What it is
Encanto Park is the park Phoenix built when it decided to be a city. It is 222 acres at 15th Avenue and Encanto Boulevard, two miles northwest of downtown, laid out around a 7.5-acre lagoon by the Works Progress Administration between 1935 and 1938: a boathouse, a bandshell, a clubhouse, a golf course, lawns and an avenue of trees that have now had ninety years to grow. The land had been the Dorris and Norton farms, bought at the urging of William G. Hartranft, who conceived the park, and made a city park by quitclaim deed on November 27, 1934; the name means “enchantment,” and the city has never been shy about it.
What is there now is what was there then, plus the twentieth century. The lagoon is stocked for fishing and has pedal boats. Enchanted Island, on the island in the lagoon, is a small amusement park for children one to ten, with eleven rides and the city-owned Encanto Carousel, an Allan Herschell machine built in 1948 that has been turning in this park since Kiddieland days. There are two golf courses, the Encanto 18 and the nine-hole Encanto 9, a public pool, playgrounds, courts and ramadas. Forbes once put it among the dozen best city parks in the country, and USA Today among the ten best things in Phoenix, which is more than most WPA projects can say.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale’s parks are good and young. Chaparral and Eldorado have lakes and lawns; the Greenbelt has eleven miles of path; the Railroad Park has the trains and its own carousel. None of them has a 1935 boathouse, a lagoon you can pedal across under ninety-year-old trees, a carousel older than the city of Scottsdale’s incorporation, or a historic neighborhood around it. Encanto is the Valley’s one great old park, and for a family with small children it is a full morning at almost no cost.
The practical version
Just under thirty minutes from Old Town via Indian School Road and 15th Avenue. Free parking in the lots off 15th Avenue and Encanto Boulevard. The park is open 5:30 AM to 11 PM; Enchanted Island, the boathouse and the pool keep shorter, seasonal hours, so check Enchanted Island’s site for the week. October through April is the season; in summer, come before ten.
When to go
October through April is the whole answer. The lawns are green, the lagoon is pleasant, and a weekend morning sees half of central Phoenix with a picnic blanket. Summer is early morning only, and Enchanted Island trims its hours in the worst of it; the pool is the exception, open afternoons in season. Our Scottsdale with kids note treats Encanto as the cool-season outing it is.
Enchanted Island’s hours are the thing to check: typically late morning to mid-afternoon on weekdays, longer into the evening Friday through Sunday, extended over school breaks, and it posts themed days, pirates in October among them, that are worth a child’s attention.
What to do, in order
- The carousel. The 1948 Encanto Carousel on Enchanted Island, first thing, while the line is short.
- A pedal boat. Rented from the island concession; twenty minutes around the lagoon, in the shade of the big trees along the bank.
- The loop walk. The path around the lagoon, past the boathouse and the bandshell, is a mile of the oldest shade in Phoenix.
- A picnic. The ramadas and the lawn on the 15th Avenue side; bring your own, because the island’s concessions are snacks.
- The pool, in summer, or nine holes on the Encanto 9 if someone in the party has clubs; our golf without a membership note explains why the municipal courses are the bargain.
Encanto-Palmcroft
The neighborhood wrapped around the park’s east side was laid out in the 1920s with curving streets, palm medians and the Spanish Revival, Tudor and Pueblo houses of Phoenix’s first money. It is a historic district now, and a slow five-minute drive from Palmcroft Drive to Encanto Boulevard to Monte Vista Road is the best free architecture tour in the city.
With kids
This is who the park is for. Enchanted Island is built for ages one to ten and not a year older, entry is free and rides are by ticket or wristband; the playgrounds are good; the ducks are relentless.
The story
Phoenix in 1934 had about 50,000 people, no large park, and in William G. Hartranft a man who wanted one on the scale of the big city parks back east. The city bought the Dorris and Norton farmland northwest of downtown, and the quitclaim deed that made it a park took effect on November 27, 1934, initially, the records say, to keep livestock off it. Then the New Deal arrived. The Works Progress Administration put men to work on the lagoon, the boathouse, the bandshell, the clubhouse and the golf course from 1935 through 1938, and Encanto became the city’s front lawn, the park Phoenix put on its postcards.
The carousel is the park’s other artifact. The Allan Herschell Company built the machine in 1948, and a children’s amusement area, Kiddieland, ran in the park through the postwar decades, declining by the 1980s to the point that rides were sold off. A 1991 restoration reopened it as Enchanted Island, built around the carousel, and when the operating contract was fought over in 2015 the city made clear that the carousel is public property and stays where it is whoever runs the rides. The park was named a Phoenix Point of Pride, and the neighborhood around it, Encanto-Palmcroft, is the city’s best-preserved 1920s subdivision.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale was a farm town of a few hundred people when the WPA was digging Encanto’s lagoon, and it did not build a park of any size until the 1950s. The Valley’s park-building tradition, the lakes and lagoons that Chaparral and the Greenbelt inherited, starts here, and so does the municipal-golf tradition that gives Scottsdale visitors a cheap round within the city limits. For a Scottsdale family, Encanto is the version of the Railroad Park with ninety more years on it.
Getting there
Indian School Road west from Old Town to 15th Avenue, then south a mile to Encanto Boulevard; the main lots are on 15th Avenue and on Encanto Boulevard by the island. About twenty-eight minutes with no traffic. Loop 202 west to Seventh Avenue, then north to Encanto and west, is the alternative when Indian School is slow. The Encanto/Central light-rail stop is a mile east, which does not help from Scottsdale; this is a car trip.