it's what you want to know
Handel’s Ice Cream could easily have made its 20th anniversary celebration all about Handel’s.
After all, Buck Buchanan’s first ice cream venture has been a hit since Day One, a place so enmeshed in the fabric of family life in Berwyn and beyond, it feels like always been there. Heck, even Adam Sandler famously found his way to Handel’s – and not just once.
The landmark Berwyn Tavern – “the BT” to locals – is changing hands after 33 years.
“We had a great run,” says Henry Fischer, who bought the business back in 1992 as a silent investor.
The chorus to save Oakwell – Stoneleigh’s Villanova “sister” – from school district buzzsaws is practically deafening.
And we’re not just talking about cars honking for picketers outside Lower Merion School District’s Ardmore offices each Friday.
Frankly, we weren’t going to publish. This coronavirus crisis is too crazy/awful/unwieldy to even begin to unpack. Plus, we weren’t sure how to handle our loyal advertisers, who have enough bills to worry about.
But we’ve been monitoring the Main Line’s New Normal. And while plenty about it stinks, there’s good news worth sharing.
So we’re going ahead. You’ll see our advertisers’ banners and hear some of their corona-coping stories but they won’t be billed. It’s the least we can do.
T/E is in the news again and not for its test scores.
The school district is grappling with its response to a family whose kindergartner with Down Syndrome was reported to Tredyffrin Police.
The six-year-old’s offense? Pointing her finger and saying, “I shoot you” to her special ed teacher at Valley Forge Elementary.
Hearts were heavy but heads were held high across the Main Line this week.
Hate would have no home here.
From Beth Chaim in Malvern to Beth David in Gladwyne, from the Chabad Center in Devon to Chabad Main Line in Merion, from Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy to the Perelman Jewish Day School, thousands gathered – somber and shattered, yes, but resolute in their response to the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
There would be no cowering in corners.
With growing unease, Jewish friends had watched the rising tide of hate on their home turf: the toppled tombstones, the scribbled swastikas, the bomb threats. But a massacre? In their own state? In a neighborhood not so different from Narberth? If hate could kill in Squirrel Hill, it could kill anywhere, right?
Holy Lazarus! A long-stagnant stretch of Tredyffrin has a pulse.
The owner of Swedesford Plaza wants to bulldoze the old HH Gregg and build luxury apartments in its place – 250 of them.
After approaching umpteen stores, fitness chains, health systems and grocers for its two empty anchors, Echo Realty is throwing in the retail towel on one of them. In partnership with Bozzuto, Echo plans to build a four-story, 250-unit apartment building at the old HH Gregg site, a permitted use under zoning code.
They called B.S.
Fed up because they don’t feel safe in school, thousands of Main Line students walked off the job Wednesday.
For 17 minutes or more, classrooms became ghost towns, the halls were mostly quiet.
There would be no repercussions. Lower Merion, Radnor and T/E Schools were of one voice: students would not be penalized for commemorating Florida’s fallen 17 and demanding #NeverAgain.
As a precaution, parents were cordially not invited to attend – forbidden, in fact, from entering schools that became “closed campuses” from 10 to 11 a.m. Local police stood at the ready, their services, thankfully, not needed.
The elite health & fitness company likes the Main Line so much, it’s putting not ONE, but TWO of its mega clubs here.
Our first Life Time – a scratch-built, 140,000 sq. ft. whopper with a “resort-like” outdoor pool and waterslides – will debut in June on Swedesford Rd. in Tredyffrin. (Life Time’s calling it King of Prussia, but the map says it’s Wayne, if only by a hair.)
And just announced: our second Life Time will be in Ardmore – an exclusive “diamond” level club (a notch above KOP’s “onyx premier”) in the former Macy’s building, one of two Grand Dames of Suburban Square. (The tall Times building is the other.)
In a word: wow.
We’re blown away by what a bunch of brewpub newbies just pulled off in downtown Berwyn.
They took a drab old furniture store across from the train station (RIP Pearl of the East), gutted it, and turned it into rustic-chic La Cabra Brewing, suddenly the hippest spot in town.
OK. Not so suddenly.
