What it is
The Barry Goldwater Memorial is a corner lot on the northeast side of Lincoln Drive and Tatum Boulevard, the busiest intersection in the Town of Paradise Valley, planted as a cactus garden with stone walls, a bench and a short walkway, and holding a nine-foot bronze of the senator by Joe Beeler, a founder of the Cowboy Artists of America. The town commissioned it and unveiled it in February 2004. Goldwater stands in shirtsleeves with a camera in his right hand, facing west over the Valley, and the stones along the path carry his quotations. Directly above the park, on the hill called Scorpion Hill, is Be-Nun-I-Kin, the sandstone house he built in 1952 and lived in until he died there in 1998; the name is Navajo for “house on top of the hill,” and the stone came from the Navajo Nation. The house is private. The park is yours.
That is the entire place. It takes ten minutes, and ten minutes is right.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
You will not leave Scottsdale for it; you will pass it. Lincoln Drive is the road from Scottsdale to the Camelback Mountain trailheads and to the resorts of the Camelback corridor, and the Tatum light is the one where you sit. The park is the reason to pull in once. Goldwater is in Scottsdale’s story more than most people know: his family’s department store anchored Fashion Square in 1961, his name is on the boulevard that loops around Old Town, and the public trail up Camelback across the road exists because of a 1965 campaign he backed; our people page tells all of it. The statue is where that story has a face.
The practical version
Twelve minutes from Old Town up Scottsdale Road and west on Lincoln, five from the Camelback Inn. A small lot off Tatum just north of the intersection; the statue is fifty feet from it. Daylight hours, no fee, no facilities. Read the stones, look up at the house, take the photograph, and continue to Echo Canyon, which is the only way to spend the time this stop saves you.
When to go
Any time the light is good, which in Paradise Valley means the first hour after sunrise, when Camelback across Lincoln turns red and the bronze catches it from the east, or the last hour before sunset, when the statue faces into the light it was posed for. Midday in summer is a bronze in full sun on a corner of hot pavement; skip it. The stop pairs with Echo Canyon in the morning (the trailhead lot off McDonald Drive fills by seven in season, so the memorial is the consolation if you missed it) or with a Camelback Inn or El Chorro dinner in the evening, both five minutes along Lincoln.
What to look at
- The camera. Goldwater photographed Arizona for sixty years, the canyons and the Navajo and Hopi people above all; the books are in every Scottsdale used bookstore. The town chose that man over the senator, and it was the right call.
- The stones. His sentences along the path, which are better company than most memorial inscriptions; he was quotable to a fault.
- The house. Be-Nun-I-Kin on the hill behind, sandstone and glass, built in 1952 when Lincoln Drive was a dirt road between citrus groves. Look, do not drive up.
- The corner itself. Tatum and Lincoln is where Paradise Valley’s resort row meets its residential town; the Camelback Inn is a mile east, the mountain is across the road, and the one-acre lots the town incorporated in 1961 to protect run north from here.
The Goldwater drive
If ten minutes becomes an interest, there is a short loop: the memorial here, then a mile west on Lincoln to Christ Church of the Ascension, where his ashes and Peggy Goldwater’s rest under a small plaque, then back east on Lincoln and south on Scottsdale Road to Fashion Square, where the Macy’s on Scottsdale Road stands on the site his family’s store opened in 1961, and finally the Goldwater Boulevard signs on the downtown couplet, which our lexicon explains. An hour, all told, and a better introduction to the Scottsdale of the 1960s than most museums.
With kids
A statue, a bench and a cactus garden. Two minutes for them, eight for you. Camelback is across the street.
The story
Barry Goldwater was born in Phoenix in 1909 into the merchant family whose trading posts went back to territorial Arizona, ran Goldwater’s department store from the 1930s, and in 1952, as a Phoenix city councilman about to run for the Senate, built himself a house on a rocky hill above the dirt crossroads of Lincoln and Tatum, in a valley of citrus groves and a few dude ranches that would not become a town for nine more years. He named it Be-Nun-I-Kin, Navajo for the house on top of the hill, and built it of sandstone hauled from the Navajo Nation, whose people he had photographed since the 1930s. He went to Washington in 1953, ran for president in 1964, served five terms in all, and came home to the hill every time. He died there in May 1998.
Paradise Valley incorporated in 1961 on one-acre lots and a refusal to be annexed, and Goldwater was its most famous citizen for its first four decades, a fact the town bore lightly until he was gone. In 2004 it commissioned Joe Beeler, the Sedona sculptor who had helped found the Cowboy Artists of America in 1965, for a bronze on the corner below the house, and chose the pose with care: the photographer, not the politician. It was unveiled that February. The statue the state later placed in the U.S. Capitol, by Deborah Copenhaver Fellows in 2015, shows the senator; the town’s shows the Arizonan.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale met Goldwater first as a merchant: the family store opened as the anchor of the new Fashion Square in 1961, the year the town below his hill incorporated, and the store’s own page covers that run. It met him next as a conservationist, when in 1965 he put his name to the campaign that bought Camelback Mountain’s upper slopes ahead of the builders; the summit became a Phoenix park in 1968, and the Echo Canyon trail you can see from the memorial climbs it. And it met him last as a name, when the city renamed the southbound half of its downtown couplet Goldwater Boulevard after his death in 1998, pairing him with Mayor Herb Drinkwater on the other side. Three Scottsdale stories, one man, and the corner at Tatum and Lincoln is where you can look up at his roof.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north from Old Town to Lincoln Drive, west on Lincoln about two and a half miles past the Camelback Inn to Tatum Boulevard; turn right on Tatum and the small lot is immediately on the right, just north of the intersection. Twelve minutes from Old Town, five from the Camelback corridor resorts. The Camelback Mountain trailheads are south across Lincoln on McDonald Drive and Invergordon; the church with his ashes is a mile further west on Lincoln. No transit of any use, and the corner is not a place to walk to.