What it is
Downtown Mesa is a mile of Main Street between Country Club Drive and Mesa Drive, laid out in 1878 by Mormon settlers on a grid so wide that the light rail, which arrived in 2015, fits down the middle with two lanes of traffic and parking on either side. It is the center of the third-largest city in Arizona, which most visitors could not place on a map, and for most of the twentieth century it was the sort of downtown a farm town has: a few blocks of brick storefronts, a theater, a hardware store, then decline when the malls came.
What changed it was a sequence of public bets. The city put its natural history museum in the 1937 city hall on Macdonald in 1977; it opened the Mesa Arts Center, the largest in the state, at Main and Center in 2005; it ran the train down Main Street in 2015 and extended it in 2019; and Arizona State University opened a media campus on the arts center’s block in the 2020s. Around those, slowly and then quickly, came the places locals actually drive for: Worth Takeaway, Cider Corps, Republica Empanada, the row of small bars and restaurants between Robson and Center, and the sidewalk sculptures and murals the city has been installing along Main for two decades.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because it does three things Scottsdale does not. It has two museums built for children, the Arizona Museum of Natural History and the i.d.e.a. Museum, two blocks apart. It has a train, which for a child from a car city is an attraction. And it is cheap: a lunch for a family of four here costs what a round of drinks costs on the Old Town patios. It is not a destination the way Old Town is; it is the best half-day errand in the East Valley.
The practical version
Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town via the 101, the 202 and Country Club Drive. Park once in a city garage off First Avenue or Centennial Way and walk; everything is within six blocks of the Center/Main station. Museums are a daytime visit, closed Mondays. The second Friday of the month is the evening to come. From Tempe, take the train.
When to go
Weekday mornings for the museums, which are quiet until the field trips arrive. The second Friday of the month is the night out: shops and galleries open late, the arts center museum runs until ten, the street fills with families and the restaurants that are empty on a Tuesday have waits. Some fall Friday evenings bring a Sunset Market downtown. Show nights at the arts center, which are most nights from September through May, make the blocks around Main and Center busy and the rest of the street pleasant.
The walk
Start at the Center/Main station. The arts center campus is on the southeast corner, with its shade canopies and water channel; walk through it to First Avenue and back. North on Macdonald a block is the natural history museum in the old city hall. West on Main from Center, the blocks to Robson hold the densest run of small restaurants, bars and shops; Worth Takeaway is at 218 W Main and Cider Corps is around the corner on Robson. The sidewalk sculptures, rotated by the city, are mostly along these blocks, and the murals are on the side streets and the backs of buildings; look down the alleys. East of Center, Main runs past older storefronts to Mesa Drive, where Pete’s Fish & Chips has stood since 1947.
Eating
Worth Takeaway for the sandwich, Republica Empanada on First Avenue and Hibbert for the empanadas, Cider Corps for a flight at four, Pete’s for a fish basket from a walk-up window. Between them is a changing cast of small places, a brewery or two and the coffee shops the ASU campus brought. Nothing requires a reservation and nothing costs what it would in Scottsdale.
With kids
The two museums, the train (one stop to Mesa Drive and back is a free ride for a child who has never been on one), lunch at Worth, and the arts center plazas for the running around. Our kids note has Scottsdale’s own options; this is the day you add when those run out.
The story
Mesa was founded in 1878 by Mormon families sent south from Utah and Idaho, who chose the mesa above the Salt River because the Hohokam had already dug canals across it a thousand years earlier; they cleaned out the old channels and had water in the fields within a year. The townsite was laid out in the Mormon manner, a square mile of blocks with streets wide enough to turn a wagon team, and Main Street became the commercial spine. For a century it was a farm town’s downtown, with a courthouse, a 1937 WPA city hall, department stores and, by the 1970s, the slow emptying every American main street suffered when the malls and the freeway arrived.
The recovery was deliberate and took forty years. The city moved its museum into the old city hall in 1977 and built it into a natural-history institution. It built the arts center, the largest in Arizona, in 2005, on the theory that culture would bring the restaurants. Then it endured the light rail: the Central Mesa extension took years of torn-up pavement and closed storefronts before it opened on August 22, 2015, and the Gilbert Road extension followed in 2019. The arts center, the museums and the train together gave downtown Mesa something no other East Valley downtown has, a civic core you can reach without a car, and the private investment that had held back for decades finally came, in restaurants, a cidery, apartments and a university campus.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s Old Town and Mesa’s Main Street were founded a decade apart, by very different people, and took opposite paths: Scottsdale sold the West to visitors and became a resort town; Mesa farmed, grew into a vast suburb and left its downtown for last. The Old Town on foot note is the walking tour of the first choice; this is the walking tour of the second. The ambitions now overlap, since both downtowns are built around a performing-arts center and a museum district, and the train that Scottsdale declined to build, as the getting around note explains, runs down the middle of Mesa’s.
Getting there
The 101 south to the 202 east, exit Country Club Drive, south to Main Street, east into downtown; garages are off First Avenue and Centennial Way, a block south of Main. Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town, thirty-five from the Camelback corridor. From Tempe or Phoenix, the light rail to Center/Main puts you at the arts center’s door; from Scottsdale, a rideshare to a Tempe station and the train east is the way to arrive for an evening of cider.