A daily feature from our surrounding historical societies.
Some of you will remember the Green Baron garden center on Forty Foot Road in Kulpsville. It was a go-to place for many of us who had just moved into new homes in the 1970s.
The Green Baron, to many folks’ surprise, closed around 1995. (It still existed in 2000, as this story on the Towamencin pedestrian bridge from June 2000 states.)
At one point, some years earlier, the property was targeted to be part of the proposed North Penn Expressway, a road that was supposed to connect the Lansdale Interchange of the turnpike’s Northeast Extension with the northern terminus of the 309 Expressway near Spring House.
Major road projects were a big topic of discussion around here in the 1960s-70s era. None of them materialized as originally planned.
The limited access Route 202 expressway from Norristown to the Delaware River near New Hope, faced strong opposition from Solebury and Buckingham townships in Bucks County because residents feared it would change their rural way of life. Years later, the scaled down 202 parkway we have now between Lower/Upper Gwynedd and Doylestown is all that was ever built.
Then there was the Piedmont Expressway, which was supposed to connect the Lansdale Interchange with Route 309 just south of the Sellersville (Route 309) bypass near Souderton. That plan has dragged along by fits and starts for decades and is now nothing more than a series of improvements to existing roads.
Meanwhile, the North Penn Expressway plan died on the vine in the early 1980s after a number of properties like the Nor-Gwyn Pool on North Wales Road had been acquired by the state. There was too much local debate about the road, and the state and feds took their money elsewhere.
It’s something to think about when we’re backed up in traffic today.
