Some see Danelle Plaza among the last cultural hubs in ever more urban Tempe, where downtown morphed into glass-sided offices and luxury apartments.
Robert Shipp was a young man when he listened to early punk bands and new wave at Merlin’s in the early 1980s.
Merlin’s closed in 1983, but it was just one of the Danelle Plaza music venues that acted as a local arts and music incubator over the last 60 years. Tempe owns about 3 acres on the interior of the nearly 15-acre plaza, and city officials put out a call to developers about a year ago. They sought a project that would transform the plaza into a mixed-use development with apartments. They hoped the winning proposal would incorporate the rest of the plaza into the redevelopment plans.
Marketing materials from the time called for several buildings featuring offices, shops and dining. It was planned as 52 parcels across 15 acres in what was then largely farmland. Ladmo, famous in the Phoenix area for co-hosting a children’s variety show called The Wallace and Ladmo Show, had a shop that sold toys and trinkets in the 1970s.
In the late 1970s, the Star System opened in the back of the plaza providing a home for the city’s punk and new wave scene. It rebranded as Merlin’s in 1980.There was country bar Frank’s Yucca Lounge, too.Frank’s Yucca Lounge evolved into Yucca Tap Room after bar patron Peter Hu purchased it around 1972 from the original owners.
A few doors down the Cervantes family of mariachi musicians has been playing to diners at their restaurant, which bears the family name, since the 2000s. This type of structure has its pros and cons. Business owners had a bigger say in developing and preserving the identity of the plaza, including stopping Walmart’s bid to take over the site in the 2000s, Moore said.Tempe used $2.2 million in federal housing funds to purchase its slice of Danelle Plaza — the 21,000-square-foot commercial strip and adjacent vacant land — around 2013 for affordable housing. The city ended up returning the federal money in 2018 after those plans never materialized.
The project would've included a commercial strip on Southern Avenue, which includes Yucca Tap Room, that is owned by Hu, an adjacent parcel owned by Miravista and the city-owned land. Other properties weren’t included in the proposal. His team described the plaza as “blighted” and “deteriorating” and proposed converting it into 550 affordable, market-rate and senior living units. The apartments would feature ground-floor retail, performance space and outdoor gathering areas.Hope for revitalization that respects fragile ecosystem
“I’m scared that after 10 years we may not be able to continue here,” Dodge said. “It’s our home, we’ve established a clientele here and the other family businesses have become family.” The more he learned about the plaza the more he grew nervous that it was vulnerable to redevelopment that would erase its identity.