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We all saw the overbuilding happening.

Around Tucson, new Starbucks stores were going up a half-mile away from other new Starbucks stores.

Take-out-only Starbucks were going up near sit-down Starbucks. It reminded locals of the overbuilt heydays of Mattress Firm and Walgreens.

Then, suddenly, last week, Starbucks hit the brakes hard, posting a form letter on the doors and drive-thru windows of seven local stores to say they had made “the incredibly difficult decision to close this Starbucks location.”

Boo hoo. It’s truly a sad decision for the employees of those locations, yes, but otherwise it’s a cause for celebration for those of us who don’t want a bland sameness across Tucson’s cityscape.

It’s especially exciting when considering one of those closures of a new store. Perhaps the most controversial new Starbucks of recent years, the one built on a sliver of land on the southeast corner of North Campbell Avenue and East Grant Road, is already being disassembled inside.

That means the corner could still be assembled into a big redevelopment opportunity like the one developers and neighbors sought in the years before Starbucks entered the scene.

Many people were upset that Joe Pagac’s mural of whales swimming through a desert sky was blocked in part by the new Starbucks. There was an element of desecration there, I’ll admit. But knowing that Pagac never intended the mural to be some sort of permanent installation kept me focused on the bigger picture.

The Starbucks store at the corner of East Grant Road and North Campbell Avenue is in front of a mural painted by local Tucson artist Joe Pagac. The location is one of several the company plans to close.

You may remember I wrote ruefully about the construction of the Starbucks on that corner in September 2023. The store took over the narrow lot left when Bookmans and Walgreens were torn down, after the city took a slice for the future expansion of Grant Road.

It really wasn’t the fault of the owner, who had tried to buy all the properties on the corner and create a “a mixed-use, green-forward, fairly large project.”

“We were contemplating two buildings, six stories and four stories, over retail,” Barry Baker, a partner in the ownership group, told me in 2023.

Arizona Daily Star columnist Tim Steller

It wasn’t just Baker’s team envisioning big things on the corner. A 2015 city study anticipated “a larger mixed-use project that could include residences, retail, an educational and civic/entertainment facility, as well as structured parking in buildings as feasible.”

In 2019, a citizens group called the Grant Road Coalition published a paper on that southeast corner of Grant and Campbell. It envisioned “a walkable gathering place, with an eco-friendly village marketplace, a sustainable hub of active neighborhood retail and services, including comfortable indoor/outdoor food and beverage options, and an urban wellness partnership.”

The former Cineplex Odeon movie theater located near East Grant Road and North Campbell Avenue.

The biggest obstacle to realizing any of these visions was Banner University Medical Center, which inherited the old Catalina Theater property and its large parking garage when it bought University Medical Center in 2015. Banner had used the property largely for storage and parking.

When I asked about it in 2023, the hospital’s spokesman told me it was not for sale. Now, things have apparently changed.

Spokesman Nikai Salcido said in an email this week: “Now Banner Health is considering all options including a potential sale of the site.”

This removes one of the biggest obstacles to a potential redevelopment of the corner, since Banner owns the biggest two parcels there.

However, there are other owners, including Californian Glenn Rowe, whose trust bought the land Starbucks is on in December 2024. This sliver is the key property to the whole development, since it occupies the actual corner, with a long stretch along Grant.

When I reached him by phone Thursday, Rowe said it was too early to tell what will happen with the property.

“I have no plans at this point,” he said.

There is another property at the corner, a four-unit strip originally built in 1943. It houses Hermosa Barber Shop and three other units that are being renovated now. The local Savaya Coffee is planning a roastery and cafe at the site.

This strip would be important to have as part of any effort to assemble and redevelop the corner, but it might not be completely necessary as long as the Banner properties and Starbucks slice were put together.

As to the other doomed Starbucks, the company decided not to announce which ones were closing, leaving it up to laid-off employees and news outlets to figure out which are gone. Tucson’s KOLD Channel 13 listed these as the other six locations closing:

  • 910 E. Speedway
  • 130 E. Congress
  • 4202 E. 22nd St.
  • 6960 E. 22nd St.
  • 3700 S. Sixth Ave.
  • 802 E. University Blvd.

Some were new builds, like the ones on North Campbell and on South Sixth Avenue, across from the Veterans Administration. Others had been around for years.

Construction of the Starbucks at Grant and Campbell started in 2023 in front of Joe Pagac’s popular whale mural.

In any case, if you look at the company’s online store locator, you’ll find there are still at least 60 other Starbucks locations around the Tucson area to choose from.

For now, at Grant and Campbell, if we don’t get that big redevelopment soon, at least the whale mural will remain, and soon there will be a local coffee shop chain instead of the global goliath.

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Contact columnist Tim Steller at tsteller@tucson.com or 520-807-7789. On Bluesky:

@timsteller.bsky.social