Fall Evenings in Wallingford: A New French BYOB, an Old Trail, and a Working Arts Center

For years, a Wallingford Friday night meant picking one thing. Dinner, or a gallery opening, or a walk along Crum Creek before the light went. The pieces existed. They just did not sit close enough to string together on a single evening without a car trip in the middle.

That changed last October, and the reason is a restaurant most Delaware County residents have already read about in the Inquirer. Once you place it on the map next to the Community Arts Center and the north end of the Leiper-Smedley Trail, a very particular kind of fall evening becomes possible inside a fifteen-minute drive.

What actually changed at 21 N. Providence Road

Chefs Lee Styer and Jessie Prawlucki-Styer reopened Fond on October 16 at 21 N. Providence Road in Wallingford, in the space previously occupied by La Cannelle Café. The couple ran Fond on East Passyunk for twelve years before the pandemic closed it in 2021, and they moved to Media about three years ago and had been looking for the right room the whole time. The Wallingford room is about the same footprint as the original Center City space, seating around 40 with a large patio and plenty of parking.

Two details matter for how residents will actually use this place.

• It is a BYOB, which changes the math on a Wednesday night out considerably.
• Current hours run Wednesday through Sunday, 5 to 9 pm, so this is a dinner destination, not a lunch stop or a walk-in-at-9:30 option.

The lineage is what makes the opening unusual for a Nether Providence commercial corner. Styer and Prawlucki-Styer met as students at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and later worked together for Georges Perrier at Le Bec-Fin before opening their own restaurant. Delaware County does not routinely land chefs with that resume on a Providence Road storefront. The relevant question for someone who already lives here is not whether Fond is good. It is what to do with the ninety minutes before or after.

The fifteen-minute triangle

Pull up a map and drop pins on three addresses:

• Fond BYOB, 21 N. Providence Road
• Community Arts Center, 414 Plush Mill Road
• Leiper Historic House and the north trailhead of the Leiper-Smedley Trail, 521 Avondale Road

They form a small triangle inside 19086, all within a few minutes of each other by car and connected on foot by the trail itself. The Leiper-Smedley Trail is a six-foot-wide, paved, multi-use trail that links the historic Leiper House and Park to Smedley Park, and allows access to Strath Haven High School, the middle school, and the Community Arts Center. The Arts Center literally sits along the route.

That last fact is the one most residents forget. You can park at the CAC, walk a piece of the trail, and be back for a 7 pm concert without having driven anywhere in between.

The Community Arts Center calendar is more active than most residents realize

The Community Arts Center is tucked into the hills of Wallingford in a 130-year-old estate that was once the home of a businessman who made his fortune selling hearth tiles, and it now hosts hundreds of artists of all ages. Founded in 1948, it serves more than 18,000 people a year through classes, exhibitions, outreach, and festival partnerships, with 2,800-plus students enrolled annually.

A few things are worth knowing before you buy a ticket to anything else this fall:

1. The Duke Gallery is free and rotates constantly. Opened in 2008, the 3,100-square-foot Duke Gallery hosts 8 to 10 main exhibits a year, each free. If you have not been inside in a year, the show has turned over roughly ten times.
2. Music is a real part of the program, not an afterthought. The Center hosts Friday Night Live concerts, Tri-State Jazz Society concerts, and the Tie-Dye Music Festival across the year.
3. Fall Fest is the anchor event. The festival combines a fine arts and crafts market with an open house featuring live music, tours, artist demonstrations, kids activities, and food vendors, indoor and outdoor depending on weather, with free admission.

Point three matters because Fall Fest is a legitimate reason to send out-of-town family down the driveway at 414 Plush Mill for a Saturday afternoon before dinner, which most residents default to a trip into Media for.

The trail as an evening decompressor

The Leiper-Smedley Trail is short by hiking standards and that is the point. It connects the Thomas Leiper House, built in 1785, to Smedley Park, running mostly shaded through the Crum Creek Valley and crossing the Blue Route on an overpass. Parking is available at either end, at Smedley Park at 20 Papermill Road or at the Leiper Historic House at 521 Avondale Road.

For a fall evening, walk the north end. You leave from the Leiper House side and you are moving under a canopy that turns hard in mid-October. The Thomas Leiper Estate itself is a National Register property. Built by Thomas Leiper circa 1785, the yellow-stuccoed mansion sits on a compound that includes a "Fireproof" vault, a communal outhouse, a barn, a carriage house, a smokehouse, a warehouse, a tenant's house, and a quarry. The house, Thomas Leiper's summer home when he was in the tobacco and railroad businesses, is open Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 1 to 4 pm from April through December, so October and November weekend walks still coincide with tour hours if you time it right.

A note on the surface, because the trail's reputation is inconsistent online. Sections south of Baltimore Pike are paved; north of the Pike the surface shifts to single-track worth exploring on foot. Choose the paved south stretch if you want to walk in dinner shoes.

The Furness library, after 5 pm

The other underused fall resource is the Helen Kate Furness Free Library, founded in 1902 and renovated in 2006, located in Wallingford. Weeknight programming runs later than most residents assume. Monday through Thursday hours run 10 am to 7 pm, with Friday and Saturday closing at 5. That is the difference between the library being a Saturday morning stop and a legitimate stop on the way home from work.

Two dates are already on the fall calendar. September 19 is the library's Well Red Event, and October 12 the building is closed for the holiday. If you have never made it to a Well Red, that is the year to try.

One way to put an evening together

Here is a template. Adjust for whether you have kids in tow or you are trying to keep the whole thing to two hours.

1. Park at the Leiper House lot at 521 Avondale Road by 4:30 pm.
2. Walk the paved south section of the trail toward Smedley Park. Turn around whenever the light starts to go.
3. Drive four minutes to 414 Plush Mill Road and step into whatever is currently hanging in the Duke Gallery. It costs nothing.
4. Drive four minutes to 21 N. Providence Road for a 6:30 reservation at Fond. Bring the bottle you have been meaning to open.

Nothing on that list existed as a coherent sequence two years ago because the anchor at the end of it did not exist as a coherent sequence two years ago. The trail was here. The Arts Center was here. The room at 21 N. Providence Road was a café. The change is quiet, and it is exactly the kind of change that reshapes what a resident's Saturday looks like without ever getting a press release.

Reading the fall the right way

The temptation with a piece like this is to fold in every farmers' market and pumpkin patch within driving distance. That is not the story in Wallingford this year. The story is that a very small stretch of Nether Providence has quietly become the kind of walkable dinner-and-something corridor most Delaware County residents assumed they had to go to Media or the Main Line to find. The distances have not moved. The addresses have.

If you have lived here for a while, the practical upshot is that you probably do not need to build your fall Saturdays around a drive north on I-476 anymore. If you have neighbors who still do, tell them what changed at 21 N. Providence Road.

If you are thinking about how your own address fits into the fall rhythm of this part of Delaware County, or how the arrival of restaurants like Fond and steady anchor institutions like the Community Arts Center shape the way homes here trade, Luxe Living by Sandy is happy to talk it through. Sandra McCulley has spent her career watching how the small changes on Providence Road turn into the reasons people stay. Get in Touch when you are ready.