What it is
Arizona State’s Tempe campus is the original one, about 640 acres between Mill Avenue and Rural Road and between the lake and Apache Boulevard, with something over 50,000 students on it in term. It started in 1885 as a territorial normal school in four rooms on a donated cow pasture; Old Main, the brick and sandstone hall with the deep porch at the top of the campus, was dedicated in 1898 and is still the front door. From there the campus runs south along pedestrian malls, the Palm Walk the famous one, through a hundred years of architecture to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gammage at the southern edge.
The grounds are an accredited arboretum, which is the part visitors miss: the trees are labeled, the plantings are deliberate, and the walk from Old Main to the stadium passes more species than the Botanical Garden’s demonstration loop. There is a free art museum in a building by Antoine Predock, a James Turrell skyspace that never closes, a public-art collection ranked among the best at any American university, and a hidden garden with banana trees behind a dormitory.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale has no university and no equivalent walk. The nearest thing to a campus stroll in the city is the Civic Center, which takes twenty minutes. This takes a morning, costs nothing, and is the easiest way to understand what ASU means to the Valley: it is the biggest institution in it. Add the art museum and it is a better free museum morning than most of what the attractions note lists.
The practical version
Nineteen minutes from Old Town by Scottsdale Road and the 202. Park at the Fulton Center garage off College Avenue, walk the bridge over University Drive to Old Main, take the Palm Walk south, and work west to the art museum at Mill and 10th. Two hours. Go on a weekday in term, between nine and three, for the campus with people on it.
When to go
Weekdays in term (late August to early May, with December and the first half of January quiet) are the campus at full strength, which is the point. Fall Saturdays with a home game turn the whole thing into a tailgate from noon; fun once. Summer empties it and the malls at ten in the morning are shadeless; if you come in June, do the art museum and the skyspace at dusk and skip the walk.
The route
- Old Main. Start on the porch. The first floor is open in working hours and has the building’s own history on the walls.
- The Palm Walk. South from Old Main’s lawn, a quarter mile under 111 date palms. The arboretum labels begin here.
- The malls. Cut west on the Cady or Orange malls past Hayden Library, which is mostly underground, with its lawn on the roof.
- ASU Art Museum. At Mill Avenue and 10th Street in the Nelson Fine Arts Center: free, Tuesday to Saturday with a late Thursday in term, strongest in contemporary and Latin American work. The building’s stairways and terraces are the first exhibit.
- Turrell’s skyspace. ‘Air Apparent’, near Rural Road and Terrace on the east side, is a room open to the sky with lighting that changes the color of it; go at sunset or after dark.
- The south edge. Gammage at Mill and Apache, the stadium and the arena in the gap of the butte to the north, all on the same walk.
With kids
A college campus is a good walk for a child who likes to run; the Secret Garden south of McClintock Hall has a lawn and a fireplace, and the Gallery of Scientific Exploration in the ISTB4 building on the east side has a 3D theater and a Mars exhibit. Our museums note pairs the art museum with SMoCA for a two-museum day of modern art, one on each side of the line.
The story
The Thirteenth Territorial Legislature in 1885 handed out a university to Tucson and a normal school to Tempe, and Tempe’s delegate, John Armstrong, took the normal school, which opened first. It did so in 1886, with 33 students in a building on land given by two Tempe families. Old Main went up in 1898 as the school’s first real hall. The name changed as the school did: Tempe Normal, Arizona State Teachers College, Arizona State College, and in 1958 Arizona State University, by a statewide vote that the University of Arizona fought and lost. Grady Gammage, the president who won that vote, died the next year; the Wright auditorium at the south end of campus is his memorial.
The modern campus is mostly post-war. The pedestrian malls replaced streets in the 1960s and 1970s, the arboretum designation followed, Predock’s fine-arts center opened in 1989 and the research buildings on the east side have gone up in a steady line since 2000. Enrollment passed 50,000 on this campus alone in the 2010s. What survives from the old normal school is Old Main, the University Club bungalow from about 1909, and the Palm Walk, whose date palms were first planted a century ago and replaced, as they aged, with new ones in the 2010s.
The Scottsdale connection
ASU is the biggest employer of Scottsdale residents and the biggest landlord in south Scottsdale, where its SkySong innovation center occupies the site of the old Los Arcos Mall at Scottsdale and McDowell; our ASU lexicon entry covers what the university means on this side of the line. The art museum and SMoCA are ten minutes apart and share curators, artists and a view of what contemporary art in the desert is for.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south to the westbound 202, one exit to Rural Road or Mill Avenue, then south to University Drive. Light rail runs along the campus’s north and east edges, with stations at Mill and 3rd Street and at University and Rural, and connects to Sky Harbor; our getting around note has the lines.