This new $400 million plaza helps turn Conshohocken into a headquarters town

Conshohocken was built as a Schuylkill Valley factory town, like Manayunk or Norristown, full of stone and brick homes for the families that made Wood steel, Lee tires, Quaker chemicals, and other products in works that lined the river.

Since the 1990s, blocky offices, brass-trimmed restaurants along central Fayette Street, and apartment blocks and factory conversions along the floodplain have amplified Conshohocken’s position, and its two SEPTA stations have helped. The borough sits between car-dependent King of Prussia and higher-tax Center City Philadelphia.

What’s new, halfway up the hill on Fayette, is a city-style redevelopment, with corporate-headquarters amenities. The developer, Bill Glazer’s Keystone Development + Investment, named it “Sora West,” after a sharp-beaked native bird that scavenges in the nearby Schuylkill. Sora East is a smaller building nearby, earlier acquired by Keystone, in 2008.

Around a grassy plaza that wouldn’t look out of place at a state college, this $400 million group of newly opened buildings includes the 11-story, 430,000-square-foot headquarters of AmerisourceBergen Corp., one of the three largest drug distributors in the U.S., which opened last fall; a 127-bed hotel, the West + Main, a Hilton brand; and the restaurants Hook & Ladder Sky Bar & Kitchen and 1874 Social. Those venues extend from a new building into an older one incorporated within the complex: the Victorian former home of the borough’s Washington Fire Co.

The hotel and restaurants opened earlier this month, delayed by the pandemic. AmerisourceBergen staff have been returning to the office. To receive the commuters, on the north edge of the plaza stands a new 1,500-car parking garage, packed behind a glass-walled stair tower, lit at night.

The development recalls, in its elements if not its scale, the towering complex Comcast has erected in Center City — likewise with its own hotel, restaurants, transit connections, and parking — or the amenities built to enhance DuPont Co.’s old headquarters around Wilmington’s Rodney Square.

“People think what we have now in Conshohocken happened overnight. But it was a long, hard trek. It really started at the end of the 1980s,” with an earlier band of office and apartment developers, says Stephen Spaeder, senior vide president at Equus Capital Partners, a Villanova-based developer. The firm’s latest suburban ventures include a 352-apartment building a few blocks away, at 400 W. Elm St.

Indeed, Glazer has been preparing this for nearly 20 years. In 2003, he bought a pair of low-rise office buildings and began litigation with Montgomery County’s development authority over proposals for those and nearby properties. In 2013, he proposed a 250-foot-high complex (about a quarter the height of Comcast’s Philadelphia towers), which borough leaders had him trim to 200 feet; meanwhile, he redeveloped a phone company building for borough offices.

The firehouse, which dates to the 1870s, was a key. It was opened for the Washington Fire Co. — “the Washies,” now, as in the factory years, a key institution in the borough. The volunteer company long ago moved to more modern quarters; the original building’s restoration, including part of the hotel lobby and upstairs dining rooms, emphasizes metal and wood scrollwork, with firefighter artifacts and themes.

The grassy space at the center of the complex is open to the public, as are spaces in the parking garage out back during the workday, and more at night and on weekends.

That’s appropriate, given the subsidies. State Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Philadelphia) helped secure state Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program funds, which totaled $11 million for AmerisourceBergen and the developers. Keystone raised more than $30 million more through the EB-5 federal immigration program that allows visas to foreigners who invest in U.S. projects, and $10 million from low-interest loans backed by Pennsylvania’s C-PACE financing program for “clean energy” projects.

The project also collected $2.1 million in PennDOT Multimodal Transportation Fund grants for transit-related projects, and $1 million from the gambling-funded Local Shares Account.

Glazer says Sora West resembles other developments that draw residents to public and readapted spaces, such as the Piazza, developed by Bart Blatstein, on the site of the former Schmidt’s brewery in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties; the park and seasonal skating rink at Rockefeller Center in New York, whose public surface is “about the same size” as the Sora West field, Glazer says; and hotelier André Balazs’ Chiltern Firehouse redevelopment in London.

He also cites the Independence Beer Garden next to the former Rohm & Haas headquarters, one of several 20th-century office buildings Glazer has been updating along Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. (The Inquirer is moving its own headquarters to the building.)

“We adore great placemaking; that’s what we wanted here,” Glazer says of his Conshohocken project. “That 148-year-old firehouse is the cherry on top.”

AmerisourceBergen officials didn’t respond to questions about why they picked Conshohocken over Philadelphia or King of Prussia when they determined to leave Chesterbrook, near Valley Forge, a few years back.

Glazer says AmerisourceBergen’s choice “was all about the location.” Close to the city and the Main Line suburbs, highways and SEPTA trains, but without the city’s extra wage and retail taxes, “the best and the brightest are centered around here,” the developer says.

And unlike boxy, drive-up office centers, he adds, “Conshohocken has a walkable downtown, with the bike trails close by, and plenty of [free or low-cost] parking, and 17 restaurants in the neighborhood out back.”

But how much urban-style growth can the borough fit? Farther down the hill, “I’m a little shocked that they keep allowing buildings to happen on that riverfront, where it floods,” says entrepreneur Michael Golden.

Golden and his billionaire business partner Michael Rubin sold GSI Commerce to eBay in 2011 — after which Golden invested in local enterprises around Conshohocken, including Kevin Tierney’s MoreThanTheCurve.com, an area news site, and two restaurants, Southern Cross Kitchen on Fayette Street, and Gypsy Saloon across the Schuylkill in West Conshy.

Unlike some businesses in Center City Philadelphia, where staff have returned slowly from COVID-19 shutdowns, Golden says he and other Fayette Street restaurateurs are “busier after the pandemic than we’ve ever been.”

He said the many financial companies that have left Philadelphia for the nearby suburbs over the years keep boosting his sales. Drug industry companies such as AmerisourceBergen, tech companies such as Oracle, which combined several local acquisitions into a single Conshohocken office, and financial companies such as pension adviser Hamilton Lane, which relocated from the City Line area, attract travelers to area hotels — and “the hotels are sending us a lot of customers,” Golden said.

But even Golden, a booster, says the borough is still missing many features.

“Conshocken and West Conshohocken suffer from the lack of a real Main Street business [and retail] district,” he says. “Fayette doesn’t have it all. Compare it to Main Street in Ambler, or Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill. Those are walking towns, with stores.

“You want to see a great supermarket. You want to see college students. We have a few Villanova students, but that youth energy is missing. Our demographics are super old. There’s no playhouse, there’s no movie theater, movie studios, art galleries.”

He said local officials get the message and have made it easier to close streets for parties and set up sidewalk dining. Yet the corporate and restaurant growth Conshy has enjoyed has quickly brought other challenges, Golden concluded: “We have lost the affordable housing. It’s a huge issue. The kind of working people who used to live in Conshohocken can’t afford it.”

Glazer says the borough’s easy access will draw more workers and visitors as development rolls on.

“Conshohocken has had many iterations,” he told me, sitting in one of the plastic Adirondack-style chairs that dot the green public lawn between the headquarters and the hotel on a colorful October morning. “Now we have this transit-oriented development. It’s a great exemplar for where the nation, the world, is going. We intend Sora to be at the center of it.”