Walk the trail at 6:45 on a September morning and it feels exactly like it has for years. Dirt underfoot, not pavement. Olive and ash canopies throwing shade over the east side of Central Avenue. A stroller ahead of you, a leashed dog behind you, somebody on a bike ringing a bell before an underpass out of habit more than necessity. Murphy's Bridle Path runs about 2.5 miles from Bethany Home Road north to the Arizona Canal, and it asks nothing of you in return. No permit, no entrance fee, no app to download. It has looked this way since it stopped being an actual bridle path for actual horses and became what everybody who lives near Central Corridor already calls it: the trail.
That part of the story is stable. The part that isn't stable is what's happening a few blocks south, at the corner of Central Avenue and Camelback Road, where the trail's southern end spills into Uptown Plaza. If you've walked or run past that corner anytime in the last eighteen months, you've watched a 70-year-old shopping center go through the busiest stretch of reinvestment in its history, and none of it looks like the usual churn where a new tenant replaces an old one. Everything here is addition. That's the part of the neighborhood most posts about this trail don't tell you, because most posts about this trail stop at the trail.
A Trail With A Long Memory
The path follows Central Avenue through what was originally developed in the late 1800s as an upscale Phoenix suburb, and some of the city's most historic homes still line the route. Olive and ash trees went in along both sides of the street early on, with citrus trees planted on the interior lots to make the neighborhood more attractive to buyers at the time. Those trees are why the trail still reads as shaded and residential rather than exposed and arterial, even with car traffic running alongside it the entire way.
The trail is dog-friendly with no leash exceptions and no seasonal closures. It's open year round, though the honest local advice is the same advice you'd give about any unpaved surface in the Valley: the cooler months between October and April are when it's actually pleasant to run the whole thing rather than cut it short at the halfway mark. If you're not within walking distance, the North Phoenix Baptist Church lot at Central and Bethany Home has historically served as an informal parking spot for people coming from elsewhere in the corridor.
None of that is new information if you've lived here more than a season. What's newer, and what changes the calculation for anyone deciding whether to extend the walk past the trailhead, is what's now waiting at the south end.
The Corner That Turned 70 And Got Busier, Not Quieter
Uptown Plaza opened on September 25, 1955, built by Del Webb, the same developer behind Sun City and the original Flamingo in Las Vegas. When it opened, the plaza sat just outside the Phoenix city limits, making it the city's first suburban shopping center. It has spent seven decades since then as the connective tissue between the high-rises on Central Avenue and the historic residential streets of Windsor Square, Medlock Place, Pierson Place, and St. Francis. That's not a marketing description. It's the plaza's own account of who it has served since 1955.
What's unusual is what's happened since the plaza marked that 70th anniversary. In April 2025, The Henry, Fox Restaurant Concepts' all-day café known for its brunch and its Gatsby-era interior, left its original Arcadia location behind after fourteen years and opened a second Valley location at Uptown Plaza's northeast corner. Salt & Straw arrived the same year. Neither of those openings displaced an existing tenant. They filled space the plaza had earmarked for growth.
Then 2026 kept going. This year Uptown Plaza added Let's Toast, a Korean BBQ sandwich concept opening its first brick and mortar location, and Road Runner Sports, the national running and fitness retailer founded in 1983, bringing its proprietary Fit Finder technology to a Central Phoenix location for the first time. Both are now open. Neither one required anything else at the plaza to close.
Here's the mechanism most retail reporting misses: a shopping center adding tenants without losing any is a different animal than one where turnover just looks like activity. AJ's Fine Foods, Shake Shack, Chula Seafood, Flower Child, West Elm, Manor Shoes, and Urban Eyecare are all still there. The plaza isn't refreshing itself by swapping out weak performers. It's expanding the roster around a base that already held. That's the kind of retail health that doesn't show up in a single headline, only in the fact that a corner built in 1955 just had its most active year and a half of tenant additions without a single vacancy to show for it.
Across The Street, A Building Finally Woke Up
The other half of this story is happening directly across from the plaza. One Camelback, an 11-story tower originally built in 1985 as a 203,122-square-foot office building, sat empty after its original tenants moved out around 2015. A conversion into residential units was supposed to finish in the first half of 2021, but financing problems and foreclosure stalled the project for years. In December 2025, Mesa-based Kinella Capital LLC acquired the property for $36 million and restarted construction. By early 2026 the building was about 80 percent finished, and it passed 90 percent over the summer, with move-ins slated for early September. That puts new residents walking into the building this month, directly across the street from a plaza that has spent the last year and a half adding retail.
That timing isn't a coincidence anyone had to engineer. It's just what happens when a stalled asset and a growing one sit on the same corner long enough. The 163 units range from roughly $1,600 a month up to penthouse units near $10,000, with one penthouse already reserved before the building fully opened. Ground floor retail space is part of the plan too, with tenant announcements still to come.
Put the two stories together and you get the actual shift: a plaza that spent 70 years anchoring a handful of historic residential streets is now anchoring foot traffic from a new residential tower that didn't exist a year ago, at the same moment it's adding the exact kind of tenant, a national running retailer, that makes sense for a corridor built around a trail.
What This Means If You're Already Walking It
If Murphy's Bridle Path is part of your routine, the practical update is simple. Road Runner Sports now sits a short distance from the trail you're already running, with fitting technology built for people who log miles regularly rather than people shopping for a single pair of shoes. The Henry is back at Uptown Plaza's northeast corner serving the same all-day menu that built its reputation in Arcadia, just closer to home if home is the streets this trail runs through. Let's Toast is the newest option if your post-walk routine has room for something that wasn't there last year.
None of this required the trail to change. The trail is still dirt, still shaded, still free, still the same 2.5 miles it's always been. What changed is the destination waiting at the end of it, and that's worth knowing whether you're planning tomorrow's run or just wondering what's different about the corner you drive past every week.
The Arizona Canal that marks the trail's north end is part of a canal system that runs longer than Venice and Amsterdam's combined, a fact the city likes to point out and one that's easy to forget when you're just trying to beat the heat before 8 a.m. It's a strange thing to be proud of, but it's also a reminder that this corridor has always been built around water and shade doing quiet, unglamorous work. Uptown Plaza is doing something similar right now. Nobody put out a press release calling it a comeback. It just kept adding tenants until the pattern became obvious to anyone paying attention.
If you're one of the people who already walks this trail most mornings, you already know the shape of the neighborhood. What's changed is worth a look next time you're headed home. And if you're weighing what a home along this stretch is actually worth given how much the corner it backs up to has shifted in the last year and a half, The TEAM can walk you through it. Request a Luxury Home Valuation and get a straight read on where your property stands.
