The Corner of Central and Camelback Hasn't Changed This Much Since 1955

Walk out of Windsor Square toward Camelback Road this month and you will notice the construction fencing is gone. The apartment tower that has sat half-finished above Uptown Plaza for the better part of a decade is welcoming its first residents. Move-ins started in early September. For a neighborhood that has walked to the same corner for coffee, groceries, and dinner for generations, that is not a small thing. It means Uptown Plaza is entering its busiest stretch of change since Del Webb broke ground on it in 1955, and this time the change includes people actually living on top of it.

Windsor Square residents already know Uptown Plaza as the anchor a few blocks west, home to AJ's Fine Foods and a rotating cast of restaurants that has made the corner a genuine food-lover's stretch rather than just a strip mall with good parking. What's different now is the pace. In the span of about eighteen months, the plaza has swapped out more tenants than most shopping centers see in five years, and a residential tower that stalled through foreclosure and years of dormancy is finally delivering units a block from the neighborhood's front step.

A Shopping Center That Keeps Reinventing Itself

Uptown Plaza was Phoenix's first suburban shopping center, built by developer Del Webb and heralded in 1955 as a modern alternative to downtown shopping. It has always served as the retail gathering point for Windsor Square and the neighborhoods around it, including Medlock Place, Pierson Place, and St. Francis. The center hit its 70th anniversary in 2025, and ownership marked the milestone with the kind of statement you'd expect from a landlord who knows the property's history matters to the people who live near it.

"Uptown Plaza is a generational asset that will be cherished for years to come," said Andrew Cohn, a principal at Levine Investments, which owns the center.

That stewardship has come with a steady run of new tenants, and the timeline below shows how quickly they arrived.

Five Tenant Changes in Eighteen Months

Here's the sequence, in order:

• Fall 2024: Horse & Hyde, an elevated honky-tonk and restaurant, opened its second location at Uptown Plaza. The original opened in Arcadia in 2023.
• January 2025: Huss Brewing Co. closed its Uptown Plaza taproom. Lou Malnati's also closed its location there during this stretch.
• February 2025: Dynamite Beer Co., a Cave Creek taproom, opened in the space Huss vacated. It's run by Mike Chapman, a former Huss manager, and his wife Laura, who opened their first location in Cave Creek in 2022.
• April 2025: The Henry Uptown opened, a 6,000-square-foot all-day New American restaurant from Phoenix restaurateur Sam Fox.
• Later in 2025: Salt & Straw arrived.
• 2026: Let's Toast, a local concept known for Korean BBQ breakfast sandwiches and Seoul-inspired street food, opened its first brick-and-mortar location. Road Runner Sports also joined the plaza, bringing a foot-scanning technology that recommends footwear based on gait analysis.

None of this is a single restaurant closing and another moving in. It's a wholesale reshuffling of what the plaza offers, condensed into a period shorter than the average lease renewal cycle. The mix has shifted from beer-and-pub-food staples toward a broader spread of full-service dining, dessert, and specialty retail, anchored by long-standing tenants like AJ's Fine Foods, West Elm, Chula Seafood, Flower Child, Shake Shack, Sweatshop, Local Nomad, Manor Shoes, and Muse Apparel.

The Building Across the Street Finally Has Neighbors

The bigger structural change sits directly across from the plaza. One Camelback, an 11-story former office tower at Central and Camelback, has been trying to become an apartment building since its original tenants vacated around 2015. A conversion effort initially aimed for completion in the first half of 2021 stalled over financing, and the project went through foreclosure before Mesa-based Kinella Capital LLC acquired it for $36 million in December 2025. Construction resumed, reached roughly 80 percent completion by early 2026, and now exceeds 90 percent, with move-ins slated for early September.

When it's finished, One Camelback will hold 163 residences averaging 980 square feet, along with 10,725 square feet of ground-floor retail space and a five-level underground parking garage. Reported rents range from around $1,600 a month up to $10,000 for a wraparound three-bedroom penthouse, one of which was reserved before the building had even opened. It sits steps from the Camelback light rail station and is adjacent to Uptown Plaza, meaning the people signing leases this month will be doing their grocery runs and dinner reservations at the same storefronts Windsor Square residents already frequent.

This matters for a simple reason. Uptown Plaza has spent 70 years serving people who drove or walked in from the surrounding neighborhoods. It has never had hundreds of residents stacked directly on top of it. That changes parking patterns, foot traffic at peak dinner hours, and how quickly a reservation at The Henry or a table at Horse & Hyde fills up on a Friday night. None of that is bad news for a neighborhood that has always valued walkability, but it is a different kind of crowd than the one Windsor Square has shared the plaza with for decades.

What Doesn't Change

For all the turnover at the plaza, the core of Windsor Square's walkable food scene hasn't moved. Postino remains a block away on Central Avenue, alongside the record store Stinkweeds. Windsor, the neighborhood's namesake restaurant, and Culinary Dropout are both within an easy walk. Churn and AZ Pops still handle dessert duty for anyone who wants something sweet after dinner instead of another cocktail. These are the places that gave Windsor Square its reputation as a food-lover's neighborhood well before Uptown Plaza started adding tenants at this pace, and they're not part of the churn happening at the shopping center.

That distinction is worth sitting with. The plaza's reinvention is happening because ownership is actively curating a different tenant mix and because a residential building that sat empty for a decade is finally filling up. The neighborhood's own restaurant row exists independently of that, run by operators who built their reputations in Windsor Square specifically rather than leasing space in a shopping center. Both things are true at once. The corner is changing fast. The neighborhood around it is not.

If you've lived in Windsor Square for a while, the practical takeaway is straightforward: expect a busier Camelback and Central intersection over the next several months as One Camelback fills up, expect a Friday night wait at The Henry or Horse & Hyde that didn't exist a year ago, and expect the plaza's tenant mix to keep evolving as ownership works through what it calls a highly curated shopping center. None of that changes what made Windsor Square worth walking to in the first place. It just means more people will be walking there with you.

If you're weighing what any of this means for buying, selling, or simply understanding how a specific block in Windsor Square is trending, Heather McDermott has spent years watching this corner of North Central Phoenix change and can put it in context for your own situation. Let's Connect.