Buying into the vision: Vestavia Hills City Center blossoms after early struggles

Two decades since its debut, the Vestavia Hills City Center is on the rebound. 

Opened in 2003, the City Center’s mixture of high-end retail and restaurants offered a radical new vision to the aging Vestavia Shopping Center. However, the center’s two anchor restaurants, Nonna Rose and Brazil, failed within the first three years, followed by high turnover rates, an uninspired mix of tenants and bankruptcy by 2010, putting its future on shaky ground.

In 2017, the Vestavia City Center was sold to KPR (Katz Property Retail), a New York-based firm that specializes in acquiring retail shopping centers in the eastern United States, in a deal worth $60.3 million. 

To help revitalize the City Center and recruit new businesses, KPR turned to Birmingham-based Crawford Square Management. Mary Beyer Lell, the head of leasing for Crawford Square, led the project and early on saw the City Center’s potential, comparing it to neighborhood spaces in other cities. 

“I think they had an idea of what they wanted to do there, but I also knew that Vestavia did not have a gathering space,” Lell said. “Mountain Brook has these villages, and Homewood has Edgewood and SoHo. Where in Vestavia did you go that had a gathering space? So the vision was ‘Let’s create a gathering space here.’”

Lell envisioned a green space where families could gather and their kids could play and hang out while enjoying fast-casual food from local restaurants, as well as a central location for live music and special community events. The KPR leadership agreed, but getting the local business community on board wasn’t so easy. 

“I thought it needed to be focused on food and beverage, and it needed to be around a gathering space, and I knew it needed to be something local and popular that people would be excited about,” Lell said. “People had a terrible time envisioning what this was going to look like. It looked terrible. It had raised flower beds that had dead plants all in them. It was in disrepair. It didn’t look good.”

While Lell was excited about the future of the Vestavia City Center, some of her friends and colleagues in the commercial real estate business cautioned her about her enthusiasm for the project. One of her good friends brought up the failure of Dale’s Southern Grill, which operated a location briefly in the City Center. 

Undaunted, Lell believed that the right mix of restaurants and retail would appeal to Vestavia Hills residents and surrounding areas. 

“I’m sorry, but Vestavia residents didn’t want to go to Dale’s. It wasn’t the right thing,” she said. 

“I listened to what the residents wanted. They wanted someplace to bring their kids,” she added. “They want to be able to sit outside and have a margarita and let their children run around and feel like they’re safe.”

One of the first local restaurants Lell considered was Taco Mama. She developed a relationship with Taco Mama’s founder, Will Haver, while working for Bayer Properties with a focus on The Summit. She was instrumental in bringing Taco Mama to The Summit and strongly believed a new location in the City Center would be a hit. 

Her first conversation with Haver was met with resistance. Haver said that while he was interested in opening a Taco Mama in Vestavia Hills, the City Center was out of the question. However, Lell asked for an opportunity to share her vision for the development and eventually earned Haver’s support.

Haver said that initially there was “zero way” he’d open a location at the center. “She told me they had redeveloped it and added a cool green space. She then asked me to ‘just do her a favor and come by and look at it.’”

Haver said he “begrudgingly” agreed to meet with Lell to discuss the project. Lell prepared herself with renderings of what the final renovations would look like. Haver liked what he saw but still had some reservations, especially about being the first new restaurant in the yet-to-be-redeveloped City Center. 

Lell said she knew that Taco Mama would be well received in Vestavia Hills and convinced Haver that other local businesses would follow his lead.

“When Will said ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ I really had to work with him on understanding the vision of what it was going to be, and that was hard to do because we hadn’t put a shovel in the ground when I got Will on board with it,” she said. “He had to kind of buy into my vision.

“Some people just weren’t visionaries. They couldn’t picture it, but Will bought in,” Lell added. “He did want to be in Vestavia, and so he bought into it. He was my first guy that jumped in with me into the development.”

“Once we opened, we had a line out the door, and other restaurateurs started calling me soon after to see if they should come join us. It worked out great,” Haver said.

Haver signed a lease in March 2020, just before the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic began. The Vestavia Hills Taco Mama officially opened in early 2021 and has steadily grown into one of the company’s best-performing locations.

“I am ‘knocking on wood,’ but it has been awesome to be there. We love the Vestavia community and that restaurant. The community thanks us all the time for being there, and we can’t thank them enough for supporting us every day,” Haver said. “I have a great appreciation for how Crawford Square thinks about the vibrancy of the center. They are great at what they do. We knew we were going to add energy to that development. It’s one of our top restaurants.”

Just as Lell predicted, Taco Mama’s success and the City Center’s new vibe have brought a wave of local and national businesses to the development, such as Crumbl Cookies, Chopt, The Standard, Pigtails & Crewcuts and the second location of Davenport’s Pizza Palace. 

“I got Davenport’s on board with it because I had Taco Mama, and then because of that, we got The Standard, and Pigtails and Crewcuts came along at that time, too,” Lell said. “It just built on each other.”

Established by brothers Rex and Ardyce Holli in 1964, Davenport’s has been a Mountain Brook restaurant for 60 years. Ardyce Holli’s grandchildren, Amanda Thames and Yates Norris, now run the family business and decided to open a second restaurant in the City Center after investigating possible locations in Homewood and Trussville, among others. 

While Davenport’s operated a restaurant in Vestavia Hills for about 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s, Thames said she and Norris, a Vestavia Hills resident, couldn’t find an ideal place for a new location until the redeveloped City Center caught their attention.

“We already knew about it, but we just started looking at it and loved what they did with outdoor space and just being so family-friendly and kind of a little gathering center for families,” Thames said. “We loved that idea, and that provided some things that our Mountain Brook location doesn’t have, like outdoor seating.”

Thames said that as attractive as the City Center was on its own, she was happy to see Taco Mama already in the process of opening by the time she and Norris signed their lease. 

“I have to admit that because Taco Mama was right next door, that definitely helped. I probably wouldn’t have wanted to be the first tenant,” Thames added. “That gave us a lot of confidence that it might be a great fit for us.

“It’s been great. We had a lot of positive responses when we announced we were moving in, and a lot more people than I expected to remember the old Vestavia location,” Thames said. “Without the changes that Lell made, we most likely wouldn’t have wanted to move into that space.”