The Old Big Lots Is Still Dark. Everything Else On West Fifth Already Reopened.

Drive down West Fifth Avenue this week and you'll pass a bright new biscuit counter with a line out the door, then half a block later, a nearly 68,000-square-foot box that's been empty since before most people started noticing. Both storefronts sit on the same short stretch of the same street, in a city that covers just over 1.3 square miles. One reopened in nine months. The other has been dark for close to two years, with roughly two more to go before anyone can walk through the doors.

That gap tells you something about how Grandview Heights actually rebuilds itself, and it's not the story you'd guess from watching the restaurant openings alone.

What already came back

The space at 1417 W. Fifth Ave. spent a few years as Hot Chicken Takeover, the local chain that closed the location in September 2025 as part of a broader shutdown that saw it wind down every remaining store by that October. Biscuit Belly, a Louisville-founded breakfast chain, took over the address and opened its first Ohio location there on June 2, 2026, serving a biscuit-heavy menu that includes twelve different biscuit sandwiches. From closure to reopening, that's about nine months.

A few blocks away, inside The Little Grand Market food hall at 710 Grandview Crossing Way, the turnover moved even faster. For the Love of Dough Cookies vacated its stall in April 2026. By early June, Fresh and Feta, a Mediterranean bowl concept from Habibi Grill owner Tarek Albast, had moved in with falafel, chicken shawarma, and sides like baba ghanoush and fried cauliflower. That's a stall filled in under two months, inside a food hall that itself only opened in August 2024.

Small footprints. Fast turnarounds. That part of West Fifth is doing exactly what a busy corridor is supposed to do.

The building nobody's fixed yet

Now walk a little further to 1451 W. Fifth Ave., the old grocery box. This building has cycled through tenants for decades: a Big Bear store, then a Giant Eagle for about ten years, then Big Lots starting in 2017. Big Lots closed there in fall 2024 as the national chain collapsed under its own financial trouble.

Sprouts Farmers Market, a Phoenix-based specialty grocer with no other Ohio locations, signed a lease on the building in the spring of 2026, according to Columbus Business First reporting picked up by Hoodline. That's already a year and a half of vacancy before a tenant was even confirmed. And the timeline doesn't close there: NBC4 reports Sprouts doesn't plan to open its doors until 2028, which means the total dark period for that box, from Big Lots' closure to Sprouts' grand opening, runs close to four years. Sprouts will use about 28,000 square feet of the space and leave another 10,000 square feet for a future tenant still to be named.

Here's the comparison side by side:

Why the format matters more than the location

It's tempting to read a two-year-dark storefront as a sign the corridor is struggling. The restaurant and food hall numbers say otherwise. What's actually happening is that small-format retail space, a single restaurant suite or one food hall stall, turns over on the timeline of a normal lease negotiation and buildout. Big-box grocery space doesn't work that way. A nearly 70,000-square-foot building needs a tenant whose entire business model depends on that scale, and there simply aren't many grocers actively expanding into a market the size of Central Ohio at any given moment. Sprouts happens to be one of them right now, and even they need close to two years of construction and staffing buildout before opening day.

You can see the same pattern in miniature across the rest of the city. Grandview Yard, on the eastern edge of town, has built a reputation as a Class A+ office corridor drawing Fortune 500 tenants, a different leasing rhythm entirely from a neighborhood restaurant strip. Goodale Boulevard, by contrast, has become the address for smaller entrepreneurial and tech-oriented businesses looking for character over square footage. Three corridors, three different tenant profiles, three different clocks. A city this compact holds all of them at once, which is part of why a single empty box on West Fifth feels so noticeable. There's nowhere for it to hide.

The fall calendar didn't wait on any of this

While the leasing plays out at its own pace, the parts of Grandview Heights that run on a weekly or monthly clock haven't slowed down at all. A few things worth knowing about as September opens:

• The Grandview Hop runs its last night market of the 2026 season on Saturday, September 26, from 5 to 9 p.m., closing Grandview Avenue between 1st and 5th for pedestrians, vendors, and food trucks. New this year is a Community Courtyard at Grandview Center with a rotating lineup of themed activities, including a classic car showcase and a pet expo with a pop-up dog park.
• TRI the Heights, the youth triathlon, brings road closures around the city on Saturday, September 5, with a finish-line celebration afterward at Wyman Woods Park.
• Fall Fest takes over Wyman Woods Park on September 22 to mark the first day of the season, with vendors, food trucks, and free family activities.
• The city's Dog Event Series includes a Dog Swim at the Municipal Pool on the Tuesday after Labor Day, September 8, from 4 to 7 p.m., open to any registered pup, plus a "Walk with the Dog" loop around Wyman Woods Park with stations for teeth brushing and paw prints along the way.
• The Grandview Heights Farmers Market keeps its Sunday schedule at Larson Middle School through the fall, with a rotating lineup that has included Patisserie Lallier, Flourish Brioche Donuts, and Rose Dough Donuts alongside weekly regulars like FoodSouls Cuisine.
• Wallace Gardens, the city's community garden plots near Grandview Avenue and Goodale Boulevard, starts a produce donation drive with Rooted in Good on October 16, letting home gardeners funnel extra harvest toward local hunger relief.

None of that calendar depends on how quickly a grocery chain can finish a buildout. It runs on volunteers, city staff, and a rotating cast of small vendors, which is exactly why it moves so much faster than the real estate does.

What this actually tells you about living here

If you've been wondering whether the empty Big Lots means the West Fifth corridor is losing momentum, the restaurant and food hall numbers suggest the opposite. Small-format space here fills in a matter of months. The one property that's taking years to turn over is taking that long because of its size, not because nobody wants to be on that stretch of the city. Once Sprouts opens, the corridor picks up a second grocery anchor to go with a full lineup of new food options, on a street where three formerly closed storefronts will all be occupied again.

In the meantime, the rest of the city keeps its own faster rhythm, one Hop, one Sunday market, one Fall Fest at a time. That's the part that's easy to miss if you're only tracking the buildings.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans in Grandview Heights, whether you're watching the market from the sidelines or thinking ahead to a move, Guided Property Sales can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground here, block by block. Request your VIP home valuation and get a read on the neighborhood that goes past the headline numbers.