, the plan to remake this block was announced, protested, and quietly redrawn. The version that will actually shape a Gladwyne fall is the pared-back one, not the headline-grabbing original. And most of the changes residents will feel by Halloween have very little to do with new buildings.
On Jan. 8, Andre Golsorkhi, founder and CEO of design firm Haldon House, presented plans for a revitalized town center, complete with historic architecture, green spaces, and businesses that "fit the character" of the area, and revealed the project was backed by Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania's richest man, and his wife, Janine. That first pitch, branded Gladwyne Square, was polished enough that critics claimed it was trying to be Nantucket.
Four months of Civic Association meetings later, the plan came back smaller. Presented at the May 18 meeting of the Gladwyne Civic Association, the revised concept keeps five moves and drops the rest:
Retail square footage shrank. The idea of importing a bakery, a fitness studio, and a barber shop was set aside. Haldon House originally intended to bring a slate of new businesses to the village, but Oser and Golsorkhi realized they could fulfill the community's needs by expanding the offerings at its existing businesses, rather than bringing in more retail tenants.
Read that sentence twice. It is the whole story.
The January plan put the new restaurant in the old Gladwyne Market building, with a wraparound porch and a period-shutter facelift. The May plan moves it across the intersection to 351 Righters Mill Rd., the former location of OMG Hair Salon. The Market building becomes an expanded pharmacy instead.
Why this matters for a resident: the Guard House problem gets solved from a smaller footprint. Currently, the only full-service restaurant in Gladwyne's commercial core is the Union League's members-only Guard House, which has been closed to the public. The OMG building is roughly a third the size of the old Market. A restaurant that fits into that space is by definition an intimate, neighborhood room, not a destination that pulls cars off Conshohocken State Road on a Friday night. The developers want a dining option that "only exists in Gladwyne" and do not plan to recruit a restaurant from Philadelphia.
The pharmacy move is the quieter but arguably bigger shift. Gladwyne Pharmacy has been the village's daily-errand anchor for decades. Relocating it into the Market building gives it, per the developers, a folksy wraparound porch and plenty of room for its extensive gift, children's items, home goods and, possibly, easier access to a new parking lot across the street. A pharmacy with a real porch changes the geometry of a Saturday errand. You linger. You bump into people. That is the loop the village has been missing.
The new restaurant is still a rendering. The green space is still a rendering. Homeroom is open right now, and it is where the village's daytime energy already lives.
A veteran of Philadelphia's CookNSolo restaurant group, and a Lower Merion native, Chef Henry Morgan opened his first café in the heart of Gladwyne Village, offering seasonally-driven breakfast and lunch menus, highlighting local farmers and purveyors such as Urban Roots Philly, Kneehigh Farm, Bart's Bagels, Merzbacher's of Germantown and Ox Coffee. The address is 358 Righters Mill Road, in the space that was once Green Bean Coffee, where Morgan worked over a decade ago. Hours run Monday through Saturday, 7:00 am to 3:00 pm most days, closed Sunday.
Under the revised plan, Homeroom gets its own new "barn" next door. "What we didn't want to do is what we did last time, which is design a barn that looks like it's been here forever and try to create a false history," Oser told the crowd. "We want to make it really clear and be able to celebrate which buildings are historic in Gladwyne. And make the village feel a bit more eclectic." During construction, Golsorkhi suggested that Homeroom could temporarily relocate to the future restaurant building, meaning the cafe could briefly live inside the OMG space before its permanent barn is finished.
The practical read for this fall: nothing about Homeroom's daily rhythm changes yet. What changes is the expectation around it. A cafe that had been treated as a one-off is now the confirmed anchor of a two-restaurant, one-green village center.
If you want to see the village at full volume before any construction starts, mark October 4.
Riverbend Environmental Education Center will celebrate the season with its annual Shiverfest on Saturday, Oct. 4, offering an afternoon and evening of outdoor activities, entertainment and a touch of Halloween spirit. The festival, a fall tradition at the Gladwyne preserve, runs from 3 to 8 p.m. Families can take part in a trick-or-treat trail, pony rides, tree climbing, bounce houses and face painting. For those seeking a seasonal scare, Shiverfest includes both haunted and "not so haunted" walking trails through the preserve. Live music, a circus show and insect demonstrations round out the lineup. Food trucks on site this year include Victor's Pizza, Chewy's and Dre's Water Ice & Ice Cream.
Two logistics worth knowing. First, parking is not at Riverbend itself. In recent years, attendees have used the Palace Mission Parking Lot, 1622 Spring Mill Rd, Gladwyne, PA 19035, with shuttles provided to and from Riverbend. Second, this is not a small event. Riverbend's signature Shiverfest event draws upwards of 700 participants.
The Gladwyne community has been eager for a fall family event, especially an event that supports Riverbend's mission.
That framing, from Riverbend's own development team, is the thesis of the entire village-center project in miniature. The redevelopment plan is not adding new attractions to Gladwyne. It is turning up the volume on the ones that already work. Shiverfest is the loudest example, and it happens before a single permit gets pulled on Righters Mill.
While the Haldon House plan gets the headlines, two other changes will land inside a resident's ordinary week.
The first is at Richie Ashburn Field. Lights are likely coming to Richie Ashburn Field in Gladwyne, after the Lower Merion Board of Commissioners voted to move forward with a memorandum of understanding. Extending evening play into standard time is the kind of quiet infrastructure move that reshapes fall weeknights for anyone with a kid in youth baseball, without anyone building anything you'd notice from the road.
The second is at Waverly Heights. The township's planning commission is discussing a preliminary land development proposal for a portion of 1400 Waverly Rd. The retirement community is seeking to demolish seven semi-attached single-family villas and put three buildings in their place. Two three-story buildings would be identical and house 12 units each, while the third would add 12 units onto the Blair Apartment Building. Thirty-six new units at a campus of this scale is not a small internal reshuffle. It is a signal that the Waverly footprint is densifying, which over time changes traffic patterns on Waverly Road far more than a village-center parking lot ever will.
The redevelopment plan is still in review. The reconfigured plan has not officially been submitted to Lower Merion Township for approval. Greg Prichard, historic preservation planner for Lower Merion, said the township is expecting the Gladwyne project to involve meetings of multiple review boards with the board of commissioners' approval as the final green light. That means the version of the village you'll experience this October is essentially the current one, with one large asterisk: everyone knows what it's about to become.
A pragmatic autumn loop, using only what is open today:
There is one open question that will define whether this all coheres or splinters. The redevelopment is intended to revive the village center while preserving Gladwyne's historic, small-scale character. Lower Merion Township's director of building and planning, Chris Leswing, has said that much of the plan is permitted by right under the area's neighborhood center zoning designation, though some elements will require review board approval and a vote by the board of commissioners. The parking lot on Youngs Ford Road is the piece that needs a zoning change. Watch that vote. It is the hinge.
If you own a home in Gladwyne and are trying to make sense of how these changes read against your property specifically, whether you're planning a renovation, thinking about timing, or simply want a grounded local perspective, Collin Whelan and the Two Cols team are based a few minutes away in Wayne and know this village block by block. Schedule a Consultation to talk it through.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation and experience the personalized service and expertise that make The Collin + Colleen Whelan Team.
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