The Building at 23rd and Fairmount Is Finally Getting a Tenant

Walk down Fairmount Avenue from the Art Museum toward Broad Street and for six years one corner has refused to join the rest of the block. The storefront at 23rd and Fairmount, the old home of London Grill, has sat dark since the restaurant closed in May 2019. Everything around it kept moving. That corner didn't. Now, according to building owner Jack McDavid, it finally is.

The reason this matters isn't nostalgia for a restaurant most current residents never ate at. It's timing. By the time whatever comes next opens its doors, it will be filling the last empty storefront on a stretch of avenue that has already turned over almost entirely around it. That sequence, last instead of first, tells you something about how this corridor actually fills in.

Six Years Is a Long Time to Leave a Corner Dark

London Grill wasn't a small loss. It was the kind of address longtime residents mention by name when they talk about what Fairmount used to feel like. Its closing in 2019 left a gap on one of the avenue's most visible corners, and that gap sat through a pandemic, through a wave of new ownership up and down the street, and through enough turnover elsewhere that its emptiness started to look permanent.

McDavid told the Inquirer this month that he's readying the space for a new tenant. No name, no menu, no opening date has been confirmed. What's confirmed is that the block's longest-standing vacancy is finally in motion, which puts it roughly six years behind everything else that has already reopened around it.

Everything Around It Already Turned Over

That's the part worth sitting with. While 23rd and Fairmount sat empty, the rest of the avenue didn't wait for it. A short walk in either direction turns up a run of openings and reinventions that happened while that one corner stayed frozen:

• Manong, a Filipino-American steakhouse from Tabachoy owner Chance Anies, opened at 1833 Fairmount Avenue.
• Javelin took over a former sushi spot with a full cocktail and wine program built by Richie Tray of the Library Bar.
• Ios Restobar replaced the restaurant Fare with a bright renovation and a Greek menu.
• Stone's Beer & Beverage Market, a 70-year-old fixture, reopened after a full renovation.
• Fairmount Tavern, once a dive bar with a reputation as a Charles Bukowski hangout, got new owners, a curated beer list, and a facelift, while keeping a whiskey pour named after its old regular.

None of these openings needed London Grill's return to happen. They happened on their own timeline, business by business, while the avenue's most recognizable vacancy just sat there. That's the actual shape of how this street rebuilds itself. It isn't one anchor pulling everyone else along. It's a lot of smaller bets landing first, with the biggest, longest-dark space arriving last because it took the longest to solve.

A Few Blocks West, a Bigger Bet on the Same Idea

The other project underway on Fairmount Avenue makes the same point from a different angle. Developer Yoav Shiffman bought the former Rite Aid at 20th and Fairmount out of the chain's bankruptcy auction and is building a three-story, 28-unit apartment project on the site with roughly 9,000 square feet of ground-floor retail split across five commercial spaces, ranging from about 1,300 to 3,000 square feet.

What Shiffman has said publicly about his plans for that retail is the interesting part. He's told local press he wants the ground floor filled by businesses oriented toward the neighborhood itself, the kind that draw steady foot traffic from people who already live within a few blocks, rather than destination restaurants built to pull diners in from other parts of the city. That's a deliberate bet against the model that built Fairmount Avenue's most talked-about openings over the past few years, which have leaned hard into being reasons to visit from elsewhere. Shiffman is building for the opposite instinct: retail meant to serve people who are already home.

Whether that bet pays off will say something about which version of Fairmount Avenue wins out over the next few years, the corridor as a dining destination or the corridor as a place where daily errands happen on foot. Both projects, the reactivated London Grill space and the new construction a few blocks west, are answers to the same underlying question about what this stretch of avenue is for.

The Calendar Fills In Around the Storefronts

The businesses aren't operating in isolation either. Park to Broad, the nonprofit that has organized Fairmount and Girard Avenue's commercial corridors since its earlier life as the Fairmount Community Development Corporation, runs a full calendar built around these storefronts: the Fairmount Arts Crawl, the Girard Avenue Street Fest, Girard Second Saturdays, and Taste of Fairmount, which residents consistently describe as their favorite night of the year, a chance to sample the neighborhood's restaurants block by block and talk shop with the owners themselves.

The organization's monthly business roundup keeps tracking what's still shifting. Its August update flagged the GPS Fest at Lemon Hill, a Cooper DeJean look-alike contest hosted by Libertee Grounds ahead of Eagles season, a new small business called Holland & Milan Organics selling handmade skincare, and a fresh 1,042-square-foot retail buildout on Ridge Avenue. Lemon Hill itself is also getting a new playground installed this fall, part of the park improvements that continued after the spring's event season wrapped.

None of that is destination news. It's the texture of a neighborhood that keeps generating small, specific reasons to pay attention, week to week, corner to corner.

What the Last Vacancy Actually Confirms

Put it together and the London Grill news reads differently than a single restaurant reopening. It's confirmation that the avenue's slowest-to-heal storefront is now moving on the same timeline as everything faster around it. Manong, Javelin, Ios Restobar, Stone's, and Fairmount Tavern already proved the corridor could fill in without waiting for its most visible vacancy to resolve. The Rite Aid site a few blocks away is testing whether the next wave of retail serves visitors or neighbors. And 23rd and Fairmount, the corner that took six years longer than everyone else, is finally catching up.

For anyone who has walked past that dark storefront for the better part of a decade, that's the story worth watching this year. Not what opens there, not yet, but the fact that it's opening at all, on a street that had already moved on without it.

If you're keeping an eye on how blocks like this one are shifting, and what that means for property values on streets that turn over storefront by storefront rather than all at once, Evangeline Gambardella tracks these changes across Fairmount and the surrounding Art Museum corridor as they happen. Reach out for a free home valuation if you're curious what a block like this one means for your own address.