it's what you want to know
An established fact: People in Tredyffrin, Paoli and Easttown love their libraries. They use them A LOT.
Also a fact: All three library buildings are struggling to keep up. Demand has climbed sharply. It’s not so much demand for books but for everything else: the programs and services that make today’s public libraries “third spaces” for connection, enrichment and, yes, the occasional bit of peace and quiet.
If you saw a man leaning on a lamppost along Lancaster Avenue this past summer, pen in hand, staring intently at a Main Line restaurant, he wasn’t just another local sketcher.
It was John Donohue, a former New Yorker editor and cartoonist turned acclaimed restaurant artist, doing his thing.
Give Donohue 20 minutes, and he’ll have White Dog, Carina Sorella or Christopher’s on paper, in ink, with no corrections. He’s done it more than 1,600 times since 2017.
Need a break from the polls, the ads and the doomscrolling this week? Here’s a heart-warmer about what happens when thousands of strangers decide, in a matter of hours, to help someone they’ve never met.
It starts with a truck nobody wanted.
It just wasn’t sitting right. An “article” headlined “The Future of [Easttown’s] Hilltop Park is Up in the Air” was making the rounds on community Facebook pages, dressed up as legitimate journalism but rife with insinuations and half-truths.
I hadn’t yet dug into the township’s biggest undertaking in years, a new $12 million to $13 million township building for police and staff at Hilltop Park. But I knew enough to know the “article” was suspect.
Before Rocky Balboa pounded sides of beef in a South Philly meat locker, Sylvester Stallone was pumping iron in Berwyn.
“There is no Rocky without Philadelphia,” Mike Sielski declares in Going the Distance: Stallone, Philly and the Story of Rocky, his new book timed to the film’s 50th anniversary.
Rocky wouldn’t be Rocky without those runs through the Italian Market, those strolls through gritty Kensington, that triumphant climb up the Art Museum steps, argues the award-winning Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist and WIP radio host in his fifth book.
But the Main Line looms large in Rocky’s origin story, too.
Part wine bar and bottle shop, part Italian restaurant and fashion boutique (really!), Vintner’s Table is a Main Line first: a place where everything poured comes from the owners’ own winery in … wait for it … Kutztown.
Originally targeted for last fall, the third Vintner’s Table from Folino Estate Winery is finally open in the former Twenty One Pips space at 24 Cricket Ave. in Ardmore.
To call this undertaking ambitious would be an understatement.
“I have not been this angry since COVID.”
That was Molly Todd of Christopher’s, telling Radnor commissioners Monday night what she thinks of Wayne Commons, the parklet they approved last month for North Wayne Avenue. The plan would eliminate 24 primo parking spaces and cut off the main entrance to the North Wayne Avenue lot, the busiest in town.
Louella is back on the Main Line, and she brought friends.
Six months after closing her Wayne boutique, retailer Maria Delany has rounded up seven other women-owned businesses for Jingle & Co., a three-month holiday pop-up opening Oct. 15 in Berwyn Primary Shops near MJ’s Café.
The future of medicine just might lie in 2,000 sparkling square feet in King of Prussia.
Not kidding.
It’s the new home of Aether Medicine, the cutting-edge practice of Dr. Asare Christian, one of the most caring, credentialed physicians around.
National basketball championships in 2016 and 2018.
An alumnus named pope in 2025.
Swelling enrollment numbers.
Record-setting capital campaigns.
Campus expansions to Cabrini and soon, Rosemont College.
And now, surging momentum for a would-be saint, one of its own Augustinians, Father Bill Atkinson, the world’s first quadriplegic priest.
With a winning streak like that and fellow Augustinian Pope Leo XIV leading the Church, it seems anything’s possible for Villanova these days.
