Page 15 - The Hunt - Summer 2024

MEMORANDUM
A Bucolic Boom
Chester County’s tiny Sadsburyville is growing (mostly) on its own terms.
By Kim Eckman Douglas Photos By Jim Graham
An older home looms near Lafayette Square’s luxury apartments.
Five miles west of Coatesville, at
the corner of what’s now Old Wilmington Road and Lincoln Highway (Route 30), the Sadsburyville Hotel dates to 1799. A 19th-century expansion was planned with the arrival of rail service, but troubles laying the track swung the Harrisburg Line south, sending travelers to the Stottsville Inn on Route 372 in Pomeroy. As a result, progress in Sadsburyville stalled, and the hotel went through a series of owners.
When Harry Lymberis bought the rundown hotel in 1973, the only thing it had going for it was its cocktail lounge. Emigrating from Greece to Coatesville in 1967, Lymberis had created a unique sauce that put the hot dogs made by his former employer, Midway Grill, on the map. Once he bought the hotel, Lymberis starting selling hot dogs out of the bar. “It was quiet all week, but it was booming
on Friday nights,” says his son, John.
In the 50 years since Lymberis and his wife,
Athena, opened Harry’s Hotdogs, they’ve added three dining rooms and a lounge to the original bar, and the building is now the focal point of a burgeoning burg. The population of six-square- mile Sadsbury Township saw just single-digit increases for 40 years until 2000, when it jumped to 2,582. It’s now at an estimated 4,125.
Hundreds of new single-family homes, townhouses and luxury apartments have blanketed what was once rolling farmland. Two business parks have emerged, creating jobs and increasing demand for restaurants, daycare and other services. Perhaps the most telling sign of growth: Two traffic lights have gone up along the Sadsbury segment of Route 30, the nation’s third longest highway, running from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.
“Our concern the whole time has been,
‘How do we do this and make it nice?’” says John, whose entrepreneurial spirit was sparked by a childhood working alongside his parents.
A Coatesville Area Senior High School graduate, John came away from his time
at Temple University with a degree in architecture. Now 55, he was 25 years old and living near Harrisburg when he got the fateful call from his mother in 1994. Somebody
had told Athena about a new public sewer system coming to Sadsburyville that could cost residents $8,000 per tap. “She told me, ‘I don’t know what that is, but you have to come here and figure it out,’” John recalls. “I told [then township supervisor] Doug Durat that nobody was going to go for those costs.”
John knew a little something about business, and he obviously had a grasp of architecture. His senior thesis on adaptive reuse included a master plan for developing
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