For as long as most people in Bala Cynwyd can remember, the Cynwyd Heritage Trail was a there-and-back proposition. You parked at Cynwyd Station, walked or biked down toward the Manayunk Bridge, admired the Schuylkill, and turned around. The trail didn't go anywhere. It looped you back to your car.
That changed this spring. A new rail-with-trail extension now runs south from Cynwyd Station to Bala Station at City Avenue, and it lands you somewhere that didn't exist in any real form five years ago: a stretch of retail and dining that Federal Realty has spent roughly $170 million building. At almost the same moment, the oldest restaurant on Montgomery Avenue quietly changed hands after 34 years, closing one era of Bala Cynwyd dining to open another. Two endpoints of the same small town, both mid-transition, both worth knowing about if you already live here.
A Trail With an Actual Destination
The extension opened in March 2026, and the mechanics of how it got funded are worth pausing on. State transportation grants covered about 90 percent of the cost. Lower Merion Township covered the rest using recreation fees collected from new development along City Avenue. In other words, the buildings now waiting at the trail's southern end are, in a very literal sense, the reason the path to them exists.
The new segment follows an active SEPTA line, so it has the industrial texture the rest of the Cynwyd Heritage Trail is known for: rail corridor on one side, paved and soft-surface path on the other. It's not scenic in the postcard sense. It's useful, which is arguably better. If you've walked the dog from the Bala Cynwyd Park trailhead on Trevor Lane a hundred times and always doubled back at the same spot, you now have a reason to keep going.
What's Actually Waiting at the Other End
The building anchoring the trail's new terminus is Blayr, a 217-unit apartment property that opened for move-ins in March 2026 on the site of a Lord & Taylor that had sat empty since 2021. Lower Merion commissioner Louis Rossman, who represents Bala Cynwyd, has described the vacant department store as a visual blight on the corridor for years. He's since said he expects City Avenue to feel different after decades of going dark once the workday ends.
Blayr was built with the trail specifically in mind. Its amenity package includes a walking path that connects directly to the Cynwyd Heritage Trail, along with a pool, a golf simulator, and a pet spa. On the ground floor, Federal Realty has signed Chopt Creative Salad Co., the modern Lebanese fast-casual concept NAYA, and Hammer & Nails Grooming Shop to roughly 7,000 square feet of street-level retail, with openings rolling out through 2026. None of this replaces the area's existing anchor: Lark, the coastal Mediterranean restaurant from James Beard finalist and Top Chef winner Nicholas Elmi, has been drawing reservations to Righters Ferry Road for a few years now and remains the destination table in this part of Bala Cynwyd.
Put plainly, a walk that used to end at a dead stretch of rail bed now ends at a place you'd actually plan an evening around.
Meanwhile, Montgomery Avenue's Oldest Table Changed Hands
While City Avenue was filling in, Montgomery Avenue was losing a fixture. Aldar Bistro, the Lebanese and Mediterranean restaurant the Wakim family has run at 281 Montgomery Avenue for 34 years, is closing to make way for a new Southern Italian restaurant called Bruzi. Joseph Wakim, who owns the restaurant with siblings Michel, George, and Fadia, said he turned down roughly ten previous offers before agreeing to sell to this particular buyer.
"We all grow older, and it's time to step aside."
The buyers are two Philadelphia couples with roots in Cosenza, in Calabria: Luciano and Tania Spensierato, and Marco Mondello and Anna Bellizzi. Luciano and Marco both worked behind the bar at Gran Caffè L'Aquila in Center City for close to a decade before deciding to open their own place. Tania has said Bala Cynwyd checked every box the group was looking for.
"Bala Cynwyd and Lower Merion really fit that vision. The location on Montgomery Avenue was exactly what we were looking for."
The name Bruzi refers to the ancient people of the Calabria region, and the menu is expected to lean into that heritage with house-made pastas, regional cheeses, cured meats, and slow-cooked ragùs, backed by an opening wine list of roughly 100 Italian bottles and a craft cocktail program. Aldar will stay open through the transition. Wakim expected the liquor license transfer to Lower Merion Township to wrap up this month, with about two months of renovation to follow and an opening targeted for late October or November. The family isn't leaving the neighborhood. Murray's Deli, next door to Aldar, continues under the Wakims, as does Evviva, their catering and private-events venue in nearby Narberth.
One Walk, Two Different Endings
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only track one end of town. Bala Cynwyd now has two active transitions happening at the same time, and the trail happens to run between them. Start at the Cynwyd Station trailhead on a Saturday morning and you can walk north into the West Laurel Hill Cemetery's Cameo Gardens, a stretch that reopened in late 2024 with new picnic tables, benches, and more than a hundred new trees and shrubs planted along the Barmouth Gateway. Or head the other direction, south past Bala Cynwyd Park's historic stone farmhouse and its dog-friendly loop, and you'll come out at Bala Station and City Avenue in time for a Chopt salad or a pass through Lark's dining room.
By the time Bruzi opens its doors this fall, the same resident could plausibly walk the new trail extension for lunch at NAYA one weekend and drive four minutes to Montgomery Avenue for house-made pasta the next. That's not a coincidence of timing so much as a sign of where investment in this corner of Lower Merion Township is actually flowing: into the connective tissue between destinations, not just the destinations themselves.
There's more coming, too, though it's moving slower. Township officials have been working for a couple of years now on a further connection through a Norfolk Southern tunnel that would link the Cynwyd Trail to the Pencoyd Trail and, eventually, the Manayunk Bridge and the broader Circuit trail network across the region. The tunnel itself is passable today, but a fully built, funded connection is still in progress. Worth checking back on, but not yet the thing to plan a Saturday around.
For now, the story is simpler than a master plan. A trail that used to turn you around finally goes somewhere. And the restaurant row on Montgomery Avenue that's been a fixture for three decades is about to feel different too, just a few months apart.
If you're weighing what a changing corner of Bala Cynwyd means for your own address, whether you're thinking about buying nearby or wondering how a stretch like this affects the value of a home you already own, Larisa Bevan has spent years watching these Main Line shifts translate into real numbers. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
