Owner: South Tucson's Crossroads Restaurant to be rebuilt

Crossroads Restaurant Drive In, the iconic South Tucson eatery severely damaged earlier this week in a fire, will be rebuilt, its owners say.

The Aug. 13 fire ripped through the patriarch of South Tucson’s restaurant row, leaving behind mostly a charred shell of a building at the corner of South Fourth Avenue and East 36th Street.

“It’s a tragedy, honestly,” Aracely Gonzalez, who owns the restaurant with her husband, recently told the Star. “Unfortunately it seems like someone did this from the outside, but we just haven’t confirmed that with the fire marshal … we left Saturday night around 9 and everything was perfect, then at one in the morning everything was on fire. It’s a horrible, horrible experience and feeling.”

“(The restaurant) has been in the family for over 40 years, so definitely we’re going to try to bring it back,” Gonzalez said.

No cause has been determined for the blaze, said Raul Navarro, a commander with South Tucson’s police department. He said Friday that the investigation continues.

Gonzalez said there has been good news about the extensive damage.

“We just talked to the structural engineer to secure the building, the walls, whatever’s left was safe. We received the good news that it is, so we can start working the process, and taking the steps to bring it back.”

Gonzalez said the emotional loss has been devastating.

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“I feel like we lost a member of our family, which it is. It’s our second home,” Gonzalez said. “My oldest son used to work here, my other son is a server, I have two teenagers who help clean up tables on the weekends and they all grew up here,” she said. “I was working here when I was pregnant with them.”

“Sometimes I think I spend more time here than my own home, and that’s the part that hurt the most,” Gonzalez said.

A GoFundMe has been started to help pay employees helping to clean the restaurant, Gonzalez said.

Crossroads is not the only historic South Tucson restaurant to recently face the challenges of reopening following a major fire.

Micha’s Fine Mexican Foods, just down the street from Crossroads since 1976, caught fire in April 2018.

While the fire at Micha’s also was significant, the restaurant reopened by the end of the year, something that Gonzalez said she hopes to do too.