Florence Wheeler is midway through a peach at the register when her brother Leon counts out quarters for a fruit bar. It costs seventy-five cents. Some days the tally stretches to a Gatorade or a three-dollar scoop of ice cream, and their mother, Shannon Wheeler, says this happens close to five days a week. She also walks over from her home in Owen Park most mornings for coffee, or in the evening for whatever vegetables she's missing for dinner. None of this required a car, a parking lot, or a trip across the river. It happens at a building on Archer Street that, until this spring, was empty.
That building is CH|OP Grocer, and it sits at Archer and Quanah, on the line between Crosbie Heights and Owen Park in west Tulsa. The name is literal: it combines the initials of both neighborhoods. What makes it worth writing about isn't that a new grocery store opened. It's who the owner decided it was for, and how small that decision turned out to be.
A Neighborhood That Used to Feed Itself on Foot
Larry Mitchell has lived in Crosbie Heights for fourteen years, since moving over from Broken Arrow. At seventy-three, retired, he remembers when the neighborhood had its own grocery stores and laundromats, the kind of places you walked to without thinking about it. Over time those closed. Home renovation and new building slowed to almost nothing. The area that once supported daily foot traffic became, in plain terms, a food desert.
That's the backdrop CHOP opened into. Chris McCabe, the owner, bought the building at 1301 W. Archer St. in 2024 with a plan for a bodega and a small home goods shop next door. He also owns Belafonte, the live music venue on Phoenix Avenue, so he wasn't approaching this as a stranger studying a market from the outside. He was already invested in this same stretch of the neighborhood.
Built By Survey, Not By Guess
Here's the detail that separates CHOP from a typical neighborhood grocery play. Before McCabe stocked a single shelf, roughly 500 neighbors filled out surveys telling him what they wanted the store to carry and become. That number is worth sitting with. Crosbie Heights itself has an estimated 517 residents according to neighborhood data cited on Nextdoor. Five hundred survey responses from a combined service area that includes Owen Park means an unusually large share of the people CHOP set out to serve actually told him, in advance, what to build.
McCabe has been direct about the ceiling he's aiming for:
"We're not trying to reach all of Tulsa, we're trying to be here for these 3,000 people that live in these neighborhoods."
Three thousand people is a specific, bounded number, and it runs against the instinct most retail expansion follows, which is to chase the largest addressable population a location can pull from. CHOP did the opposite. It capped its ambition at two adjoining neighborhoods and built inventory around what those particular 500 respondents said they were missing: locally-sourced produce, ready-made meals, coffee, ice cream, and enough national brands to cover a normal week without a second stop.
The store is open seven days a week, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, hours built for a walk-up routine rather than a weekly bulk run.
One Family, Three Storefronts, Same Few Streets
The Belafonte building has its own history, and it explains something about how this corner of west Tulsa keeps getting rebuilt without anything new being constructed. It went up in 1935 as a furniture store. When that business ended, the building became the Third and Phoenix Church of Christ for the next sixty years, complete with a baptistry built under a stage barely five feet by nine. In 2003 the congregation sold it to Dr. Miriam Mills, a pediatrician and real estate investor who was living in Crosbie Heights at the time. She spent years and tens of thousands of dollars keeping the building as a community space rather than letting it become another bar. Locals started calling it the Fish Building after a mural artist Ana Maria Ortiz painted on its side.
Mills sold the building to McCabe and his partners, Will and Charis Retherford, in April 2023. It became Belafonte. The same team is now restoring a community garden at 311 S. Phoenix Ave., a lot Mills had held onto for parking that the McCabes recently purchased outright. Next door to CHOP, a shop called Mary's sells local art and home goods, named for Mary Partridge, a Muscogee woman whose original 160-acre allotment became the Crosbie Heights neighborhood.
Three storefronts, one small ownership group, no new square footage added to the neighborhood. Every project has been about taking a building that already had a purpose and giving it another one, on the same few streets, for people who already live within walking distance.
What's Already Changing
Shannon Wheeler has started meeting neighbors while she shops, people she says she wouldn't have crossed paths with otherwise. Larry Mitchell has begun shifting his own routine, doing more of his weekly shopping at CHOP instead of driving further out, and he thinks the model could work for other Tulsa neighborhoods that lost their walkable grocery options the same way Crosbie Heights did.
CHOP has already hosted a movie night, and Wheeler says she'd like to see more of that kind of programming, along with a local beer selection down the road. The store plans to start accepting SNAP benefits soon, which matters directly for a neighborhood that spent years without a nearby place to use them. Belafonte, meanwhile, continues to double as a gallery space on First Fridays, giving this same stretch of streets a second reason to draw people out after dark.
None of this happened because a national chain finally noticed west Tulsa's population numbers. It happened because a small operator who already lived and worked in the neighborhood decided the addressable market was measured in thousands, not tens of thousands, and built accordingly.
What's Within a Few Blocks
For anyone mapping out a week in this pocket of west Tulsa, the walkable radius around Archer and Quanah already includes:
- Owen Park, the green space the eastern half of CHOP's service area is named for
- WaterWorks Art Center, a public art space a short walk north
- Joe Station Dog Park, for the daily leash routine
- Newblock Park, along the river
- The Cave House, a longstanding neighborhood landmark
None of this required a rezoning fight or a tax incentive package. It required one family willing to buy old buildings on the same few streets, one at a time, and fill them with what 500 neighbors actually asked for.
Crosbie Heights' own small area plan describes an ambition for the next ten to twenty years: a neighborhood known as eclectic, welcoming, and convenient, one that respects its history while building toward what comes next. CHOP didn't wait for that timeline. It opened this spring, priced a fruit bar at seventy-five cents, and let the neighborhood's daily rhythm answer the rest.
If you're watching how pockets of west Tulsa like Crosbie Heights and Owen Park are changing, and you want a read on what that means for home values or timing a move in this part of the city, Philip Shain knows this market block by block. Let's Connect.
