What it is
The Arizona Heritage Center is the Arizona Historical Society’s museum for the middle of the state, a low modern building among the saguaros on the Tempe side of Papago Park, a few hundred yards from where the German prisoner-of-war camp stood during the Second World War. The society, founded in territorial Tucson in the nineteenth century, runs museums across Arizona; this one takes the twentieth century as its subject, which is a rarer thing than it sounds. Most Arizona museums stop at statehood or start at the Hohokam. This one is about the Roosevelt Dam and the canals, the copper strikes and the Depression, the air bases and the camps of the war years, and above all the thing that happened after 1945, when air conditioning, defense contracts and cheap land turned a farm town of a hundred thousand people into a metropolis of millions. Scottsdale’s own story, from the two-thousand-person town of 1951 to the resort city, is a chapter of that one.
The changing exhibitions take on harder subjects than the permanent galleries do; recent years have brought shows on Indigenous contemporary art and on a century of women’s protest in Arizona. The society’s library and archives for the Phoenix area are in the building, open to researchers by appointment, and are where a house history or a family’s territorial records live.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s museums are about art and the mythic West, and our museums note says so, and the question a new resident actually has, how did this place get like this, is answered here, fourteen minutes from Old Town. The Scottsdale Historical Society in the Little Red Schoolhouse is the local version; this is the regional one, with the archives.
The practical version
Fourteen minutes from Old Town by Scottsdale Road, McDowell and College Avenue, with free parking. Tuesday through Saturday, short daytime hours; closed Sunday and Monday; it was shut for repairs from November 2025 into January 2026, so check the hours before you drive. Modest admission. Two hours, and pair it with the zoo or the Botanical Garden across the park.
When to go
Any weekday afternoon it is open. The building is never crowded; a school group in the morning is the busiest it gets, and by one o’clock on a Thursday you may have the galleries to yourself. The air conditioning makes it a reasonable July afternoon, and its hours fit neatly after a morning at the Phoenix Zoo or the Botanical Garden, both ten minutes across the park. Check the society’s site first: the center has changed its hours several times in recent years and closed for the winter of 2025 to 2026 for repairs.
The galleries, in order
- Statehood and water. The dams, the canals, the farms; the foundation for everything that follows.
- The war. Arizona’s air bases, the training fields that became airports, the internment camps and the POW camps, including Camp Papago Park a few hundred yards from where you stand.
- The boom. Air conditioning, Motorola and the defense plants, the subdivisions, the retirees; the gallery that explains the Valley outside the window.
- The changing exhibition. Whatever is on; it is usually the sharpest thing in the building.
- The walk to the canal. Out the door and five minutes to the Crosscut Canal path and the escape-tunnel marker; our Camp Papago Park page tells the story of the 1944 Great Escape.
For researchers
The library and archives hold the society’s central Arizona collections: photographs, manuscripts, maps, business records and newspapers. Appointments are made through the society’s reference staff by email, and the archivists are generous with first-timers who arrive with a street address and a question. A Scottsdale house built before 1960 very likely has a trace here.
With kids
Better for teenagers than for small children; the galleries are text-heavy and the subject is the recent past. A twelve-year-old who has just learned about the Second World War will find the POW camp story, and the walk to the marker, the best part.
The story
The Arizona Historical Society is older than the state, founded in Tucson in the territorial period, and for most of its history its museums were in the south. The Phoenix-area museum in Papago Park was the society’s long-delayed answer to the Valley’s growth, and the choice of the twentieth century as its subject was deliberate: the Heard, the Pueblo Grande museum and the state’s own capitol museum had the earlier eras covered, and nobody was telling the story of how a desert farm town became the fifth-largest city in the country. The building sits on land that was part of the Papago Park military reservation, which is why the POW camp story is literally underfoot, and it has had a sometimes precarious run, with hours cut and expanded as the society’s budget has moved; the closure from November 10, 2025, to January 2026 for building repairs was the latest chapter.
What the museum does well is the connective story. The dams of the Salt River Project made the farms; the farms and the dry air brought the health seekers and the winter visitors; the war brought the air bases and the engineers; the engineers stayed when Motorola and the others opened plants in the 1950s, and the air conditioner made staying bearable. Scottsdale’s growth from a crossroads to a city of a quarter million happened entirely inside the period these galleries cover, and the resort rows on Scottsdale Road and the subdivisions of McCormick Ranch are the museum’s last chapter written on the ground.
The Scottsdale connection
Our Camp Papago Park page tells the Great Escape of December 1944, when twenty-five German prisoners tunneled out of the camp a few hundred yards from this building and most were recaptured within weeks; the museum’s war gallery is the fuller account, and the marker on the Crosscut Canal path is the walk between the two. For the Scottsdale resident, the archives are the practical gift: the society’s photographs and records are where the history of a particular lot, a particular motel on Scottsdale Road or a particular family of the territorial years turns up, and the staff know how to find it.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south to McDowell Road, east a short distance to College Avenue, then south into Papago Park; the center is on the right before Curry Road, with free parking. About fourteen minutes from Old Town. From Tempe’s Mill Avenue it is five minutes north on College. The light rail’s Center Parkway and Washington station is a long walk; drive or rideshare. The Botanical Garden and the zoo are ten minutes away across the park by McDowell and Galvin.