What it is
The Arizona Museum of Natural History is the Valley’s dinosaur museum, and it lives in Mesa’s old city hall, a 1937 Works Progress Administration building by Lescher & Mahoney on Macdonald Street, a block north of Main. The city opened a small museum inside it in 1977, called it the Mesa Southwest Museum, expanded the building in 1983, 1987 and 2000, added a research division with real paleontologists and archaeologists in 1995, and renamed it in 2007 to match what it had become.
What it had become is a serious regional natural-history museum with one showpiece children will talk about for years. Dinosaur Mountain is a three-story indoor cliff with a waterfall, animatronic dinosaurs on its ledges and a flash flood that comes down it every thirty minutes. Around it: Dinosaur Hall with mounted skeletons (a Tarbosaurus, a Camarasaurus), galleries of minerals and meteorites, a reconstructed Hohokam village with pithouses and genuine artifacts, a Mayan city for children to build, a gold-panning trough, and the territorial jail cells that came with the building when it was the courthouse.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale has no natural-history museum and the Phoenix ones are farther. Our museums note is honest that Scottsdale’s strengths are Western art, contemporary art and architecture; a child who wants a T. rex has to leave town, and this is the closest and best place to take them. It is also air-conditioned, which in July and August makes it a destination in its own right.
The practical version
Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town via the 101, the 202 and Country Club Drive; city garages are a block away and the Center/Main light-rail station is two blocks. Open Tuesday through Saturday during the day and Sunday afternoons, closed Mondays. Two hours with children. The i.d.e.a. Museum, a children’s art museum, is a short walk across the tracks for the second half of the day.
When to go
Weekday mornings in the school year are quiet until the field trips arrive around ten; a 10 AM arrival on a Tuesday gets you Dinosaur Mountain nearly alone. Summer is the busy season, when every parent in the East Valley is looking for air conditioning, and weekends in July are crowded. Monsoon afternoons in August, when the real flash floods are running outside, are the best time to see the fake one.
What to see, in order
- Dinosaur Mountain. Up first, time the flood, watch it from the top.
- Dinosaur Hall. The skeletons and the Arizona fossils; this is where the research staff’s work shows.
- The Southwest Gallery. The Hohokam village, with pithouses you can walk through and artifacts from the museum’s own excavations at Mesa Grande. Our Hohokam lexicon entry and the canals note explain why this matters a mile from where you are standing.
- The jail. The territorial-era cells from the building’s courthouse days, with the graffiti.
- The gold-panning trough and the Mayan city. At the end, where children can be left for twenty minutes.
With kids
This is the Valley’s best museum for the four-to-twelve range, and it anchors a downtown Mesa day that our kids note does not have room for: the natural history museum in the morning, a sandwich at Worth Takeaway on Main, the i.d.e.a. Museum in the afternoon, and the light rail as the free ride in between if the children have never been on a train.
The story
Mesa’s city hall of 1937 was a Depression project, one of the WPA’s civic buildings across Arizona, designed by the Phoenix firm of Lescher & Mahoney, who did a good share of the state’s public architecture between the wars. It held everything a town of ten thousand needed: the council, the courts, the library, the police and the fire department, and a jail. When the city outgrew it, the building became, in 1977, a small Mesa Southwest Museum, the sort of local-history room every Arizona town had.
What changed it was ambition and dinosaurs. Expansions in 1983 and 1987 added gallery space; in 1995 the museum hired curators in paleontology and archaeology and started doing its own science, including the long excavation of Mesa Grande, a Hohokam Classic-period platform mound a mile north that the museum now operates as a public site under its O’odham name, the Sce:dagĭ Mu:val Va’aki. A third expansion in 2000 gave the museum the room for Dinosaur Mountain and the dinosaur hall as they stand today. The 2007 renaming to the Arizona Museum of Natural History acknowledged that a city museum had become a state one.
The Scottsdale connection
The Hohokam gallery here and the Huhugam Ki Museum on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, on Scottsdale’s eastern edge, tell the same story from two sides: the archaeologists’ and the descendants’. The canals the Hohokam dug ran through what is now south Scottsdale, and the canals note traces them; Mesa Grande, the mound the museum excavates, sat at the head of one of the largest canal systems on the Salt River. A visitor who sees both museums and then walks the Arizona Canal path has the whole thousand-year arc.
Getting there
The 101 south to the 202 east, exit Country Club Drive south to Main Street, east to Macdonald Street, north one block; the museum is on the right. Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town, thirty-five from the Camelback corridor. Garages on First Avenue and Centennial Way. From Tempe, the light rail’s Center/Main station is a two-block walk; our getting around note explains why the rail does not help from Scottsdale itself.