Drive McKnight Road on a Saturday afternoon and you will spend most of your time watching brake lights. Turn off onto Babcock Boulevard two miles west and the traffic thins, the buildings shrink to one story, and the businesses stop having corporate headquarters somewhere else. Same township. Same zip code, mostly. Two completely different ideas of what a main street is for.
That split is not new. What is new is the paperwork. Ross Township keeps a running list of businesses that have filed to open, and the fall 2026 list makes the pattern impossible to miss: everything landing on the big commercial arteries this season is a chain, and everything landing on Babcock is a single storefront with someone's name on the lease.
What's Actually Opening This Fall, and Where
According to Ross Township's own opening-soon page, five businesses are in the pipeline right now. Dollar Tree is taking a spot on McKnight Road. BJ's Wholesale Club is opening on Northway Drive. Powerhouse Gym & Fitness is landing on Perry Highway. Those three are the kind of tenants that need a big parking lot and a regional supply chain behind them.
The other two are opening on Babcock Boulevard. Pellegrino's Pizza Shop is taking a spot at 3275 Babcock. Babcock Cafe is opening two doors down at 3288 Babcock. Neither one is a franchise. Both are the kind of business you can only run if you're the one behind the counter.
That's not a coincidence of timing. It's what the corridor has been sorting into for years, and this fall's filings just happen to make the sorting visible in one list.
Why the Big Footprints Keep Choosing McKnight
McKnight Road was built for scale, and it keeps proving it. Ross Park Mall opened in 1986 anchored by Macy's and Nordstrom, and nearly 40 years later it still runs roughly 170 stores, many of them high-end. The mall's newest addition is a Dick's House of Sport built onto the north end, the kind of format that needs acreage most storefronts on a two-lane road will never have.
A few blocks north, the former Northway Mall got a full redesign into The Block Northway, which now holds The Container Store, Nordstrom Rack, J.Crew Factory, Piada Italian Street Food, and a newly opened Paris Baguette. Every one of those tenants needs the same thing: a big box, a parking field, and a regional real estate strategy that treats Ross Township as one location among many.
That's the physical reason McKnight keeps landing chains. The format matches the format. A gym chain or a wholesale club doesn't want a narrow storefront on a quiet two-lane road. It wants exactly what McKnight, Perry Highway, and Northway Drive can offer.
What Grows on the Quieter Road Instead
Babcock Boulevard can't host a wholesale club, and it hasn't tried to. What it has instead is a run of small, single-location businesses that have been building reputations one regular customer at a time.
Wheelfish, on the residential stretch of Sangree Road just off Babcock, opened nine years ago and has built a following on live music, trivia nights, and a smoked barbecue menu that runs from pulled pork and brisket to a deep-fried deviled egg appetizer that keeps showing up in reviews. The owner has talked about expanding the outdoor patio so private parties can eat outside year-round, which tells you something about how much foot traffic a "hidden" spot on a side street can actually pull.
Sieb's Pub & Restaurant, a family-owned Irish pub and banquet space at 3382 Babcock, has held a 4.6-star rating built on homemade recipes rather than a corporate menu template. Down the road at 5439 Babcock, Red Orchid serves Thai comfort food out of a space small enough to feel like someone's dining room.
And then there's the North Hills Art Center, which has nothing to do with retail and everything to do with why Babcock feels different. It started in 1959 as an informal group founded by two stay-at-home mothers who wanted a place for artists to gather. The group bought its current building in 1968 and has run it as a nonprofit ever since, offering classes, workshops, and summer camps out of a building you can spot from the road by the mural painted across one side.
None of this happens on a corridor built for chains. It happens because Babcock's rents and footprints stayed small enough for individual owners to take a chance on a storefront, and because enough of those bets have paid off that new ones keep getting placed.
Here's the split laid out side by side:
| Corridor | Recent or incoming tenants | What the format demands |
|---|---|---|
| McKnight Road / Perry Highway / Northway Drive | Ross Park Mall (Macy's, Nordstrom, Dick's House of Sport), The Block Northway (Container Store, Nordstrom Rack, J.Crew Factory, Piada, Paris Baguette), Dollar Tree, BJ's Wholesale Club, Powerhouse Gym & Fitness | Large parking fields, regional or national ownership, high traffic counts |
| Babcock Boulevard | Wheelfish, Sieb's Pub & Restaurant, Red Orchid, North Hills Art Center, Pellegrino's Pizza Shop, Babcock Cafe | Single storefronts, owner-operators, lower traffic, walk-in familiarity |
The Park Where Both Sides of the Township Actually Meet
If McKnight and Babcock represent two different retail personalities, North Park is the one place in Ross Township where that distinction stops mattering. Everyone who lives here, whichever corridor they shop, ends up on the same trails eventually.
The Latodami Nature Center, tucked into the northwestern corner of North Park, runs a fall calendar built for exactly this kind of casual, repeat visit. This week brings a Birding Hike on September 23 and a Litter Cleanup volunteer day on September 24. September 26 is the busiest date on the calendar: an Arboretum Workday with the park rangers in the morning, timed to overlap with the Allegheny County Parks Foundation's Pour at the Park fundraiser that afternoon and evening, which combines a hands-on tree-planting session with a ticketed brews-and-bites festival built around live local music and a kids' activity zone. After that, the center's Tuesday Evening Hikes pick back up on October 6 and October 20, giving the calendar a second wind heading into fall.
None of this requires a membership or a reservation weeks out. It requires knowing the schedule exists, which is more than most people who don't live here will ever bother to learn.
One Township, Two Rhythms
The honest read on Ross Township this fall isn't that one corridor is winning and the other is losing. It's that the township has settled into two rhythms that don't compete with each other so much as run in parallel. McKnight Road will keep landing the tenants that need scale, because it's built to handle scale and has been since 1986. Babcock Boulevard will keep landing the ones that need a chance, because a small storefront and a loyal customer base are still enough to make a Pellegrino's or a Babcock Cafe worth opening.
If you've lived here a while, you already sort your errands this way without thinking about it: mall trip on McKnight, dinner reservation on Babcock, Saturday morning on the trail at Latodami. The opening-soon list just confirms that the township is sorting itself the same way, one lease at a time.
If you're weighing what a home in this part of the North Hills is actually worth, that kind of local texture matters as much as square footage. The Beth Danchek Group has spent decades reading North Hills neighborhood by neighborhood, corridor by corridor, and we're glad to walk you through what a specific block or a specific school boundary really means for your move. Ready to make your next move? Contact us today.