By Remi Vaughan, Staff Reporter

Handel’s Homemade Ice Cream and Yogurt, a cornerstone staple of the Conestoga community, left its home at 576 Lancaster Ave. last year. The ice cream emporium has since relocated across the street, but the fate of the old building remains uncertain. 

In December 2019, Todd Pohlig of Pohlig Custom Homes and his team, David Della Porta and Don Tracy of Cornerstone Tracy LLC, proposed their development plan for the strip of now entirely abandoned buildings along Lancaster Avenue 

Their development would be “a four-story, 150,000-square-foot mixed-use development with Handel’s and one or two small retailers on the ground floor, luxury apartments above, and a public plaza in the center. The complex also would have a two-story, 228-spot parking garage,” according to a Philadelphia Inquirer article written by Steven Falk. 

The development team had to acquire a waiver of variance from the Township Zoning Board for the project, as the plan stood to build one story higher than the township’s construction code allows. Pohlig obtained the waiver, but not community support. 

“The neighbors appealed that decision (of the developers obtaining the waiver) to the Chester County Court of Common Pleas. Now that’s not unusual: people don’t like change to start with,” Pohlig said. 

The court process took about a year, ending with the judge ruling in favor of the development team obtaining their variance. However, the neighbors appealed the decision a second time to the Commonwealth Court. At this point, those involved with the project were facing a delay for at least another few years. 

“At that time, Jason Dempsey, who was doing the (Fritz Lumberyard development) across the street approached our group and said he could make it work without the variance,” Pohlig said. 

Jason Dempsey is the owner and developer of DP Partners, a real estate investment and development company. 

“One thing we didn’t want to happen was to have something occur there that interfered with the (Fritz Lumberyard development) that we were doing, so we approached the other developer and suggested that we perhaps take over the project,” Dempsey said. 

Pohlig explained that once Buck Buchanan, the owner of Handel’s, decided to move, the team took Dempsey’s offer.

The project is now set to be “a mixed use three-story, 107-unit luxury apartment building, with scaled back retail space,” according to a Main Line Times and Suburban article by Ray Hoffman. This is similar to DP Partners’ development across the street at what once was the Fritz Lumberyard. 

The timeline for the project is dependent on when DP Partners decides to start, and from then, Dempsey believes it will take anywhere from 18-24 months to complete. 

Remi Vaughan can be reached at [email protected].