Sharon Harper, Business/Civic Leader is being honored as 2025 Arizona Historymaker October 25, 2025.
The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com are moving their offices to the redeveloped Park Central Mall in midtown Phoenix, leaving downtown for the first time in the news organization’s 135-year history.
The newspaper’s new office at Park Central will be 17,000 square feet, Andrew Cheney, a broker with Lee and Associates who represented Park Central in the lease, said.
“We have one of the most exciting atmospheres on Central Avenue right now,” Cheney said of the activity at Park Central, listing Creighton University, the new hotel, EOS Fitness, restaurants and apartments, as benefits for Park Central. “There is something for everyone there right now.”
Phoenix recently designated the area around Park Central as a bioscience core, known as “Phoenix Medical Quarter, Global Advancement of Health and Education.”
Sharon Harper, chairperson and CEO of Plaza Cos., one of the co-developers of Park Central, said the success of the redeveloped mall is “such a tribute to Phoenix for sure.”
“Park Central has risen as the epitome of the history and the future of the city,” she said.
Along with The Republic, Dress for Success Phoenix, a non-profit organization that provides unemployed people with professional clothing and job training to help them reenter the work- force, recently moved its office to Park Central.
Harper said new development projects are in the works for the former mall as well. Plaza Cos. is in escrow with the Dinerstein Cos., the developer of an apartment complex already at the former mall, on another site to build an additional apartment building.
Barrow Neurological Institute is also in the early stages of planning a new bioscience building at the site.
Artlink, an arts organization, is planning a new set of programs for performing arts at Park Central.
“We wanted to be a leader in the mix of biosciences, commercial office and arts and culture,” Harper said of the curation of tenants at Park Central.
