Construction began in February 2023 on a new retail corner at Connecticut Avenue and Plyers Mill Road. Mezeh Mediterranean Grill held its grand opening there on August 27, 2026, about three and a half years later, and the last of the new restaurants had its doors open.
The detail that reshapes the picture is who signed the lease for the biggest unit in the building. M&T Bank, which had run its Kensington branch on Howard Avenue for years, agreed to move three-tenths of a mile down the road into the new development once it was ready. A bank doesn't relocate toward traffic that hasn't arrived yet. It relocates toward traffic that's already there, or traffic it's confident is coming.
Three Years, Four Tenants
The shopping center, now called Crossroads at Kensington, sat under a different working name for its first year of construction: Kensington Crossing. The developer switched to Crossroads at Kensington sometime in 2023, around the same point four tenants had already signed on for the property's roughly 11,000 square feet. From there, the storefronts filled in slowly, one at a time, over the following eleven months:
- September 23, 2025 — Buffalo Wild Wings GO opened with a ribbon-cutting and a wing giveaway for the first 100 people in line. It was the first fast-casual "GO" format location in Montgomery County and the third Buffalo Wild Wings overall in the county, joining locations in Gaithersburg and Rockville.
- Spring 2026 — Marathon Deli & Grill, a Greek restaurant that has run in College Park since 1972, opened its second location with a full bar, custom murals, and hours that stretch from morning to 11 p.m. seven days a week, as Bethesda Magazine noted in its May roundup of new county openings.
- August 27, 2026 — Mezeh Mediterranean Grill held its grand opening, giving away free bowls in two separate windows that day, according to MoCo Show. It became the center's fourth tenant to open its doors.
M&T Bank rounds out the roster as the anchor tenant, occupying the largest unit at 2,635 square feet. Its plan from the start was to close its Howard Avenue branch and move into the new space once construction wrapped. As of this year's run of grand openings, that's still the arrangement on the books: the bank signed on first, took the biggest footprint, and is staged to make the same move its restaurant neighbors already made.
The Bank That Crossed the Street
Howard Avenue is where Kensington's Antique Row lives, and it's also where M&T Bank has operated for years. A bank branch is one of the least sentimental businesses in any commercial district. It doesn't relocate for atmosphere or historic character. It goes where the daily transactions are, because daily transactions are its entire business model.
So when M&T Bank agreed to leave a spot on Howard Avenue, in the heart of the antiques district, for a spot on Connecticut Avenue next to a Safeway, a Dunkin, and three fast-casual restaurants, that's a specific kind of vote. It's a bet that the corner at Plyers Mill Road is where people are running errands on a Tuesday, not just where they're browsing on a Saturday.
What Fills a Shopping Center on a Tuesday
Look at what actually leased space at Crossroads at Kensington and a pattern shows up fast. Buffalo Wild Wings GO is built for pickup and delivery, not sit-down dining. Marathon Deli operates until 11 p.m. daily, closer to a lunch-and-dinner utility than a destination meal. Mezeh is a build-your-own bowl concept, the kind of place you go because it's fast and reliably good, not because you planned the evening around it. None of these are occasion restaurants. They're the kind of businesses that do their best volume on an ordinary weeknight, which is exactly the volume a bank branch wants to be near.
That fits the corridor these tenants moved into. The Safeway at 10541 Connecticut Avenue has been open daily from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. for years, and the older Kensington Shopping Center sits at 10506 Connecticut, just down the block. Connecticut Avenue near Plyers Mill Road already had daily foot traffic baked into it. The new center didn't invent that pattern. It added four more reasons to stop there on your way home.
Howard Avenue Still Runs on Saturdays
None of this makes Howard Avenue less worth visiting. It makes it worth visiting on a different schedule. The Kensington Farmers' Market still sets up every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Historic Train Station, 3701 Howard Avenue, with more than 20 vendors selling produce, prepared food, and flowers, as the Town of Kensington's own site describes. Antique Row itself spreads across Howard, Armory, and Fawcett, a stretch of small, owner-operated shops that's stood there long enough to be, by most accounts, the oldest antiquing district in the D.C. metro area.
One of those shops, Goldsborough Glynn Classic Furnishings & Finds, was recently featured in an HGTV roundup of antique stores that designers favor, a level of outside recognition that doesn't happen for a district that's simply coasting. K Towne Bistro still draws visitors who came for the antiques and stayed for dinner. At the same time, recent visitor reviews on travel sites are split on how full the district feels these days, with some longtime shoppers noting that a few of the larger storefronts on the west side have closed over the years, even as others still call it a hidden find worth an afternoon. That mixed read is worth holding onto rather than resolving one way or the other. Antique Row was never built to run at Tuesday-errand pace. It was built to run at Saturday-market pace, and by that measure, the farmers market, the antique shops, and the bistro are all still doing exactly what they were built to do.
Two Streets, Two Clocks
Kensington now has two commercial spines operating on two different schedules, and the M&T Bank relocation is the clearest evidence of which one handles which. Connecticut Avenue near Plyers Mill Road has become the daily-use corridor: banking, grocery runs, fast-casual dinner, all clustered within a few hundred feet of each other. Howard Avenue has stayed the weekly-use corridor: a farmers market that only exists on Saturday mornings, antique shops with hours built around weekend browsing, one restaurant that rewards a planned visit rather than a quick stop.
That's not a story about one street winning and the other losing. It's a story about a small town sorting itself into two rhythms instead of one, and a bank branch deciding it needed to be on the daily side of that split. If you've noticed the new construction on Connecticut Avenue without connecting it to anything happening on Howard, that's the piece that ties them together.
Understanding how a town organizes itself block by block, which corners carry the daily errands and which ones carry the weekend rituals, is the kind of detail The Velvel Group tracks across every part of the DMV we work in, Kensington included. If you're curious what else has shifted along Connecticut or Howard Avenue lately, reach out. We're paying attention to the same corners you are.
