Starbucks Plans Return to Brady Street
New location on Brady Street would be the 20th for Milwaukee.
Site of future Starbucks, 1438 E. Brady St. Photo taken Sept. 11, 2024 by Sophie Bolich.
Starbucks could soon return to Brady Street for the first time since 2018.
The international chain is making plans to open a new cafe at 1438 E. Brady St., less than a block away from a previous location, 1677 N. Farwell Ave., which closed nearly six years ago.
Known for its highly customizable drinks and credited with popularizing the pumpkin spice latte, the coffee shop giant operates more than 35,000 locations across the globe, as of 2022.
The new Milwaukee location would be the city’s 20th; the company closed its Red Arrow Park cafe in October 2023.
Starbucks is slated to replace a T-Mobile store within Brady Place, a Walgreens-anchored strip mall that’s also home to Megawich, Wings Over Milwaukee, a hair salon, a vitamin store and a smoke shop. T-Mobile has relocated to a different storefront within the building.
Starbucks began preparations for the Lower East Side space earlier this year, according to city records, which indicate plans to demolish and remodel the 1,645-square-foot commercial space.
Plumbing and electrical work, as well as heating, ventilation and air conditioning are in progress. A sign permit is pending city approval. A rendering of the building’s exterior shows a large, colorful mural on the east side of the structure.
The new cafe would be located across from an 11-story hotel planned for an 18,179-square-foot lot at the intersections of E. Brady St., N. Cambridge Ave., and N. Farwell Ave.
A demolition permit for the development was filed earlier this week. A beginning date for construction has not yet been finalized.
The same intersection was the site of a previous Starbucks store that closed in 2018. The building was then slated to become a Hayat Pharmacy; however, those plans never materialized.
Brady Street is home to a number of local and regional coffee shops including Rochambo Coffee & Tea House, Sweet Joy Brazilian Cafe, The High Crowd, Dryhootch Coffeehouse and Nomad Coffee Bar.
A new cafe, Good Vibes Coffee House, is expected to open on Brady Street this fall.
A representative of Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
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Eagerly awaiting to see if Sbucks has learned anything yet — all recent store remodels feel cheap and uninviting; clearly different from their roots.
Also, I don’t see where they’ll put a drive-thru, so …
And here I was thinking (hoping) that they would bulldoze the entire building that they are going into…a cheap ^^^ building built in the 1980’s or so. My guess is that it was objected to when it was first proposed and built…and now a high end hotel is going to look down on this sad piece of prime development possibility.