Suburban retail works a predictable way. A national brand counts the traffic on Stage Road, runs its demographic model, and signs a lease. The resulting strip — a Chipotle, a Panda Express, a 7 Brew in the drive-thru lane — tells you nothing about the people who live near it. It tells you about a spreadsheet.
What has been happening in Bartlett over the past two years is different. The places getting built here are being built by people who want to be in Bartlett specifically. That distinction is easy to miss in a roundup of openings. It becomes impossible to miss when you look at who is writing the checks and what they turned down to do it.
A Former Movie Theater Is the Clearest Example
In August 2022, the Malco theater on Bartlett Boulevard closed after more than three decades. The building at 2809 Bartlett Blvd. was, as one of its future owners put it, "a single-purpose facility" — built to show movies, not useful for much else. The Lightman family, which owned the property, was planning to tear it down.
John and Leslie Daniel, a retired banking executive and a community engagement professional who live in a Downtown Memphis high-rise, had been playing pickleball since the tennis courts at their building were converted. They knew the Mid-South had no dedicated indoor facility. They looked at empty grocery stores and former Bed Bath & Beyond locations across the metro. The buildings were either too expensive, in locations that didn't work, or would have cost too much to renovate.
Then Michael Lightman called.
The Daniels put more than $500,000 of their own money into the conversion. The ten auditoriums at the old Bartlett Cinema became eight full pickleball courts, a practice court with an ERNE ball machine, an exercise studio, a pro shop, and a mezzanine clubhouse with an observation deck. The slanted theater floors were leveled. The acoustic walls came out. The projector floor became a second-story viewing area. Each court is named after a film — from Star Wars to Hustle and Flow — as a nod to what the building used to be.
Bluff City Pickleball held its grand opening in March 2024. It was, according to the Shelby County Chamber Alliance, the Mid-South's first dedicated indoor pickleball facility. The Bartlett Area Chamber of Commerce hosted a ribbon cutting. Leslie Daniel later said the crowd surprised her — not its size, but its mix. That was part of the point. The Daniels had declined easier paths to bring something to the city that serves it.
The Coffee Corridor Is Telling the Same Story
In August 2025, construction started on Baaloo Coffee Roasters at 2821 Bartlett Road. The owner, Omar Yusuf, is investing more than $500,000 into a full renovation of a freestanding building — not a storefront in a shopping center, a standalone structure — to anchor a café around ethically sourced Ethiopian coffee roasted on-site. The beans trace back to his family's farm in Harar, one of the world's most storied coffee-producing regions. As of December 2025, construction was still underway.
A few blocks away, the owners of Side Porch Steakhouse have already opened Pharmacy Coffeehouse inside a former long-standing pharmacy building. The concept centers on craft coffee, seasonal menus, and a sit-down gathering space rather than throughput. It is the opposite of a drive-thru.
The drive-thru options arrived too — a 7 Brew opened in Bartlett in the summer of 2025, and Dutch Bros is among the additions the Daily Memphian reported on in December 2025. None of that is surprising. What is worth noticing is that the independent, owner-operated concepts are arriving at the same moment and investing at the same scale. Baaloo and Pharmacy Coffeehouse are not filling space left by something else. They are converting buildings and betting on a neighborhood.
Union Depot Is the Macro Version of the Same Bet
Bartlett's first mixed-use development broke ground on the former campus of the Tennessee Baptist Children's Home at 6896 US-70. The 74-acre Union Depot project, led by developer Keith Grant's Blue Sky Communities, carries a price tag of $162 million and is the largest private investment in Bartlett's history. The master plan includes 336 flats, 70 townhomes, 161 single-family homes, 55 lofts above retail, and 85,000 square feet of commercial space. An apartment building held its grand opening in May 2025. Phase 2B is now selling.
The commercial leasing is being handled by Gill Properties senior vice presidents Barry Maynard and Frank Dyer III. When they signed the restaurant tenant for the ground floor of The Westerly — a 5,500-square-foot endcap with outdoor dining — they chose Belly Acres, the Memphis burger concept known from its East Memphis location on Poplar Avenue. Maynard was direct about the decision: "We had several other big nationals we could've gone with, but we wanted to try to stick with something local."
Belly Acres is expected to open at Union Depot in 2026. Maynard and Grant have also said they are pursuing a higher-end, free-standing local restaurant for one of the outparcels.
The project is not contingent on finding those tenants. The loans are signed, the funding is in place, and construction is active. In May 2025, the city announced that developers plan to expand Union Depot across Summer Avenue into a vacant triangle of land north of Stage Road — roughly 30 additional acres of retail, commercial, and residential space. That plan still requires Planning Commission and Board approval, but the direction is clear.
On US-64, another signal arrived with Taco Prime, a new upscale taqueria that opened on the corridor in late 2025, adding to a stretch that has been seeing new investment fill the gaps left by older tenants.
The Trail That Was Already Here
Before any of this, Bartlett had Stanky Creek.
Nesbit Park on Yale Road — most riders know it by the creek name — holds 9 to 10 miles of singletrack maintained by the Stanky Creek Cycling club, a USA Cycling-affiliated organization. The trail system has a blue loop, a yellow loop, a white loop, and the Outhouse Trail, a fast one-mile section inside the larger white loop that regulars consider among the best riding miles in the metro. The park is also open to hikers and trail runners. It is free, it is city-managed, and it is routinely used.
The trail has been a local anchor for years. What changes now is what a Bartlett Saturday can look like around it. Ride Stanky Creek in the morning. Coffee at Baaloo or Pharmacy Coffeehouse. Pickleball at Bluff City in the afternoon. Dinner somewhere along the Union Depot corridor as the restaurant tenants continue to fill in. That is a full day that did not exist two years ago, and none of it requires leaving Bartlett.
What It Actually Means
The generic read on all of this is that Bartlett is growing. That is not wrong, but it is the version of this story that tells you nothing.
The more specific thing is that the people doing the building — the Daniels at Bluff City, Omar Yusuf at Baaloo, the Side Porch team at Pharmacy, Grant and Maynard at Union Depot — each made a deliberate choice to invest here at a scale that carries real personal risk. Each of them had alternatives. The Daniels looked at locations across the metro. Maynard said no to nationals that would have signed faster. Yusuf is spending $500K on a standalone renovation.
When operators make that kind of choice, they tend to build something that fits the neighborhood rather than something generic enough to work anywhere. That is the difference between a suburb that fills up and a suburb that becomes the place its residents actually choose to spend time.
Bartlett is in the middle of becoming the second thing.
If you live in Bartlett and are thinking about what this moment means for your home, or if you are considering the area and want to understand what the market looks like right now, the team at Ware Jones Realtors knows this neighborhood well. Connect with a Memphis neighborhood expert to start the conversation.
