Suburbia: We Can’t Work It Out

 As it’s played out over the past couple of years, the Battle of Ardmore has, if nothing else, offered plenty of entertainment value, including drama and absurdity and lots of swearing at public meetings (enough that the township passed a motion banning it). The low — or, depending on how you look at it, high — point came at a township meeting last winter, when one of the business owners affected by the redevelopment plan stood up and threw a handful of change in the face of commissioner Joe Manko. “Judases!” the man screamed at Manko and his colleagues, charging that the township was in bed with some developers.

“I really don’t wanna remember it, because that actually happened,” Manko says, when asked about the incident one recent afternoon in his Bala Cynwyd law office. But it’s clear he considers it the final straw.

Talking to Manko, who has been a township commissioner for 26 years and is the driving force behind this project, you realize you could forgive the opposition for getting angry with him. He isn’t the smoothest salesman. There’s no silver tongue to match his whitening hair. And apparently not much of a filter. Not long after telling me that many people suggested he not grant me an interview, he goes into an anecdote about the time he told a female reporter that three of his favorite things were tennis, jogging … and sex. He said a lot of other things in that interview, but of course that’s what ended up in the paper.

But the man does have a vision, if a poorly articulated one. For him, the Ardmore project started in the early ’90s, when the commission first talked about rebuilding the squat bunker that replaced the town’s original train station, which was demolished in 1957. As the commissioners made plans for that project, Manko began to see an opportunity to turn Ardmore back into the bustling place it had been when he was a kid, growing up a few miles down the road in Bala Cynwyd. Back then, you took the bus into Ardmore and had a soda and went bowling, or to the movies. It was the place to go.

To make the turnaround happen, Manko and the commission embraced “transit-
oriented development” — a new train station as the catalyst for and centerpiece of a broader plan. Working with SEPTA, they’d use a grant from the federal government to rebuild the train station. Beyond that, they’d have a developer construct a town green plus several new multi-story “mixed-use” buildings, which would combine parking, shops and even apartments. “Not only do we want to have a train station that we want people to come to, but we want people to move here and work here,” Manko says. The train station may have been the centerpiece of the plan, but all that new parking would be the real key to attracting more foot traffic to the remaining shops along Lancaster. Not only does Manko want people to drive less and increase their reliance on SEPTA and Amtrak; he thinks more people will move to an environmentally friendly Ardmore because of the ease of getting to and from Center City or points west. “If you build it, they will come,” he declares. His idea would also, he says “stop suburban sprawl, stop throwing Wal-Marts out into farmland, stuff like that.”