How Conshohocken Got Cool

Is Conshohocken … cool now? / Illustration by Leticia R. Albano

It’s a gray day in mid-February, and I’m standing inside a bright shop in Conshohocken perusing the goods. There are crystals — glimmering Brazilian citrine and shiny labradorite, which the sign tells me promote health and fresh beginnings. There are books and teas and candles — musky, floral-scented numbers crowned with colorful bits of dried flowers and hunks of opaque black tourmaline, and pastel-hued ones shaped like goddesses arranged in rows like a benevolent army.

I’m in Thirteen Circles, a spiritual gift shop where a sign outside reads “The Witch Is In” and an angelic-faced shopkeeper with hot-pink hair is studiously crunching numbers on a stack of receipts and pausing to answer questions from customers, including me. Lily Scharff grew up in Conshohocken and moved back in 2024 after spending the previous four years in college in Center City.

“Coming back after being in an art school bubble definitely was a little bit of culture shock,” she tells me. “But I feel like Conshy has been so much more accepting of the vibe that I have going on — and of this entire store — now than it was at any point growing up.”

The shop is on Fayette Street, the main corridor of this quiet borough on the Schuylkill River about 15 miles northwest of Center City. Despite the faster clip of the cars, Fayette is a place that could be plunked down in any small town in America. There’s Sanctuary Blu, a stylish boutique slinging small-batch bath salts and hand-knit Eagles sweaters, and the dog-friendly Morning Talk Cafe. There’s the town library, more than one stately stone church, and a surprising number of cafes where regulars congregate over coffee and morning gossip. And just as defining are the things that are missing from the downtown: a Trader Joe’s, a Starbucks, a Wawa. (The borough council notably quashed the zoning of the latter in 2013 in order to maintain the “small town atmosphere.”)

As much as Conshohocken has remained the same, though, it has also, as Scharff pointed out, changed. Glossy high-rise apartment buildings line the river, filled with inhabitants ranging from recent college grads to empty nesters. A historic factory hums with new life as an office complex of tech startups and ad agencies. Where some older establishments have closed, new restaurants have filled in, slinging wood-fired Neapolitan pies or salmon grain bowls or pho. But change, as always, can bring uncertainty.

Long before it was Conshy, this bend in the Schuylkill River was a Lenape settlement. (Conshohocken is the Lenape word for “pleasant valley.”) The first European colonists arrived in the late 1600s, establishing a river crossing known as Matson’s Ford — later the site of a Revolutionary War skirmish.

In the 19th century, the construction of the Schuylkill Canal and railroad lines along the river transformed the town into an industrial hub, with ironworks, steel mills, and other manufacturing. The town of Conshohocken was formally incorporated in 1850.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Conshy’s industrial boom had earned it the moniker “Steel Town” (perhaps a better nickname than “Conshy”), and mills and factories dominated the borough’s riverfront. One was the Lee Tire & Rubber Company, which opened in the 1910s and eventually became a cornerstone of the town’s economy and skyline. By the 1960s the tire plant had hit hard times, and it eventually shut in 1980.

Even as the factories went quiet, though, new infrastructure was paving the way for Conshohocken’s rebirth. When Interstate 76 — locally known as the Schuylkill Expressway — was built in the 1950s, it skirted the borough and made it more accessible to Philadelphia and King of Prussia. And then in 1991, the last section of the Blue Route (I-476) was completed, finally connecting I-95 with I-76. Now there was a junction of two major highways on the town’s doorstep​.

All roads were leading to Conshy, and this new accessibility lured new developers. In 1989, One Tower Bridge went up, a 271,678-square-foot behemoth filled with tenants including Morgan Stanley and other investment firms. By the 2010s, Conshohocken was a sought-after address for companies, offering a strategic location — via highway, SEPTA, or even bike on the Schuylkill River Trail — midway between Center City and the far suburbs.

Beyond building new, some developers were reimagining the town’s existing factories, transforming these old industrial spaces into headquarters for 21st-century businesses. One was the old Lee Tire, on the National Register of Historic Places, which is now Spring Mill Campus — half a million square feet of red brick and stone buildings surrounded by a network of bucolic walking trails with views of the river.

After the tire company closed, its buildings were bought and converted into basic office space, which languished without any major upgrades. Then in 2019, the property was bought by Bryn Mawr-based real estate firm Alliance HP, which recognized the potential to bring it into the 21st century. The team spent more than a year on renovations, hiring Philly-area firms D2 Design and Cohere branding agency to modernize it while maintaining its original character.

On a recent visit, Matt Handel and Jake Maldonado from Alliance give me a tour of the campus. There’s sleek lighting and splashy murals punctuated with plenty of historic details, like arched stone doorways, wrought-iron chandeliers, and stained-glass windows. We pass a gym lined with weight machines and Peloton bikes, a lounge decked out with mid-century furnishings and a shuffleboard table, and black-framed glass walls that open onto meticulously landscaped outdoor gathering spaces. There’s even a smaller stone building that would feel at home on a farm in the Cotswolds, and was likely once a stop on the Underground Railroad. (And also, I’m told, was maybe offered up as a place of asylum for Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI right before … you know.)

Even at first pass, I can see how Spring Mill Campus has been a game-changer for the area.

“The sheer size of the project gives it a chance to really move the needle — 500,000-plus square feet, so all these different businesses, collectively, have a chance to really impact the overall community,” Handel tells me. “We attracted some really cool businesses to Conshohocken that are part of an overall transformation that’s happening here.”

Hotel West & Main’s exterior / Photograph by Jason Varney

That transformation seems especially visible from the third-floor office where we’re standing, with its mini fridge stocked with four different flavors of Spindrifts and a wall of windows overlooking a network of buildings that once churned out rubber tires and now hosts happy hours, weekly food trucks, and art shows. The campus is walking distance to several restaurants that have become havens for hordes of office workers to meet over business lunches and after-work cocktails.

Handel points out a rectangular building across the street, now apartments with a ground-floor veterinary clinic. “That used to be a strip club,” he says. “So strip club out, Negronis and espresso martinis in.”

The campus’s thoughtful redesign and new amenities helped retain some of its pre-renovation tenants and attracted many more. One is tech startup ZeroEyes, making AI-powered, human-verified gun detection software and run by former Navy SEALs. COO and co-founder Rob Huberty says they were also drawn to Spring Mill’s history. “If you’re doing startups, America itself kind of is a startup,” he says, adding that the location is also prime. “Philadelphia is 11 miles that way. Valley Forge is 11 miles that way.”

For Frank Burrell and Joshua Benson, who run Deerfield, an advertising agency with about 150 employees, part of the appeal of the campus was having a space employees could return to, relatively seamlessly, after working remotely during COVID.

“We did a heat map for where our employees lived to make sure that we had a central location, and it’s close to the train,” Benson tells me in Deerfield’s airy, open office with light flooding down from the glass ceiling. “So for us to be able to get talent from Philadelphia, it’s a big deal.” Plus, notes Burrell, “You get away from the Philly tax that you have to pay as well.”

Handel and Maldonado and I snake through the complex, exiting one brick building and heading into the next via a loading dock. It’s the headquarters of Bowstring Studios, a creative agency that makes branded content for clients like Chevrolet and Temple University. Co-founder and CEO Enrique Mendoza leads us through the cavernous space, past a white cyclorama where they’ve just finished­ filming bougie dog food. Right now, their team in South America­ is editing the footage.

Here, Bowstring creates commercials and other content featuring the likes of Jalen Hurts, Chris Pratt, and more mega-watt stars. The local team of about 20 can work remotely, but they come in regularly for production or meetings, and to gather over food-truck lunches or happy hours. When they do, some commute from the city by bike on the Schuylkill River Trail.

Mendoza, who runs the company with co-founder Sean Quinn (whom he met while studying at Villanova in the late ’90s), has seen the change in Conshohocken firsthand; he first moved here post-college and lived in the Plymouth Gardens apartments off Fayette Street. Nowadays, it’s a place he feels comfortable hosting companies from New York, Chicago, and beyond.

“We bring clients in from New York — they [would] pay two times what we get here, and they’re a black car away,” he says.

Clients can stay at Hotel West & Main, which opened in late 2022 at the bottom of Fayette just past the bridge. Bowstring can host dinner meetings at one of the restaurants Mendoza calls “client-ready” in walking distance of their desks, including the Daisy Tavern.

Michael MacCrory is one of the partners at the Daisy Tavern, a stylish new American restaurant that opened in May 2024 on the Spring Mill Campus. MacCrory’s grandmother worked here back when it was Lee Tire. “She was a nurse and took care of all the guys who worked in the tire factory,” he says. His uncles also worked in the factory; the family history felt auspicious to MacCrory. “I was like, ‘Uzzie is not gonna let me fail here.’”

But beyond his grandmother’s good juju, MacCrory chose the location because he’s worked in commercial real estate for the past 25 years. He tells me he’s “watched Conshohocken just kind of grow and grow and grow.”

The spacious restaurant spills out to a terrace with tables and an outdoor bar under string lights; it hosts weekend brunch and live music. As at many Conshy spots, the clientele here is a cross-section of the borough, ages 25 to 75.

“We have people who work at Spring Mill who come here for happy hour, blue-collar folks who knock back a few beers, families,” says MacCrory. “Parents whose kids rent all these gazillion apartments that are coming to catch up. We got a little bit of everything.”

The commercial resurgence that included Spring Mill was matched by a residential one. Since 2020, nearly 1,000 new living units have opened in the borough, including condos and single-family homes. Residential apartment buildings line the river, housing a hefty chunk of Conshohocken’s population — which, according to the borough, has grown about 30 percent since 2020. The bulk of these new residents are between the ages of 28 and 42, says borough employee Shauna Wylesol, who puts the median age at 35. “It’s definitely a young professional area,” she tells me.

My friend from college was one of the 20-somethings who moved to Conshy in the mid-aughts. David Inderbitzin spent his early 20s living with college friends in Manayunk and Roxborough after we graduated from Dickinson in 2000. When his roommates moved in with significant others, he sought out a new place to live and settled on Conshy — a fact that I remember feeling shocked about at the time.

“My first interaction with Conshohocken was in the mid-’90s, and it wasn’t a place I ever thought I’d live — it was run-down, it felt like a dead town,” he tells me over Banquet beers at the Conshy Corner Tavern. “But by the time you got into that mid-2000s era, it just seemed to be a place that was on the upswing.”

He was drawn to the borough’s walkable downtown, with restaurants, church communities, and parks, and he still lives there, now with his wife, Sue, and their two sons.

“It’s become revitalized,” Sue says. “There are still a lot of the original Conshy-ites that were here before — it’s just now blended in with a lot of families, and they’re sticking here.”

That small-town feel shines during events including a St. Paddy’s Day parade, a Soap Box Derby on the Fourth of July, car shows, and the annual Conshohocken Funfest, all of which shut down Fayette Street so the community can gather. “They have a band at the bottom of the hill, all the bars and restaurants have things going on, vendors come in,” Dave says. “I’ll tell you what — this town does a lot of things to bring people together.”

Liselle Milazzo took note of these attributes as she was looking for a place to settle after she accepted a position as a professor of community recreation at Penn State Abington.

“There are people here who are really invested in making Conshohocken a community, and I loved that,” she tells me over lattes at the Morning Talk Cafe. Milazzo grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Boston, London, and South Korea. She circumnavigated the world on a semester at sea in college and got her PhD in recreation, sport, and tourism at the University of Illinois, where she lived in the city of Urbana.

After she took the job in Abington, she looked for the best place to live with her husband and their dog. “I scoured everywhere,” she says. “I had three Excel spreadsheets.” There was added pressure to land in the right spot: Milazzo’s husband grew up in a tiny town in western Illinois, and this would be his first post-college relocation. “I felt a lot of responsibility to pick us a really strong community,” she says.

Downtown Conshohocken / Photograph by JG Photography/Alamy Stock Photo

On their list of must-haves: a residential area around a thriving downtown core, public transit, a library and coffee shops within walking distance, and safety. Someone noted that Conshohocken checked all these boxes, and she was immediately drawn in. In the nearly two years they’ve been residents, the couple has embraced Conshohocken. Milazzo joined bird-watching groups; she can use her binoculars to see blue herons and belted kingfishers from the windows of her riverside apartment. They’ve joined a cycling club. “I can hop on my bike from where I live, down by the river, and hit Aldi, Barnes and Noble, the movie theater in Manayunk.”

She also finds so many of the small quirks and perks of the town charming, like the cafes (Izenberg’s, Nudy’s, Brunch) and the full-service Getty station where she shakes the attendant’s hand each time he fills her gas tank. And the fact that so many spots are dog-friendly, and that even the ones that aren’t are extra-accommodating — ­one night in the winter, while Milazzo was walking her Yorkshire terrier, Maisie, the librarian ran a book out to her on the sidewalk because she couldn’t go inside with the dog.

“The two of us are in love with everything,” she says. “We don’t want to ever have to leave.”

She worries that she might have to, though. Along with Conshohocken’s surging popularity, real estate values have skyrocketed. Besides those swank waterfront apartments, several Conshy residents mentioned the luxury townhomes going up near the Spring Mill Campus, offering rooftop terraces in walking distance of the Daisy Tavern and the Schuylkill River Trail, some on the market for just under $1 million.

“It’s depressing, because then I think, well, where can I afford?” Milazzo says. “And it’s an hour away from here. That’s not where I want to live.”

Jamie Joffe has watched the town’s evolution and points to the pandemic as picking up the pace of its transformation. The Binge or Cringe podcast host came to Conshohocken in 2017, after growing up in Lower Merion and moving to Lafayette Hill; she and her family relocated when her kids were teenagers. The borough has been on an upswing since, but especially since 2020.

“There was an exodus from the city,” Joffe tells me on the phone. “People didn’t want to live in the city, but they wanted to have that sort of feel of an urban-ish area.” Lower Merion was so expensive, and you still had to get into the city, she says. “So I think a lot of people moved here because it was much more affordable and had great access.”

But unlike some other rapidly gentrifying areas, Conshohocken has largely managed to integrate new development without losing the neighborhood camaraderie longtime residents cherish — a fact often credited to mindful planning by local officials (see: squashing that Wawa) and input from the involved community (on display during monthly borough meetings).

That involved community indeed seems to be the magic holding together a town that has had a pretty dramatic glow-up. Kim Strengari has lived in the borough for nearly 25 years; her restaurant group, Conshy Girls, owns, among other spots, Gypsy Saloon in West Conshohocken.

“I see my clientele change,” she says. “These young kids, they’re in their 20s, coming in and wanting to be part of the small-town feel too.”

She sees the borough as a time capsule. Even though the number of residents has boomed and luxury apartments and a hotel have gone up, the chain stores haven’t gotten in. Also, she says, “We never got the road — we need another access way,” referring to the fact that, even though Conshohocken is accessible by two major highways, the constantly congested Fayette Street bridge adds friction getting in and out of town. “So we’re still in Small Town, USA,” she says. “There’s still enough of the old timers. … It still gives that sense of yesterday for me.”

As a small business owner deeply rooted in the community, Strengari is a connector, a go-to for gathering donations and organizing help for anyone who needs it. Recently, she rallied her network for a local in need.

“I just said, I can’t tell you anything about this story, but I have somebody that needs our help, and I can’t do it alone,” she remembers. No one asked questions; they just donated thousands of dollars. “Everybody actually wants to be part of something,” she says.

One day in February, I take my 13-year-old daughter to Strengari’s restaurant. Though we arrive just before 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, the bar is shoulder to shoulder, and the candle-lit dining room, adorned with both leftover Christmas trimmings and more recently leftover Valentine’s Day decor, is already half filled and on its way to fully packed. I’m getting a front-row view of something the Gypsy Tavern owner mentioned. Her clientele has evolved over the years — now it’s a seamless mix of older, longtime Conshy-ites and the younger new generation. There are older men huddled over beers and couples in office wear meeting for a midweek dinner. Benny and I order the giant house salad and lobster mac and cheese, and I watch as the hostess greets a string of new guests and hugs the ones on their way out the door.

Published as “The Little Town That Could” in the May 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.