What's New in Cahaba Heights, Vestavia Hills: Local Business Updates

Drive down Crosshaven Drive this fall and you'll pass a burger stand celebrating its 80th year, a fruit stand celebrating its 50th, and a storefront that's been sitting empty since a grocery chain pulled out sixteen months ago. All three are true at the same time, and that's the actual story of Cahaba Heights right now. The neighborhood isn't swapping old businesses for new ones. It's filling in the gaps around the businesses that were already there, while the stubborn gaps that don't fill easily stay empty for a very long time.

The Long Vacancy on Crosshaven Drive

The Winn-Dixie at 3925 Crosshaven Drive closed in May 2025. The building has sat empty ever since, which by this fall works out to about sixteen months with no grocer serving that stretch of Cahaba Heights.

That's not because nobody wanted the site. As WBRC reported, Vestavia Hills city manager Jeff Downes told the city council the absence created real "leakage," his term for residents driving to other jurisdictions to buy groceries instead of spending that money inside city limits. The problem was economics, not demand. City officials pegged a $3 million feasibility gap between what it would cost to tear down the aging building, replace the storm sewer and water lines, and build new, versus what a grocer could justify spending on an old commercial lot.

Walmart is now under contract to buy the site and build a 45,000-square-foot Neighborhood Market there, larger than the existing Vestavia Hills store. The city structured its incentive as a rebate rather than an upfront payment. Walmart only collects if the store generates new sales tax revenue, and city projections put that at more than $11.1 million over ten years against the $3 million incentive. No construction date has been announced yet. Councilwoman Kimberly Cook framed the redevelopment as part of a pattern the city has already invested in along Crosshaven Drive through sidewalk and traffic improvements.

Sixteen months is a long time for a single storefront to sit dark in a neighborhood this small. It's the exception that shows how hard the rest of the district has been working to avoid exactly that.

New Concepts Filling in Beside the Old Ones

Everywhere else on the map, empty space has been getting claimed fast, and mostly by independent operators rather than chains.

Qahwah House is opening between Milo's Hamburgers and Cahaba Dermatology & Spa on Crosshaven Drive, bringing traditional Yemeni coffee to a shopping strip that's mostly known for burgers and produce. Owner Khaled Almansoob has said his goal is a slower kind of coffee shop, one built for people to gather rather than grab and go, a contrast to the fast-casual model most new coffee concepts chase. The brand has more than 30 locations nationally, and this will be its first in Cahaba Heights.

A few minutes away on Cahaba Heights Road, Sequoia opened as a one-on-one and semi-private strength training studio run by certified trainer Kalvin Frelich. On Old Towne Road, Studio 314 Dance opened this September with a full class slate running from two-year-olds through competition-level high schoolers, founded by Morgan Maddox Cunningham. Aspen and Ash Collective opened on Cahaba Heights Court as a co-working suite for independent stylists, offering eight stations and shampoo bowls to stylists building their own client books rather than working for a single salon.

The Kitchen by Market opened in June at 1031 Montgomery Highway, the second location for the gourmet grab-and-go concept that started in Mountain Brook Village. Andy's Garden Center consolidated its offerings into a single Farm Market location on Morgan Drive, closing a second Vestavia storefront to focus everything, plants, produce, seasonal goods, in one spot. The Well and Co. brought a combined home décor boutique and Cala coffee bar to Park South Plaza.

None of this replaced anything. It filled space that was either newly vacant or newly built.

Anniversaries on the Same Streets

What makes this fall unusual is how many of the neighborhood's oldest businesses are marking milestones at the exact same time the new ones are opening their doors.

Murphree's opened in July 1976 under Gene and Kathy Murphree and is still family-run, now with son Brad Murphree sharing ownership. The Dance Factory's founder, Genia Waller, started dancing at six and teaching at thirteen before opening her own studio at twenty-five, and the business has run continuously since 1987. These aren't businesses hanging on. They're businesses old enough to have trained the parents of the kids currently walking into Studio 314 down the street.

What Didn't Make It

Not everything stuck. Red Lobster at 1030 Montgomery Highway closed permanently on May 24, ending a run that stretched back to the 1970s. It was reportedly one of the first Red Lobster locations to open in Alabama. The chain filed for bankruptcy in 2024 and closed roughly 130 locations nationwide, and the Vestavia store didn't survive the cuts. The nearest Red Lobster now is in Trussville.

A different kind of exit happened on Rocky Ridge Road, where developers proposed a New Day Car Wash and a Bullet coffee shop on a 2.4-acre site that would have replaced an existing office building. The proposal needed city council approval and drew enough opposition that after an April community meeting failed to resolve the concerns, the developers withdrew their application entirely. The lot is still an office building today.

Between the two, one closure traces back to a national chain's bankruptcy filing rather than anything local, and one proposal ended when its developers withdrew the application after a community meeting. Set against the openings and anniversaries above, the Red Lobster closure and the withdrawn proposal are two setbacks in this round of local business news.

The Hardware Store Moving to Keep Up

One story sits between the anniversaries and the new openings: a business succeeding enough to need a second location. The Compton family has run Compton Ace Hardware at 4500 Montevallo Road in Crestline Park for four years, building on 47 years in the convenience store business before that. They're now expanding into The Bray at Liberty Park, a 700-acre mixed-use development, with a new store planned at 12,000 to 15,000 square feet, larger than their existing location. Construction is expected to start by the end of this year with an opening roughly 12 months out.

That expansion is happening in the same commercial corridor where Vestavia Hills City Center itself changed hands this year. Burton Property Group, a Mobile-based investment firm, paid $76 million for the 390,000-square-foot property anchored by Publix and home to Taco Mama and Starbucks. It's the company's first acquisition in the Birmingham metro, and it plans to invest in upgrades rather than just collect rent on what's already there.

If you're trying to read what any of this means for the neighborhood's long-term direction, that's the detail worth sitting with. A business that's been open four years deciding to double its footprint, and an out-of-town investment firm making its first Birmingham-area purchase in the same district, are both bets that the next few years look like the last few.

Watch Crosshaven Drive over the winter. That empty Winn-Dixie site is the one piece of this story that hasn't resolved yet, and whichever way it breaks will tell you more about the neighborhood's trajectory than any single opening or anniversary on this list.

If you're curious what any of this shift, old or new, means for what your own home might be worth right now, Jake Callahan tracks these changes block by block and is happy to talk through what they mean for your corner of Vestavia Hills.