The New Bakery on Haddon Avenue Opens the Same Day as the Festival, and the Overlap Wasn't the Plan
Walk past the old McMillan's storefront on Haddon Avenue this week and you'll still see brown paper taped over most of the glass. A Pinocchio figure stands in one window, a stand-in for the animal statues that have long marked the original Del Buono's storefront in Haddon Heights. Inside, crews are finishing what township records call a bread-and-pastry shop conversion, the kind of phrase that undersells what's actually happening on this corner. For 86 years this was McMillan's Bakery, a family-run shop that closed for good in May 2025. Whatever opens here now inherits that history whether it wants to or not.
What most residents don't know yet is why the reopening lands on August 29, a Saturday that already belongs to something else entirely. Haddon Avenue closes that same day for the town's Summer of Love festival. Two storylines, one block, one date. The natural assumption is that somebody planned it that way. They didn't.
McMillan's ran for close to nine decades, 86 years by the count in one Philadelphia Inquirer photo caption, before its family owners closed the doors. The building sat empty until Haddon Heights entrepreneur Tom Whitman, who bought the century-old Del Buono's Bakery brand in 2013 and later added Carmen's Deli to his holdings, pursued the site for his newest concept. The township's planning and zoning board approved the conversion at its April 2 meeting, with a formal statement following on April 6 that called the corner one that "has meant so much to the community." The plan on file includes two apartments above the retail space, a detail that quietly signals this isn't a simple facade refresh but a full rebuild from the ground up.
Whitman is bringing some of the old shop's staff back with him. One of the returning employees is Doug Biemiller, grandson of McMillan's founders George and Evelyn McMillan, which means the family whose name was on the awning for 86 years will still have someone behind the counter, even if the sign now reads Del Buono's.
Here's the part that separates a marketing stunt from an accident of scheduling. Whitman had originally been aiming for a February opening this year. Construction ran long, and as of late July, with construction still underway on the site, he was targeting a soft opening in mid-August followed by a grand opening celebration on August 29. That date is not a promotional tie-in to the festival. It is where the calendar landed after a rebuild that took twice as long as planned and cost more than he first budgeted, with an original estimate of $1.5 to $2 million growing to a final figure north of $2 million by the time the project wrapped.
"I'm like a little kid waiting for Christmas," Whitman told the Inquirer as the August deadline approached. That's the voice of someone who's been chasing a finish line, not someone who circled a festival date on a marketing calendar and worked backward.
The shop's second identity will operate under one roof with the first. A 900-square-foot section is reserved for DiBartolo's Kakery, run by cake artist Al DiBartolo, a Woolwich resident who most recently served as chief baking officer at Cherry Hill's Classic Cake. DiBartolo built his regional reputation over years of wedding and celebration cakes, and nationally he's known as the winning team captain on Food Network's Halloween Wars, a competition his team took with a $50,000 grand prize. He'll offer custom cakes, wedding consultations, and decorating classes from the new space. Whitman plans to staff the combined operation with 20 to 40 workers between full and part time roles, a scale that reflects a corner reopening as something considerably larger than the bakery that closed there in 2025.
None of that construction timeline had anything to do with the Summer of Love 60s-70s-80s Music Festival, which returns to Haddon Avenue on its own long-standing schedule. The festival runs from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on the same Saturday, closing the avenue between Strawbridge Avenue and Cooper Street for a free, all-ages day built around five tribute acts: Invasion 65, Dancin Machine, Priceless, Boy Band Project, and B Street Band, who close out the night.
Mayor Randall Teague has described the event as one that "captures the energy of Haddon Township," and the format backs that up. A beer garden curated around South Jersey craft brewers runs alongside the main stage. A kid zone with a dance dome and bounce houses keeps the day from tilting entirely toward an adult crowd. Once the sun goes down during the closing sets, the event shifts into an all-ages glow party, with neon giveaways passed through the crowd as B Street Band plays its final set. The whole thing sits close enough to the Westmont PATCO station that plenty of attendees skip parking altogether and walk in from the platform.
Haddon Avenue between Strawbridge and Cooper has anchored the town's downtown drinking and dining scene for years, independent of any single event. The Business Improvement District has run its own seasonal crawls along this same stretch, pulling together regulars like PJ Whelihan's Pub, Brewer's Towne Tavern, The Taproom and Grill, Treno Pizza Bar, The Pour House, Duo Restaurant & Bar, Central Taco & Tequila, Reunion Hall, and Tom Fischer's Tavern. Those crawls happen on their own separate dates through the year, not on August 29, but the same names are the reason this corridor already draws a crowd on an ordinary weekend, festival or not. On a Saturday when the street itself is barricaded for a stage and a beer garden, residents heading toward the music will be walking directly past all of them.
That existing density is worth sitting with for a second. A three-block stretch of a single New Jersey avenue supports a beer bar that's run since the early days of the craft movement, a 5,000-square-foot beer hall built out of a former auto parts store, at least four full-service taverns, and now a bakery rebuild that topped two million dollars in construction costs alone. Haddon Avenue isn't absorbing new investment because a festival is coming. The festival works because the investment was already there.
The honest read on August 29 is that Haddon Township didn't engineer a synchronized launch. A civic tradition that predates the bakery's construction happened to land on the same Saturday a delayed buildout finally cleared its last hurdle. That's a more useful thing to know than a coincidence dressed up as strategy, because it tells you something true about how this stretch of town actually works. Businesses here don't need an event to justify opening. The corridor generates its own foot traffic on a normal Tuesday, which is exactly why a family bakery empty for over a year could support a rebuild this size and why a cake artist with a national television resume chose to plant his next chapter inside it rather than somewhere with less established weekday demand.
For anyone who already calls Haddon Township home, the practical note is simple: expect Haddon Avenue between Strawbridge and Cooper to be closed to cars from early afternoon through 10 p.m. on August 29, expect a crowd that spills well past the barricades, and expect a new bakery counter to be doing brisk business in the middle of it, whether or not that was ever the plan.
Watching a corner like this change hands, sit empty, and come back larger than before is part of what makes a town worth paying close attention to over time. Holly Garber has spent nearly two decades reading these shifts across Haddon Township and the surrounding South Jersey communities she works in, the kind of detail that matters whether you're simply curious about your own street or eventually weighing a move of your own. If that day comes, Begin the Conversation.
Whether you are preparing to sell, searching for your next home, planning a renovation, or exploring an investment opportunity, I welcome a confidential conversation about your goals.
