If you live along Camelback Road and feel like every construction fence and "coming soon" banner is stacked at either end of your commute, that's because it is. The corridor's 2026 activity has clustered at two poles: Central Avenue on the west and 32nd Street on the east. The stretch between them is holding steady, which makes the reorganization at the bookends easier to see once you know where to look.
Here is what has actually opened, what is close, and what to plan around this summer.
The West Anchor: Central and Camelback
Uptown Plaza turned 70 last year, and Levine Investments has treated the anniversary less as a celebration than as a permission slip to keep swapping tenants. The Henry Uptown, Fox Restaurant Concepts' second Phoenix location, opened at the corner in April 2025 on the site that once held Applebee's and, before that, Helsing's Coffee Shop. Salt & Straw followed the same year. Those two openings set the tone for 2026.
What the Plaza looks like right now, if you have not walked it since spring:
- Let's Toast opened its first brick-and-mortar location at Uptown Plaza this year. Founders Sumin Kim and Sean Atkinson built the concept around Korean BBQ breakfast sandwiches, including the Bulgogi Cheesesteak, after a long run at the Uptown Farmers Market.
- Road Runner Sports, the national running and walking retailer founded in 1983, opened alongside Let's Toast with its Fit Finder foot-scan technology on site.
- Lou Malnati's served its last deep-dish at the Plaza in February. Ownership has said something is planned for the space but has not named it.
- The Sleepy Whale, the Chandler beer bar and bottle shop, has filed a liquor license application with the City of Phoenix for 100 E. Camelback Road, Suite 160, the former Huss Brewing Uptown taproom. The company's website lists the location as coming soon.
Read those bullets together and a pattern shows up. The tenant mix is tilting away from national chain casual dining and toward Arizona-born concepts with a following that predates their storefront. Let's Toast is a farmers-market graduate. The Sleepy Whale is a Chandler independent expanding north. Manor, the footwear shop that has anchored the Plaza since 2016, was founded by Phoenix native Jeremy Davis. Even The Henry, which reads national, was built in Arcadia in 2013 before Sam Fox scaled it. The Plaza is being repopulated by operators who could point to their neighborhood before they signed a lease.
Two blocks away, the other piece of the west anchor is finally moving. One Camelback, the residential tower at Central and Camelback that stalled during the pandemic, was acquired by Mesa-based Kinella Capital and is now on track for completion. TK Stratton, Kinella's CEO, told KTAR the fitness center, clubhouse, atrium, and parking still needed finishing when his firm took over. Cushman & Wakefield's sale materials list 163 residences averaging 980 square feet, roughly 10,725 square feet of ground-floor retail, and a five-level subterranean garage. The retail component matters more for Plaza-adjacent residents than the apartments do. A decade-long hole in the streetscape at that corner is about to become a leasable frontage steps from the Camelback light rail station.
The East Anchor: 32nd and Camelback
Now drive four miles east. The northwest corner of Camelback and 32nd Street opened a new flagship branch of Arizona Financial Credit Union on February 20, 2026, at 3178 E. Camelback Road. The building is a renovation rather than new construction, but it took a corner that had been under-programmed for a long time and put a full-service branch on it.
The bigger local news for daily life is next door. PRESS Coffee is opening its 20th valley café in the same block, a 2,029-square-foot space with 38 indoor seats, a bookable conference room, and 48 outdoor seats under shade. The build-out is a partnership with Dalke Design Group and sits in a Presson Corporation property. Co-founder Jason Kyle framed the location as a "gathering spot to serve guests who live and work in the heart of the corridor," which is another way of saying they measured the density of nearby offices and residents and liked what they saw.
Two openings in one quarter at a single intersection is a small number. What makes it worth flagging is that 32nd and Camelback has been a quieter corner than its position deserves. It sits directly between the Biltmore's dining core to the west and the Arcadia restaurant row to the east, and for a long time it functioned as the pass-through in between. The 2026 additions turn it into a stop instead.
The corridor's two ends are picking up the same kind of tenant: independent operators with a valley track record, backed by landlords who have decided the surrounding rooftops justify the rent. The middle stretch, between roughly 16th and 24th Street, is not slowing down. It is simply not where the leasing energy landed this year.
What This Means for a Weekday
If your Saturday morning starts at Uptown Plaza and ends at Chula Seafood, the two new tenants extend the loop without stretching it. Let's Toast makes it easy to add breakfast on the way in. Road Runner Sports gives a reason to loop back through the Plaza after AJ's. The pending Sleepy Whale reopens the former Huss space for the kind of walk-in beer flight that Plaza foot traffic supported before the closure.
If your weekday commute passes 32nd and Camelback, PRESS Coffee lands directly on the drive. The 48-seat patio is meaningful. Most of the coffee options along this stretch are drive-through or counter-only, which limits their usefulness for a mid-morning meeting.
For anyone who works from home along the corridor, both openings shift the calculus of where you take a call outside the house. The PRESS conference room is bookable. The Views Terrace and Cholla meeting room at Sanctuary Camelback Mountain Resort & Spa in Paradise Valley, four minutes north, just came out of a $7 million renovation aimed at exactly this kind of group work. General Manager Laura McIver described the completion as a pivotal moment for the property. That is hotel language, but the underlying point is that there are more polished third places within a five-mile radius today than there were in January.
One Item for the Calendar
Cholla Trail on the north side of Camelback Mountain will be closed August 17 through 28, 2026, for the Cholla Sewer Diversion and Abandonment Project. The City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department is directing hikers to the Echo Canyon Trailhead at 4925 E. McDonald Drive during the closure. That is a two-week window in the hottest stretch of the year, so the practical effect is smaller than the map suggests. What matters is what comes after: the sewer work is infrastructure that removes an aging line from a sensitive area of the preserve, which is the kind of maintenance that quietly protects the trail's long-term availability. Echo Canyon reopened in December 2025 after its own two-month closure for boulder stabilization, so the mountain's usable inventory is fully restored in time for fall hiking season.
What to Watch Next
Three questions will decide how the corridor reads by early 2027.
- Which operator takes the Lou Malnati's space at Uptown Plaza. Ownership has hinted at "great things" without a name. The size of the room and its Camelback frontage suggest a full-service restaurant rather than a fast-casual replacement.
- Which retailers sign the ground floor at One Camelback. Roughly 10,725 square feet is enough for three or four small tenants or one anchor. A grocery-adjacent use would compete with AJ's Fine Foods across the street. A wellness or dining use would extend the Plaza's gravitational pull west.
- Whether the 32nd Street node picks up a second dining tenant. PRESS on its own is a coffee stop. Add one restaurant with an evening program and the corner becomes a destination rather than a waypoint.
None of these are guaranteed. All three are worth checking on the drive.
The through-line is simple. This is a corridor where 2026 gave the two ends new reasons to stop and left the middle to do what it already does well. If you live on Camelback Road, the practical read is that your daily radius just got two useful additions at 32nd Street, a handful more at Central Avenue, and one confirmed disruption at the mountain for the last two weeks of August.
If you are thinking about how your own address fits into what is happening on Camelback Road this year, Shawn Keeler at Russ Lyon Sotheby's International Realty is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
