Haverford Avenue's Emptiest Corner Just Ended an Eight-Year Wait

Ricklin's Hardware survived two fires in its century on Haverford Avenue. The first, in 1939, leveled the original two-story building and sent Hyman Ricklin back to rebuilding the single-story structure that still stands on the corner of Haverford and Essex. It did not survive 2018.

That March, the family that had run Ricklin's since 1960 announced a retirement sale. Longtime owner Jed Riddell told reporters the property owners had turned down a resident-led effort to buy the store and keep it going. They had, in his words, other plans for the corner. It sat directly across from the Narberth SEPTA station, arguably the most walked-past spot in the borough, and for eight years those other plans amounted to paper in the windows.

This spring, the wait ended. Malooga, a Yemeni bakery and coffee concept that had built a following in Philadelphia's Old City since 2021, opened its first suburban location at 203 Haverford Avenue in March. Almost to the month, eight years after the closing sale began.

Why an Empty Storefront Isn't Always a Warning Sign

Residents who watched that corner sit dark for the better part of a decade could be forgiven for reading it as a sign the block was struggling. The opposite was closer to true. Even as Ricklin's wound down, Narberth Business Association president Ed Ridgway was on record describing Haverford Avenue's overall health as strong, noting that when storefronts on the avenue did come open, they rented fast. Ricklin's corner was the exception, and the reason wasn't lack of demand. It was that whoever controlled the space was holding out for a tenant who could use all of it.

Malooga's Narberth build-out explains the wait. This isn't a counter-service transplant. The new location includes a full bakery, a coffee bar pouring pistachio lattes and Adani chai, fresh manakish baked on site, and a dedicated group seating area built for weddings, events, and the kind of gathering a corner across from a train platform can actually support. According to reporting on the opening, the location is already running four months ahead of its own sales projections. That's not the performance of a space that settled for whoever walked in first. It's the performance of a fit that took time to find.

A Second Storefront, Filled a Different Way

A few blocks over on Woodbine Avenue, another vacancy closed the same season, but the mechanism was almost the reverse. Lassan Indian Traditional, a BYOB in Lafayette Hill known for modern takes on curries, samosas, and Himalayan-inspired desserts, opened its second location in April at 232 Woodbine, the space that had been home to Margot. Lassan didn't go looking for Narberth. Co-owners Pema Lama and Shyam Dimdung expanded there because loyal customers from their original location pushed for it.

One storefront waited for a landlord to find the right scale of tenant. The other filled because a fan base outgrew its original address and dragged the business to a new one. Two different forces, landing in the same downtown within weeks of each other. Narberth Mayor Dana Edwards called the pair of openings a real sign of momentum for the borough's downtown, and the framing holds up: momentum built from two directions at once tends to be sturdier than momentum built from one.

The Same Two Blocks Also Run the Town's Calendar

It's worth noticing that this restaurant story and Narberth's civic calendar keep landing on the same handful of streets. The borough's Fall Music & Arts Festival wrapped up this past Sunday, September 13, with live music and food trucks along Haverford Avenue and dozens of makers set up on Forrest Avenue's Artists Alley. It's the same stretch of Haverford that Ricklin's and now Malooga anchor.

The Halloween season brings Witches of Narberth back to those storefronts each October, when businesses along the avenue host a scavenger hunt for kids collecting treats block by block. And on Sunday, December 7, downtown transforms again for the Narberth Dickens Festival, with the main tents set up at the corner of Forrest and Haverford, the town reimagined as 1840s London for an afternoon, complete with a scavenger hunt, carriage rides, and a free screening of A Muppet Christmas Carol at the Narberth movie theater on North Narberth Avenue.

None of this is a coincidence of geography. Haverford Avenue isn't just where people shop and eat. It's the stage the borough uses for nearly everything it does as a community, which raises the stakes on who gets to open a storefront there considerably higher than in a downtown that only functions as a shopping strip.

What a Slow Fill Says About a Fast-Changing Region

The Main Line has no shortage of downtowns adding new restaurants this year. What makes Narberth's version of the story worth paying attention to isn't the count of new openings. It's the discipline behind how the openings happened. A property owner who could have filled a train-adjacent corner years earlier chose to wait for a concept ambitious enough to justify the address. A restaurant with an existing following in another town let demand, not opportunity, decide where to grow next. Both bets are already paying off faster than projected.

For anyone who has lived near Haverford Avenue long enough to remember buying a screwdriver or a can of paint at Ricklin's, the corner filling back in isn't just a dining update. It's a small piece of evidence that this downtown still moves at its own pace, filling in on its own terms rather than whichever tenant shows up first. That's a harder thing to engineer than a ribbon cutting, and it's part of what keeps a half-square-mile borough feeling like a town instead of a strip.

If you're curious about what else is changing in Narberth and the wider Main Line, or you just want to talk with people who track this stuff for a living, the team at Wagner Real Estate Group has been rooted in these towns for four generations. Reach out any time, whether you have a real estate question or just want to know what's opening next on Haverford Avenue.