by Lauren Loftus | Phoenix Magazine
When most people who live north or east of Central Avenue think about the West Valley, they imagine a strip mall sea of Olive Gardens and Walmarts. They’ll travel to Glendale for a Cardinals game, but they won’t make the same trip in a pizza pilgrimage the way many suburbanites do for Pizzeria Bianco in Downtown. Sam Fox – arguably the Valley’s most powerful restaurateur – hasn’t touched the west side since his Glendale outpost of North Italia closed in 2010. But seven years later, residential and commercial real estate developers are snatching up WV parcels of land like they’re never-ending breadsticks. Is the west side, dare we say it, getting cool?
“I think the west side gets a bad rep,” says Walter Crutchfield, whose development firm Vintage Partners is opening a 17-acre shopping center in Avondale. It wasn’t so long ago that parts of the East Valley were ignored the same way Goodyear or Peoria are now, he says. “For years, nobody would go to downtown Gilbert… there was no ‘there’ there.” Now there’s a Postino and a Lo-Lo’s because of one risk-taking developer: Joe Johnston, the “visionary” behind Agritopia and Joe’s Real BBQ in Gilbert.
