Saks Fifth Avenue has anchored Biltmore Fashion Park since the center opened its doors in 1963. That run ends this year. The closure, announced in February as part of a wider round of Saks Global store shutdowns nationwide, isn't a Camelback Corridor story so much as a corporate one. But what's happening in the space Saks leaves behind, and everywhere around it, is a corridor story, and it says something the closure alone doesn't: this stretch of Camelback Road is no longer being rebuilt around a handful of big anchors. It's being rebuilt around dozens of small, daily-use ones.
If you live between 24th and 32nd Street, you've probably noticed the corridor feels different than it did even a year ago. Here's what's actually behind that feeling, block by block.
The Anchor Era Is Actually Ending
Some context on the scale of what's leaving. When Saks took over the former I. Magnin space at Biltmore Fashion Park in 1995, it moved into a 90,000-square-foot store, one of the largest single retail footprints in the center's history. That kind of space defined how malls worked for decades: a couple of massive department stores anchoring one end of the property, smaller shops filling in between.
RED Development, which bought the property in July 2024 and announced a multi-phase redevelopment that November, isn't replacing Saks with another department store. It's replacing it with several much smaller, much more specific concepts. Herman Miller opened a showroom next to Ralph Lauren in late February, its first Arizona location, at just over 2,000 square feet. That's roughly 2 percent of the footprint Saks occupied. FP Movement and the boutique fitness studio [solidcore] were both penciled in for spring 2026 openings elsewhere on the property. La La Land Kind Café, making its Phoenix debut near True Food Kitchen, is expected to occupy about 1,260 square feet later this year. Lululemon, meanwhile, is doubling its existing space rather than taking on new square footage elsewhere.
None of these tenants individually replaces what Saks was. Together, they represent a different bet: that the property does better filled with places people visit two or three times a week than one place people visit two or three times a year.
What Filling the Gaps Actually Looks Like on the Ground
The shift isn't only about retail math. Biltmore Fashion Park has also started building recurring, small-scale community programming that wouldn't have made sense around a department-store anchor. In February and March, the center launched Art Walk at Biltmore Fashion Park, a Sunday-afternoon series done in partnership with Axiom Gallery and ArtLink Inc that puts roughly 20 Arizona artists' work into the center's open-air spaces. The Arizona WineGrowers Festival brought more than 40 Arizona wineries to the property on March 28. The center has also built a track record of larger community gatherings, including a Global Running Day partnership with lululemon and local run clubs that has drawn close to 1,000 participants.
These are not the kinds of events a mall books when it's trying to draw regional shoppers for a Saturday outing. They're the kind a property books when it wants the same few thousand people showing up repeatedly, on foot, from nearby.
The Same Pattern, Two Blocks East at The Esplanade
Walk across Camelback Road to The Esplanade and you'll find the dining side of the same shift, run by one operator making the bet explicit. Rick Phillips and Peter Hearn's 151 Hospitality group opened the Jewish deli Little Pickle and the martini lounge The Mercer, the latter taking over the space that had run as MercBar for nearly three decades, before opening their flagship concept, Camello, on February 2. Camello is a 6,000-square-foot Mexican restaurant and lounge with a lunch menu built for working professionals on a break and a late-night cocktail scene on weekends, led by executive chef Julio Mata, who started at Barrio Café before opening every Barrio Queen location.
Phillips and Hearn were direct about why they placed three concepts within a few hundred feet of each other. They pointed to "the renewed energy of the Camelback Corridor," citing their Esplanade neighbors along with the existing draw of Global Ambassador and Steak 44 nearby. That's not a company discovering a new market from the outside. That's an operator already inside the corridor doubling down on the same six blocks, three times over.
Morning Coffee, Afternoon Meetings, and a Golf Simulator
The corridor's daily-life infrastructure is filling in beyond restaurants and gyms. PRESS Coffee was slated to open its 20th Valley location near Camelback Road and 32nd Street this spring, a 2,029-square-foot space with 38 indoor seats, 48 patio seats, and a bookable conference room. The company's own framing of the project was less about foot traffic and more about routine: designing "a friendly gathering spot to serve guests who live and work in the heart of the corridor."
A few blocks away, Arizona Financial Credit Union opened a new flagship branch in February at the northwest corner of Camelback Road and 32nd Street. Alongside the standard menu of checking, home loans, and business lending, the branch includes a golf simulator meant for member meetings and community events, a small but telling signal that even a bank branch in this corridor is being built as a place to linger, not just a place to do a transaction and leave.
Who's Actually Filling These New Seats
None of this works without people showing up on weekdays, and the corridor picked up a substantial one this year. McCarthy Building Companies, a construction firm that's operated in the Valley for more than 50 years, signed an 11-year lease for nearly 96,000 square feet at 3133 E. Camelback Road, almost doubling its current Phoenix office footprint. The relocated regional headquarters won't open until late 2027, but the lease itself, one of the largest office deals in the Valley this year, is a bet that a construction company's employees want to be walking distance from the same coffee shops, lunch counters, and gym studios that are opening around them.
That's the piece that ties the rest of this together. A furniture showroom, a fitness studio, a taco lunch special, a coffee shop with a conference room, a bank with a golf simulator: none of these make sense as a strategy aimed at drawing people in from across the Valley for a special trip. They make sense as a strategy aimed at the people who are already here, working here, or about to be working here five days a week. The corridor isn't getting bigger. It's getting more useful to the people who already live inside it.
If you've lived along Camelback Road for a while, the practical upshot is straightforward. The list of things you used to have to drive somewhere else for, a real coffee order, a decent Mexican dinner reservation, a strength class, even a bank appointment that doesn't feel like a chore, is shrinking. Saks leaving isn't the end of something. It's the clearest marker yet that the corridor stopped trying to be a shopping destination and started trying to be a neighborhood.
If you're weighing what a home in this corridor is actually worth given everything reshaping it block by block, The TEAM tracks these shifts as closely as the market itself. Request a Luxury Home Valuation to talk through what it means for your specific property.
