Manheim Township's Oregon Pike Corner Just Took Six Years to Fill

Drive past Shoppes at the Point on Oregon Pike lately and you'll notice new signage going up in the corner unit that sat blank for years, the one that always seemed to be "coming soon" to something. If you've lived in Manheim Township long enough, you already know not to get excited the first time a storefront changes its window paper. This corner has taught residents patience. It just took six years to actually finish filling.

Here's the timeline, because it matters more than the headline tenant does.

The corner that took six years

A.C. Moore, the craft store that used to anchor 1515 Lititz Pike, closed its doors in 2020. For a while, that left one large, dark storefront sitting at a signalized intersection where Oregon Pike meets Lititz Pike, a corner busy enough that you'd think someone would snap it up fast. Nobody did, not all at once.

Planet Fitness took the first bite, opening in part of that old A.C. Moore footprint in late 2023, filling roughly 17,000 square feet with cardio equipment and circuit stations. That left a smaller corner unit, the one actually facing Oregon Pike, sitting empty for two more years.

Then, in December 2025, Grotto Pizza, a Delaware-based chain that's been slinging pies in Rehoboth Beach since 1960, announced it would take that remaining corner for its first Lancaster County location. Every other Pennsylvania Grotto Pizza sits up in the Wilkes-Barre area. This is the chain's first real move into Central Pennsylvania, and Manheim Township is where it's landing.

Construction started earlier this year, and LancasterOnline reported in late April that the build-out was on track to wrap by mid-August, with the restaurant opening about a month after that. That puts the grand opening in the back half of this month, which means the doors are likely swinging open within the next couple of weeks.

Add it up and the same shopping center anchor that went dark in 2020 won't be fully re-tenanted until 2026, and it took two separate businesses, a gym and a pizza sports bar, to do it. That's the actual rhythm of retail change on this stretch of Oregon Pike. It isn't a ribbon-cutting event. It's a slow, staged backfill that plays out over years, one lease at a time.

What actually opens this month

The new Grotto Pizza occupies about 4,900 square feet right next to Planet Fitness, in the corner unit facing Oregon Pike. Company president Jeffrey Gosnear has said the Manheim Township location will follow the model of most Grotto Pizza spots back in Delaware, meaning a sports bar setup alongside standard dine-in and carryout service. If you've never had it, the chain is known for a distinctive circular swirl of sauce on its pizzas, a detail longtime Delaware beach-goers will recognize immediately and everyone else will just have to try.

Shoppes at the Point itself is a 70,135-square-foot center sitting in a dense cluster of retail along Route 222, near Lancaster Shopping Center and within a short drive of Golden Triangle and Hawthorne Centre. It's not a destination in the way Long's Park's restaurant row has become. It's more of a workhorse corner, the kind of place you stop on the way home rather than plan an evening around. That's exactly why the six-year fill matters. Nobody was clamoring for this specific storefront. It just quietly, eventually, got used.

The same pattern, a mile down Manheim Pike

If you want a second data point on how this township actually handles empty commercial ground, look a mile or so away at the corner of Plaza Boulevard and Manheim Pike, next to McDonald's. The Board of Commissioners approved a new Wawa there back on December 19, 2025, a 6,000-square-foot building with two sit-down sections and a sidewalk planned around the property.

That approval is now more than eight months old. No public opening date has surfaced since. If the Oregon Pike timeline is any indicator of how long approvals here actually take to become working storefronts, that's not unusual. It's the pattern. Land gets approved, construction happens on its own schedule, and the corner fills when it fills. Residents who expect a fast turnaround on either project are measuring against a different township than the one they live in.

Why the slow fill actually works in this township's favor

It would be easy to read all this as a knock on the pace of development here. It isn't. The alternative to a slow, staged fill is the kind of half-abandoned strip center you see in townships that let one anchor tenant's departure gut an entire building for a decade. That hasn't happened on Oregon Pike. A.C. Moore's closure created a vacancy, and that vacancy got absorbed in pieces, first by a gym, then by a restaurant, without the building ever going fully dark or fully vacant for an extended stretch. Slow is not the same as stalled.

That distinction matters if you're the kind of resident who notices these things on your commute. The corner never looked abandoned. It looked like a work in progress, which, as it turns out, it was.

What hasn't changed while the storefronts churned

None of this touches the part of the township that actually stays the same year to year, which is the park system underneath it all. Manheim Township maintains 13 parks, and while Oregon Pike has been quietly renegotiating its tenant mix, places like these haven't needed a single announcement to stay part of the daily routine:

• Community Park, the township's first park, at 209 Petersburg Road, with a paved loop trail that circles athletic fields and a playground before crossing Route 722, a crossing with no marked crosswalk, so anyone walking it knows to look both ways twice.
• Skyline Park, just off Eden Road on Oregon Pike itself, home to the Skyline Pool and a lighted football field used by the local youth league.
• Stauffer Park, along Route 501, willed to the township by its former owners and still overseen by its own Board of Trustees. The Recreation Department runs its main office out of the historic mansion on-site, and the grounds include a restored carriage house, a formal garden, and, somewhat unusually, a pet cemetery.
• Overlook, the township's biggest draw for variety, with a pool, a golf course and mini-golf, a disc golf course, a skate park, and a dog park all on the same grounds.
• Perelman Park, tucked along the Conestoga River off Landis Valley Road, with a canoe launch and wetland plantings on land that used to house the American Paper Products Company.

Those parks aren't news. They're just there, the way they've been there through every lease signing and every empty storefront on Oregon Pike. That consistency is worth as much to daily life here as whatever opens next at Shoppes at the Point.

If you've been watching this corridor as closely as we have, you already know the corner will keep changing shape long after Grotto Pizza's opening week ends. That's just how Manheim Township works. It fills in slowly, and it holds onto its parks tightly, and both of those things are part of what makes this a place worth paying attention to.

If you're curious how corners like this one, or the parks around them, actually affect what a house is worth on a given street in Manheim Township, that's a conversation Ian Hey and Associates has all the time. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.