Drive Old York Road through the Jenkintown section on any weekday and you will pass the same beige storefront that sat behind a chained Walgreens sign for two years after the pharmacy closed in July 2023. Look again this fall and the building has multiplied. A Shake Shack takes up one end. Honeygrow anchors the middle. DIG serves its scratch-cooked plates a few doors down. Starting September 16, a Barnes & Noble opens where the glass used to just reflect an empty parking lot back at drivers.
That one building says something true about the whole township, something the fall events calendar makes obvious once you stop scanning it week by week and look at it as a whole. Abington doesn't run one fall season. It runs four, in four different places, on four separate organizers' schedules, and checking only one source means missing most of it.
Old York Road Filled Itself Twice, Not Once
The four-way split of that former Walgreens reads almost like a staged rollout once you line the dates up. Honeygrow opened first, in August 2025, joining locations the fast-casual chain already runs in Warrington, Willow Grove, Langhorne, and Doylestown. DIG followed with its own grand opening about a month later, its second stop in the Philadelphia suburbs after debuting at Ardmore's Suburban Square earlier that summer. Shake Shack came next, its fifth Montgomery County location, opening that fall. LaserAway took the fourth slot as a treatment center rather than a restaurant. Barnes & Noble arrives last, closing out a redevelopment that took just over a year to fully lease and filling the gap left by the Willow Grove store that closed a few years earlier.
None of this happened inside a building working alone. Noble Town Center already held a Trader Joe's on its upper level, a Ross Dress for Less at mid-level, and an ULTA Beauty and PetSmart rounding out the plaza before any of the new leases signed. The redevelopment layered five more reasons to park there on top of a center that was already doing fine.
Elsewhere along the same corridor, a different kind of retail turnover tells a smaller version of the same story. The Rite Aid at 1441 Old York Road sat empty until Grocery Outlet moved in, offering discounted pricing on produce, meat, and pantry staples in the former Abington Shopping Center space. Two vacancies on the same road. One filled with a national bookstore chain and a burger brand people plan trips around. The other filled with a bargain grocer. Old York Road isn't becoming one thing. It's becoming several things at once, storefront by storefront.
Roslyn Runs Its Own Saturday
Head into the Roslyn section and the fall calendar belongs to a different organizer entirely. The Roslyn Valley Business Association, not the township government, runs the Roslyn Fall Festival and Car Show, now in its 26th year. This year's date is Saturday, September 19, with the festival itself running noon to 5 PM and Easton Road closed to through traffic from 10 AM to 6 PM to make room for vendors, a car show, and the crowds both draw.
Getting around that closure takes local knowledge, not just patience. Northbound drivers get rerouted onto Edge Hill Road, then Rockwell Road, then back to Easton Road by way of Old Welsh Road. Southbound traffic follows Woodland Road to Rothley Avenue to Mildred Avenue. Trucks and buses take a wider loop through Fitzwatertown Road and Susquehanna Road. Businesses along Easton Road stay open through all of it, reachable from the side streets while the main road sits closed. If rain forces a postponement, the rain date is the following Saturday, September 26.
This isn't a township-wide event dressed up as neighborhood pride. It is neighborhood pride, organized and funded by the businesses lining one specific stretch of road, with proceeds supporting the Boys and Girls Club. Roslyn runs this weekend on its own terms, and it has for a quarter century.
A Weekend Split Across Three Parks
The township's own signature event, Abington Fest, takes a completely different shape. Instead of one site, it spreads a single weekend across three separate parks, each hosting its own piece of the celebration.
| Day | Time | Location | What's Happening |
|---|---|---|---|
| Friday, Oct. 2 | 7 PM | Roychester Park, 1837 Harding Ave. | Family movie night, Halloweentown on the big screen, bring your own chairs and blankets |
| Saturday, Oct. 3 | 8 AM | Roslyn Park, 2726 Fernwood Ave. | 5K and Kids' Dash, staggered age-group starts, a medal for every child who runs |
| Saturday, Oct. 3 | 12 to 3 PM | Crestmont Park, 2595 Rubicam Ave. | Fall Festival with live band and DJ, Touch a Truck, Trunk or Treat, bounce houses, food trucks |
| Sunday, Oct. 4 | 10 AM & 12 PM | Alverthorpe Park | Parent-Child Golf Tournament, ages 7 to 12, $20 per team, open to residents only |
A family trying to catch the whole weekend needs three separate stops, not one. The golf tournament is worth flagging in particular: registration is limited to Abington Township residents, a detail that matters if you're planning to bring a visiting grandchild rather than sign up as a household already living here.
The Fourth Node Sits Inside a 27-Acre Estate
The Sunday golf tournament happens at Alverthorpe Park, which sits alongside the grounds of Alverthorpe Manor, home to the fourth piece of Abington's fall calendar and the one that runs on the most separate track of all. The Abington Art Center occupies that manor, a mansion built in 1939 for Lessing Rosenwald, son of Sears co-owner and CEO Julius Rosenwald, on grounds the family later donated to the township for public use. The 27-acre campus includes a sculpture park that opened in 1990 and now hosts the center's exhibitions, studio classes, and, in recent winters, one large-scale outdoor experience that has nothing to do with sculpture in the traditional sense.
That experience is Astra Lumina, an immersive night walk built by Moment Factory that turns the sculpture park's wooded paths into a lit, soundtracked trail each winter. Its first run opened here in November 2024, making Abington the fifth U.S. city to host the touring show. A second season followed the next winter, continuing into February 2026. Organizers framed the return in terms that fit the Art Center's identity as a cultural nonprofit rather than a seasonal pop-up:
"We're thrilled to bring Astra Lumina back to Abington Art Center for a second season."
Whether a third season lands on the calendar this coming winter hasn't been announced as of this writing. But two consecutive years puts it squarely on the radar for anyone who tracks what happens inside Alverthorpe's gates once the leaves are down, in the same way regulars already know to check the Art Center's own event page rather than assume the township calendar covers it.
Four Calendars, One Zip Code
Line the pieces up and the pattern holds. A shopping center redevelopment on Old York Road answering to a national property manager's leasing timeline. A car show on Easton Road answering to a business association that has run it for 26 years. A three-park weekend answering to the township's own parks and recreation department. A night walk inside a historic estate answering to a nonprofit art center and a touring production company. None of these four calendars was built with the other three in mind, and none of them is wrong to run independently. That's simply how fall works here.
The practical upshot for anyone who lives in Abington is that no single source, not the township homepage, not one business association's newsletter, covers all of it. Bookmark more than one page this September, or you'll be the neighbor who finds out about the car show from someone else's photos on Monday.
Whenever you're ready to talk about what any of this means for your own address, Art Herling Team In Blue Bell is a phone call or a message away. Let's connect and start the conversation.
