Where to Stay in Abington, Pennsylvania

What is Abington known for?

Its galleries and grounds give Abington a public front, while the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center adds a second institution whose subject reaches well past Montgomery County. Older fabric survives in the Richard Wall House. Two congregations carry the Fox Chase name, Fox Chase United Methodist Church and Fox Chase Memorial Presbyterian Church.

Northeast Philadelphia begins at the line.

What are the main landmarks in Abington?

The Abington Art Center is the address most visits start from. Its galleries and grounds sit in a township whose remaining holdings are domestic or religious rather than monumental, and the Richard Wall House carries what survives of the older fabric. The Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center is the other institution of substance.

Fox Chase United Methodist Church and Fox Chase Memorial Presbyterian Church hold the Philadelphia edge. Nothing here is on a grand scale.

What is the history of Abington?

What survives here is built, not written. No charter year travels with the name, and what stands for the early township is a scatter of surviving houses rather than a founding document, the Richard Wall House chief among them. Montgomery County held it first.

Philadelphia grew out to meet the township rather than the other way round, and the boundary with Northeast Philadelphia became a line on a map instead of a break in the streets. That absorption set everything after it. Density followed.

Among Montgomery County's townships only Cheltenham Township ended up more tightly built, and only Lower Merion Township carries more people, which is a measure of how completely the Philadelphia metropolitan area closed around this ground. Institutions followed the building. The Abington Art Center took on the cultural role, the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center the commemorative one, and the Fox Chase congregations, Fox Chase United Methodist Church and Fox Chase Memorial Presbyterian Church, kept an older parish structure going as the township filled in around them.

Little of that reads as historic on the street. Abington's past is in its house lots and its parish lines rather than in monuments, which is the ordinary condition of a township on the edge of a large city.

Where is Abington?

Abington Township occupies a compact block of Montgomery County, hard against the Northeast Philadelphia line, and the built fabric carries on across the boundary without any real break. No open country separates them. Among Montgomery County's townships only Cheltenham Township is built more tightly, and only Lower Merion Township holds more people, which puts Abington well inside the Philadelphia metropolitan area rather than out past its rim.

The township covers a small area.

What is the climate of Abington?

Philadelphia's weather is Abington's weather. The township presses straight against Northeast Philadelphia, and a metropolitan area of that size shares one temperate calendar across the whole of it, so nothing in the seasons marks this ground off from the blocks over the city line. The northern temperate band governs it.

Summer heat settles into closely built streets more readily than into open country, and the grounds of the Abington Art Center are where the shade is worth having.

How do you get to Abington?

Arrival runs through Philadelphia. The township shares a boundary with Northeast Philadelphia, so the approach is a city approach followed by a few minutes of suburban road, and no separate long-distance route serves Abington on its own account. Montgomery County roads handle the rest.

The Abington Art Center and the Richard Wall House both sit within a short drive of that crossing, and a car covers the township comfortably in an afternoon.