“The close proximity of major roads attracts people,” says township manager Tony Hamaday. “We have the luxury of two exits and entrances [north and south] at the Blue Route.”

In addition to the Blue Route (Route 476), which connects Interstate 95 to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, two prime arteries bisect Broomall: West Chester Pike, which links Philadelphia to West Chester, and Route 320 (Sproul Road), which runs due north from Chester through the Main Line and almost to the Schuylkill River. Advertisers have challenged a local ordinance prohibiting billboards on the latter two roads; the township is challenging the challenge. Elsewhere, Delaware County Community College is expanding, and Hamaday anticipates “a lot of revitalization” at Marple Crossroads Shopping Center off Route 1 at the Springfield border.

Trolley tracks once threaded the Pike through this locale settled by English Quakers in the 1680s and, before streetcars, wagons routinely rumbled toward Philadelphia, as farmers, drovers and tradesmen transported their wares to market.

Next stop on the way west: Newtown Township, the oldest in Delaware County. William Penn himself staked out the planned intersection of Goshen Road and Newtown Street Road (Route 252) to be the center of the first town west of Philadelphia. Ironically, as the region boomed two centuries later, the railroad decided to pass Newtown by, and the township languished. But as various hunt clubs organized nearby, country squires and Philadelphia’s nouveau riche built estates on Newtown’s rolling hills.

Sizable modern homes carved out of the woods in today’s Newtown Square reflect that heritage. And now, more than 300 years after Penn sold parcels from his central “townstead,” the township and developers are wrestling with plans to create a commercial “town center” just across the road from the intersection where it all started.