Walk down East Aspen Avenue this month looking for the smell of fresh fudge and you will find a quiet storefront instead. For fifteen years, the address at 15 E. Aspen was where Sweet Shoppe Candy Store lived, its window facing Heritage Square, its copper kettle turning out caramel apples for a generation of Flagstaff kids and their kids. That business is still open. It just is not there anymore.
Sweet Shoppe has relocated around the corner to 102 E. Route 66, taking over a space that most recently housed The Corner Tavern and, before that, a Majerle's Sports Grill. It is a small move in distance and a much bigger one in what it says about which street downtown has decided matters most right now.
A Storefront's Long Memory
The building at 102 E. Route 66 has changed identities twice in the past dozen years, and each version tells you something about what downtown Flagstaff was asking of its storefronts at the time.
| Years | Tenant | What it signaled |
|---|---|---|
| 2013–2021 | Majerle's Sports Grill | Route 66 as a place to watch a game |
| 2022–Feb. 2026 | The Corner Tavern | Route 66 as a late-night stop |
| 2026– | Sweet Shoppe Candy Store | Route 66 as a daytime destination again |
The paper trail behind the current changeover moved fast. A demolition permit for the interior came through in mid-February, a renovation permit followed in late March, and a sign permit went in soon after. Owner Rolley told Flagstaff Business News the new location gives the shop something the old one never had: a basement.
"We are excited to be on Route 66," Rolley said, noting that the downstairs space finally solves the gelato problem. The old shop kept running out on busy weekends because there was nowhere to store backup stock. The new one has a cellar for it.
Watch for the signage change if you walk that block. The two illuminated signs that once read "Tavern" are being converted to read "Candy," neon letter by neon letter, on the same steel frame that has hung over that corner since the sports bar era.
Down the Block, Another Building Finishes a Different Kind of Comeback
Sweet Shoppe is not the only Route 66 address rewriting its own history this year. A few blocks down, the Whispering Winds Motor Hotel has reopened after renovations that started slowly during the pandemic and took years to finish. Brothers Karan and Kenal Patel restored the exterior to its original 1960s palette, bubblegum pink and electric turquoise, the colors built to catch a driver's eye at highway speed back when that was the whole point of a motor court. Inside, a green accent wall and period wood flooring carry the look through. The property has since been newly designated a National Historical Landmark.
Two buildings on the same street, moving in the same direction. One swapped a bar sign for a candy sign. The other swapped decades of deferred maintenance for a landmark plaque. Neither story is really about nostalgia. Both are about a corridor that spent years as a drive-through and is being rebuilt, storefront by storefront, as somewhere people actually stop.
The Trail That Finally Points at Buffalo Park
While Route 66 was rearranging its ground floor, the path system underneath downtown was getting rebuilt too, and this is the part a lot of longtime residents have not fully clocked yet because it happened in pieces over almost two years.
Here is the sequence, in order:
- In December 2024, the Flagstaff Biking Organization finished a realignment of the Lower Oldham Trail out of Buffalo Park, a roughly $91,000 project funded largely by Nackard Pepsi and Joy Cone, replacing an old alignment that had become unsustainable for the park's more front-country feel.
- By the summer of 2025, the city had repaved eight miles of the Flagstaff Urban Trails System, a project that started as a plan to patch a handful of cracked sections and expanded into what one city transportation planner called a complete refresh, after an inventory turned up more damage than expected.
- That same fall, construction began on a new trail segment built specifically to connect downtown to Buffalo Park directly, rather than routing walkers and cyclists through the longer, roundabout paths that had linked the two for years.
Taken individually, none of these is a dramatic headline. Taken together, they describe a system that has spent two years reorienting itself around one goal: making the walk or ride from the historic core out to the mesa at Buffalo Park shorter, smoother, and more direct than it has ever been. If your mental map of that route is a year or two old, it is worth updating before you plan your next loop.
An Older Model for the Same Idea
None of this is actually new behavior for downtown Flagstaff. It is just the current chapter of something the neighborhood has been doing for over a century.
The building that now houses Lumberyard Brewing Company was built in 1890 at San Francisco Street and Phoenix Avenue as the J.D. Halstead Lumber Company. It sat abandoned for eight years before the city put out a request for proposals to bring it back to life. Winnie and Evan Hanseth, who had already opened Flagstaff's first brewpub, Beaver Street Brewery, in March of 1994, took on the rehab and opened Lumberyard inside the old lumberyard building in May of 2010.
Flagstaff Business News revisited that story in a feature published in late August, framing it as one family running two breweries out of two rescued buildings, one on Beaver Street and one on San Francisco Street, sixteen years apart. The throughline is the same one running through the candy store and the motor hotel: an old commercial shell finds a second life doing something almost entirely different from what it was built for, and the neighborhood is better for it.
What This Adds Up To
Downtown Flagstaff has not gotten bigger this year. It has the same footprint it has had for decades, bounded by the same railroad tracks and the same handful of cross streets. What has changed is what is happening inside that footprint and how easy it is to move through it.
Route 66 is pulling businesses toward daytime foot traffic instead of late-night stops. The trail network is pulling the core closer to Buffalo Park instead of routing around it. And the buildings doing the pulling, a converted tavern, a restored motor court, a century-old lumberyard, are proof that this kind of turnover is not a disruption to downtown's character. It is the character.
If you are walking that loop this fall, you will likely time it around Flagstaff Oktoberfest at Wheeler Park on October 3, which puts a crowd back on those same downtown blocks for one of the year's biggest local gatherings. Take the long way in. Notice the new letters going up on Route 66. Notice how much shorter the walk to Buffalo Park feels than it did two years ago. Downtown did not move. It just got easier to see.
If you are watching this same stretch of Flagstaff for reasons that go beyond an afternoon walk, whether that means a home near the historic core, a mountain property with easy access downtown, or simply questions about how a specific neighborhood is holding up over time, the team at Randall Dagenais Luxury Group knows this ground at street level. Reach out when you are ready to talk about it.
