Drive Broadway between Euclid and Country Club today and the orange barrels are long gone. The medians are landscaped, the sidewalks are poured, and the six lanes that took years to build are just how the street works now. What's harder to see from behind the wheel is that three separate developers picked up three adjacent blocks of that same stretch and are filling them with three different ideas of what this corridor should become. None of them coordinated with each other. All three are happening at once, on blocks close enough to walk between.
If you live in 85716, that's the part worth understanding, not just the list of what opened last month.
What's Already Open
Some of the new storefronts are simple enough. You've probably already noticed a few:
- Stacks Book Club opened in May 2026 in the former Austin's Ice Cream building at 2920 E. Broadway, a midcentury structure with roots back to 1959. The owners kept the original red brick and unfinished concrete floors and packed nearly 4,000 square feet with roughly 6,000 books.
- Black Rock Coffee now occupies the corner at Campbell and Broadway, in the spot that used to be a Starbucks.
- Freddy's Frozen Custard and Steakburgers built out the former El Parador site at 2744 E. Broadway, one of the few parcels on this stretch large enough to have supported housing under the current zoning, and instead became a drive-through restaurant.
- Hairmosa Salon, at 2425 E. Broadway, opened at the start of 2020 and made it through both the construction dust and the pandemic that followed a few months later. The owners have said they intend to stay on Broadway.
- Inglis Florists, at 2362 E. Broadway, kept its doors open through the entire widening project by directing customers to park in the alley out back. That habit has stuck even now that street parking is easier to come by.
- Rocco's Little Chicago Pizzeria, a longtime fixture of the strip, is working with Rio Nuevo to build a new, larger location nearby.
That's the easy version of this story. The more interesting one is what's happening on the three blocks that got redeveloped wholesale rather than storefront by storefront.
Three Blocks, Three Different Bets
Rio Nuevo, the city's downtown redevelopment agency, ended up owning 39 properties along this corridor once the road project cleared out decades of deferred maintenance and uncertain ownership. Rather than developing all of it as one project, the agency handed three distinct blocks to three separate teams, and each team is betting on a different version of who shows up here.
| Block | Developer | The bet | Tenants signed or planned |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sol Block (former Solot Plaza) | Larsen Baker | Daily errands | Revolve Cycling, The Scented Leaf teahouse, Finch Kids, Lemonails, Sunny Days Gifts, Neptune Up |
| Friedman Block | Grant Krueger Team, with Union Hospitality | Evening and nightlife | Two restaurant-bars with live music, a coffee and bagel shop, a tea shop, boutiques, an e-bike shop, fitness studios |
| Bungalow Block | Randi Dorman and Moniqua Lane | Food tourism | A restaurant, a bar, a teaching kitchen, a demonstration kitchen, food tours |
Sol Block, on the north side of Broadway between Treat Avenue and Tucson Boulevard, reads like a strip you'd use on a Tuesday afternoon. A cycling and yoga studio, a children's boutique, a salon, a teahouse. This is the block betting that the neighborhood mostly wants to run errands without driving across town.
Friedman Block, next door between Tucson Boulevard and Plumer Avenue, is betting on the opposite rhythm. The team behind it also built Union Public House, Reforma Modern Mexican, and Proof Artisanal Pizza and Pasta into a live-music and food hub at St. Philip's Plaza, and the plan for Broadway follows the same playbook. As of the latest announcement, no firm opening timeline had been set, so treat this one as still taking shape rather than something you can walk into this weekend.
The Bungalow Block is the strangest bet and, if it lands, probably the most memorable. Seven historic bungalows were physically moved back from the road in 2019 to save them from the widening project. Developers Randi Dorman and Moniqua Lane are turning that block into a tribute to Tucson's UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation, with plans for a restaurant, a bar, a teaching kitchen, a demonstration kitchen, and a hub for food tours. Parking will sit on a surface lot across North Cherry Avenue rather than in front of the bungalows themselves, which the developers have said is deliberate. This corridor was never going to feel like a parking lot again if they could help it.
Three blocks, three audiences, no shared master plan beyond the fact that Rio Nuevo owns the ground under all of them. That's not a flaw. It means the next twelve months on this stretch of Broadway will feel less like one finished project and more like three experiments running in parallel, close enough that you can walk from one to the next.
Why Nothing Here Is Getting Taller
None of these bets can go vertical, and that's not an accident either. After a long fight between Rio Nuevo and neighborhood groups like the Broadmoor-Broadway Neighborhood Association over how much density Broadway should carry, the city settled on the Sunshine Mile Overlay District in September 2021. Height limits run four stories through most of the corridor, six stories if a developer meets certain parking and design criteria, seven near the Euclid end, and up to twelve stories only on the parcel south of the Safeway at Broadway and Campbell.
That ceiling is a big part of why the redevelopment on this stretch looks the way it does. There isn't room for a wave of new apartment towers to change who lives within walking distance, so all three developers are betting on drawing people who already live nearby rather than building housing for new ones. If you've wondered why Broadway isn't sprouting the kind of mid-rise construction you might see elsewhere in Tucson, the overlay district is the answer.
The buildings themselves are also part of why this corridor got this much attention in the first place. Hirsh's Shoes, built in 1954, the Kelly Building from 1964, and the Chase Bank building that started as Valley National Bank in 1971 are among the structures that helped the Sunshine Mile earn a spot on the National Register of Historic Places back in 2020. That listing is a large part of why these blocks are being renovated rather than torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
The One Business Making the Biggest Bet of All
While three developers experiment with new tenants, the biggest wager on this stretch of Broadway belongs to a restaurant that's been here since 1995. Zemam's Ethiopian Cuisine opened with four tables, funded on credit card debt, according to the family. Around the time the road project wrapped up, the family announced plans to expand the original Broadway location into a project they call Z Street, described by owner Amanuel Gebremariam's daughter, Favin Gebremariam, as a full city block of internationally themed experiences: tripling the restaurant's footprint and adding an international sports lounge alongside an Ethiopian-style coffee and ice cream shop and a rotating African Bazaar.
Where the three redevelopment blocks are placing new tenants into old buildings, Zemam's is doing the opposite: an existing, deeply local business is betting on itself at a scale that would have been unthinkable on this stretch a few years ago. That's a different kind of confidence than a developer signing a lease, and it says something about how this corridor's long-time owners read where things are headed.
What This Means for Your Next Trip Down Broadway
If you live in 85716, the practical takeaway is that this street rewards walking more than it used to. Park once near Sol Block or the Bungalow Block and you can cover a coffee run, a haircut, and dinner without moving the car, the way Inglis Florists has been telling regulars to park in the back alley for years now out of habit rather than necessity.
The less practical but more interesting takeaway is that nobody has decided yet what Broadway is actually for. A daytime errand strip, a nightlife corridor, a food-tourism destination, and a family restaurant tripling down on its own legacy are all being built at the same time, on the same half mile of road, by people who never had to agree with each other. Over the next year or two, you'll get to watch which bet the neighborhood actually rewards.
If you're keeping an eye on how a corridor like this shapes home values nearby, or you're weighing a move into 85716 and want a read on how these changes are landing block by block, Iris Pasos can walk you through what's happening on the ground here in real time. Reach out for a free home valuation or to start your search.
