Wedding DJ at The Ballroom at Ellis Preserve in Newtown Square, PA

The Space

Charles E. Ellis made his fortune running trolleys in Philadelphia, eventually becoming president of the company that grew into SEPTA, and when he died in 1909 he left the bulk of his estate to found a school for fatherless girls. That school, built in Newtown Square, opened in 1923 and operated until 1977, and the Greek revival building that now holds the ballroom was raised in 1932 as part of its campus, designed by architect John T. Windrim, whose father had designed buildings at Girard College.

The building’s towering columns and the vaulted ceilings inside are original to that 1932 construction, not a later addition dressed up to look historic. After the school closed, the 313-acre campus passed through a $6.1 million sale to Atlantic Richfield before Equus Capital Partners bought it in 2004 and redeveloped it as Ellis Preserve, a mixed-use community. Finley Catering opened the Ballroom to the public in fall 2016, its fourth historic landmark venue.

Capacity & Layout

The ballroom seats 230 for a full dinner and holds up to 400 for a cocktail-style event, a wide enough range that the same room can host an intimate seated reception or a larger standing celebration depending on which format a couple chooses. The vaulted ceilings and warm lighting inside give the room scale without it reading as a bare hall, which matters at the upper end of that capacity range.

Outdoor ceremony grounds and landscaped patios sit on the wider 13-acre Ellis Preserve campus, the same acreage that was registered as an arboretum back in 1936 under horticulturist Mendelson Meehan and still carries 600 varieties of trees. That gives a couple a genuinely planted, mature landscape for photography and an outdoor ceremony, rather than lawn newly seeded around a modern building.

Amenities

An on-site bridal suite is available for the wedding party, and the entire venue, including the historic building, is wheelchair accessible throughout, worth knowing given how many older Philadelphia-area venues were never retrofitted for that. Ample on-site parking is available with valet service offered, useful at a venue drawing 230 to 400 guests where self-parking alone could get crowded.

Because the ballroom sits inside a nationally registered arboretum on a former school campus, the grounds carry a settled, planted quality that a newer venue cannot really replicate. Over 1,400 girls were educated on this campus between 1923 and 1977, and the building’s continued use as a public gathering space is a fairly direct extension of what it was originally built for.

Location & Getting There

The venue sits in Newtown Square, in Delaware County, on the broader Ellis Preserve property that Equus Capital Partners built out as a mixed-use community after 2004. That redevelopment kept the historic buildings standing while adding the infrastructure, including parking and access roads, that make hosting a large wedding here logistically straightforward.

We have worked this room, and the combination of a vaulted ceiling with hard architectural surfaces gives the ballroom real presence for sound, carrying a DJ’s system cleanly across a full 400-guest cocktail crowd without needing much added reinforcement, while the outdoor patios nearby stay separate enough that music can shift in character between the ceremony and the reception.