Handel's Ice Cream: From Youngstown to Philadelphia's Main Line

In 1945, Alice Handel started selling her handmade ice cream in a corner of her husband's gas station on the South Side of Youngstown, Ohio.

When the steel mills shut in the late 1970s, about 50,000 workers lost their jobs, people left in droves, and the gutted city became known for its poverty, corruption, and crime.

Yet Handel's Ice Cream not only survived, it thrived. The company now operates 32 stores in six states, including one on Lancaster Avenue in Berwyn.

So how did an ice cream stand that originated in a hardscrabble place like Youngstown end up on Philadelphia's storied Main Line?

Many left Youngstown to find prosperity elsewhere, but it turns out that some of them brought Handel's with them.

This includes Buck Buchanan, who opened the Handel's Ice Cream in Berwyn in 2005. Buchanan, 62, used to ride his bike to Handel's to enjoy a drippy cone of the buttery chocolate pecan ice cream, still the top-selling flavor in Youngstown.

"I would never leave Youngstown without stopping there," said Buchanan, who moved to suburban Philadelphia after college.

Buchanan always thought Handel could do more with her business. When he was in college, he asked her why she didn't open a second store. She brought him inside to see equipment held together with rubber bands and paper clips. She could hardly keep up with the lines she had, let alone think about opening another shop, she told him.

In the 1950s, Handel had moved her ice cream stand out of the gas station and across the street - farther from traffic as she worried about the safety of children waiting for ice cream - but she operated just one store.

Lenny Fisher, who bought the company from Handel in 1984, had befriended her after he moved from Brooklyn to Youngstown in 1972 to open a sandwich shop with a friend.

He'd help her move the 32-pound containers of ice cream after watching Handel, by then an elderly woman, sling each one up on her hip.

Fisher still uses Handel's recipes, and he had her ancient equipment reproduced and modernized in Italy.

The business expanded slowly, with a few stores popping up in Ohio by the 1990s. In the last decade, more former Youngstown residents have called to ask Fisher for franchise rights, and the company has opened shops on both coasts.

Buchanan, who worked in the fire-protection business, spent three years looking for the perfect location - an old auto-repair garage on Lancaster Avenue that he renovated.

On a recent Sunday, people lined up by the dozens at all three open windows at the Handel's in Berwyn. Children ate cones with pink scoops of cotton candy-flavored ice cream, and workers in white shirts handed scoops of butter pecan and chocolate chunk through windows to families waiting outside. A sign offered a visual primer on a very Ohio-centric flavor called "Buckeye," named after the chocolate-peanut butter candies shaped like the nut of Ohio's state tree.

Handel's Ice Cream is hard serve, but it's never hard. The softness is one characteristic that sets the brand apart.

Although company executives won't give up their secrets, they attribute the silky texture to the ice cream's freshness. Each location makes ice cream fresh every day; it is never packed and shipped, which can allow the ice cream to thaw and refreeze.

"That makes a big difference," Fisher said.

And they use high-quality ingredients: Belgian chocolate, whole roasted pecan halves, and cherries and peaches they mix in by hand.

There's also a sense of nostalgia that makes people want to open a Handel's in their neighborhood.

"With the franchise operators, 90 percent of them grew up in Youngstown and then moved away," said Jim Brown, Handel's chief operating officer. "They all had the ice cream growing up and they didn't find ice cream anything near what they had" at Handel's.