The two-story brick building at the northeast corner of Third and Buchanan was built in 1928 with a café on the ground floor and rooms upstairs. This fall, the ground floor gets a pizza oven.
That oven belongs to Otra Pizzeria. The second floor belongs to Better Days, a bar run by the team behind The Churchill. Both had a soft-opening weekend Oct. 24 and 25, according to Phoenix New Times. Otra's official opening was set for Wednesday, Oct. 28, and Better Days follows Friday, Oct. 30. The building has been saved for years. As of this week, it's being used for what it was built to do.
A restaurant building from the start
The City of Phoenix's Hispanic heritage tour calls the Gerardo's Building an early example of a purpose-built restaurant in downtown Phoenix. It also calls it the largest remaining commercial building tied to the city's early Mexican American history. It appears to have been built for Gerardo V. Walker, who came to Phoenix from Sonora, Mexico, in the 1920s. Walker ran the Sonorense Café on the ground floor, and the second floor was a rooming house. Phoenix New Times adds that the space also held a pool hall and a soda fountain at points in its history.
The block around it had a clear purpose too. In the early 1900s, a section of the Warehouse District near Third Street and Buchanan was mostly Hispanic businesses, homes, churches and restaurants, the city's Phoenix Then & Now segment explains. Next door, Arvizu's El Fresnal Grocery served Mexican American laborers who worked in the produce warehouses and lived in nearby barrios.
Official recognition came in layers. The National Park Service record for the building lists 1928 as its significant year, with a publication date of Sept. 4, 1985. The city's register of individually designated properties added it to the Phoenix Historic Property Register in July 2000 and made it a landmark in July 2009.
Saved first, used later
Landmark status protected the building, but it didn't give it a use. That part came with The Battery. Phoenix Ballpark Properties planned to restore both Gerardo's and Arvizu's and build new apartments around them, keeping the two older buildings inside the overall plan. The city's preservation write-up said the hope was to save enough of the original pressed-tin ceiling tiles to reuse them, and to restore the 1928 sign on the west facade. Ghost signs on Arvizu's north and south walls would stay as well. Downtown Phoenix Inc. says both buildings were reused as part of The Battery, which opened in 2021.
The apartments opened, but the old café stayed empty. Venn Construction describes Gerardo's as a "grey shell" that needed a tenant-improvement project to add infrastructure before any business could move in. Saving a building's walls and getting a kitchen running inside them are separate jobs, and at this corner the second one took about five more years.
Kell Duncan, The Churchill's co-founder, kept an eye on it the whole time. He moved to the Warehouse District around 2012 and often walked past the Art Deco-detailed brick building. "I was always looking at that spot," Duncan told Phoenix New Times. "I always wanted to know what was going to happen with it." Duncan and Stephen Allen run The Churchill downtown and are building Jefferson House in Peoria. Phoenix New Times reports the project also had to get through construction delays before opening.
The same two floors, put back to work
The new setup follows the original closely:
| Floor | 1928 | October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Ground | Sonorense Café | Otra Pizzeria, lunch and dinner |
| Second | Rooming house | Better Days, evening and late-night bar |
The upstairs no longer has rooms for rent, but it's still where people gather above the kitchen. The two businesses are separate, but each serves food and drinks on both floors. "Essentially it is one concept," Duncan told Phoenix New Times. "Even though it's one thing, they both have their own identity."
Here's what the teams have described:
- Otra Pizzeria, ground floor. Counter-service lunch every day and full-service dinner. Expect wood-fired pizzas with charred, bubbly crusts, housemade fennel sausage, burrata with salsa macha, seasonal salads and the charred romaine Caesar the pop-up was known for. Appetizers and pasta are joining the dinner and late-night menus.
- Late slices. From about 10 p.m. to midnight, the kitchen makes Roman-style square slices for Better Days customers.
- Better Days, second floor. Opens in the evening and stays open late. It's built as a vintage dive bar with dim, warm lighting, checkerboard floors and red booths along the walls. Longtime Churchill bartender Fendi Vaughn manages the bar, and Duncan says he wants her to have creative freedom with the menu. Beer, wine and cocktails from upstairs are also available to Otra diners.
- Still to come. The chefs hope to grill carne asada on Sundays, host Mexican wine events, add house-made desserts and, over time, more seasonal dishes using Arizona ingredients.
Neither business had posted exact hours when they announced the opening. The websites for Otra Pizzeria and Better Days are the places to check for current hours.
The person running the oven has been building toward a room like this for a while. Cesar Velasco worked in fine dining at Christopher's, Chula Seafood and Fat Ox. He started making pizza at Pie-Curious inside The Pemberton, then launched Otra in January 2023 as a pop-up, cooking in a wood-fired oven outside local wine bars, breweries and businesses. After a short residency at Spce Coffee's Miracle Mile location, he went looking for a permanent space, and a Local First Arizona staffer introduced him to Duncan. The open kitchen keeps the pizza-making visible, the way it was at the pop-ups. "What we offer at the pop-ups now is what we're trying to offer at the restaurant," Velasco told Phoenix New Times. "It's just more of a deeper dimension."
He brought in his longtime friend Kevin Rosales, a Chicago native who cooked at Disco Dragon, worked at the original Lou Malnati's Pizzeria and sold pizzas out of his ASU dorm room.
The second building on the corner
Arvizu's El Fresnal Grocery, at 310 E. Buchanan St., dates to around 1900. It was a grocery, then a Masonic temple. The city's account says it served as the Mexican Masonic Lodge for many years. Like Gerardo's, it became part of The Battery.
It's lined up for food next. In March, Phoenix New Times reported that Happy Good, a bagel shop and market from the Stoop Kid team, was planned for 310 E. Buchanan. The plan includes morning pastries, open-faced sourdough bagel sandwiches, focaccia and breads, and coffee roasted on site. Lunch would bring sandwiches, wraps, salads and soups, and the team eventually wants evening small bites and low-ABV cocktails. Service would start with breakfast and lunch, with hours possibly growing later. That report expected a summer opening but gave no firm date. Stoop Kid owner Steven McMillen opened the original Stoop Kid in 2020 at 901 N. First St., inside The Churchill.
If that plan goes ahead, the two buildings that served this corner a century ago would be back to their original kind of work. Gerardo's would handle the evening, from dinner through midnight slices upstairs. Arvizu's would handle mornings and lunch, much as a neighborhood grocery once did for the warehouse workers nearby.
The rest of the block this fall
The Warehouse District around Third and Buchanan keeps changing. Warehouse215, at 215 E. Grant St., said it would stop hosting events in July 2026, Phoenix New Times reported in March. Smaller businesses are moving in on Buchanan. Downtown Phoenix Inc.'s October 2026 roundup of new businesses lists ANEVÉ Nail Studio at 121 E. Buchanan St.
The corner is also a short walk from the arenas. Downtown Phoenix Inc. describes Chase Field as the anchor of an entertainment corridor that includes PHX Arena, CityScape, Arizona Center and Roosevelt Row, and says downtown businesses pick up foot traffic on game days. On those nights, the corner gives fans another stop, with a late-night bar and slices served from about 10 p.m.
For a first visit, lunch at the Otra counter is the easiest way to see the room in daylight. Dinner and a late slice upstairs show both floors working the way the building was designed, with the kitchen below and people gathered above.
At Alex LeBouton, we keep track of corners like this one, where a protected building finally gets a tenant and the blocks around it start to change. If you live downtown or in central Phoenix and want to talk about how projects like The Battery affect your own street, we'd be glad to schedule a consultation.
