What it is
Federal Pizza is a wood-fired pizzeria in a bank. The bank is a 1950s branch of First Federal Savings & Loan at Central Avenue and Colter Street, two blocks north of Camelback Road in uptown Phoenix, designed by Al Beadle, the self-taught architect whose glass boxes are the Valley’s midcentury modernism at its most disciplined. It is a low pavilion, glass on three sides under a thin roof, with a drive-through lane along one side where tellers once took deposits. Upward Projects, the group behind Postino and Windsor, restored it and opened Federal Pizza on October 9, 2012, keeping the glass, the terrazzo and the drive-through, which now hands out pizza.
The food is a short list and has stayed one: pizzas from the wood oven with a thin, blistered crust, salads, a few pastas, local beer, wine by the glass and, as a joke that stuck, old-school wine coolers. The lunch deal is half a pizza and a salad; Monday and Tuesday after eight is a pizza plus a bottle of wine or two pitchers; drinks are discounted until five. A second Federal Pizza opened later at the rebuilt Paradise Valley Mall on Tatum Boulevard, and it serves the same menu to the north Valley, but it is in a new development. This one is the reason to come.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has good pizza; our what to eat note sends readers to Pomo and others, and the city has no shortage of ovens. What it does not have is a Beadle building you can eat in. Our Al Beadle page and the midcentury historic districts note explain how much of Scottsdale’s own modernism was lost; Federal Pizza is one of the few of his commercial buildings still standing on Central Avenue, and it was saved by being turned into a restaurant the neighborhood uses every night.
The practical version
Twenty-two minutes from Old Town west on Camelback Road. Park in the lot behind the building or on Colter Street. Open daily from 11 AM to around midnight; no reservations needed on a weeknight. Sit at the window counter for the building, on the patio for the weather. Cross the street to Churn for dessert.
When to go
Monday or Tuesday after 8 PM is the local’s night, for the pizza-and-a-bottle deal and a room that is full but not slammed. Weekday lunch is the other good time, for the half-pizza-and-salad deal and the light through the glass walls. Friday and Saturday nights are busy from six and the wait can be real; put your name in and have a drink at Windsor across the street.
The patio is for October through April and for summer nights after dark. In the heat of a summer day the glass box is a greenhouse that the air conditioning fights hard, and inside is still the better seat.
What to order
The margherita-style pizza, tomato and mozzarella and little else, is the one that shows what the oven does, and the house-made sausage pizza is the one the regulars order. Salads are big enough to share. The pastas are a reasonable second course for a table of four. On tap the beer is local and changes; by the glass the wine is cheap and decent; the wine coolers are an actual menu item and people actually order them.
The building
Sit where you can see the roofline and the way the glass walls meet the floor without a visible frame. Beadle’s commercial work was about doing a great deal with very little, and this branch bank is the thesis in one room. The drive-through lane runs along the side; the pickup window is where the teller’s window was.
With kids
Pizza, patio, a lunch deal and Churn across the street. It is the easiest family dinner in uptown.
Around it
Windsor and Churn directly across Central, the rest of uptown’s restaurant row north to Bethany Home Road, Postino Central a mile south, and the Melrose District’s vintage shops a mile west on Seventh Avenue.
The story
Alfred Newman Beadle came to Phoenix after the war with no architecture degree and a Navy construction background, and over four decades built the Valley’s clearest body of modernist work: the Beadle houses in the hills, the Executive Towers and Three Fountains apartments, and small commercial buildings for clients who wanted a glass box and could be persuaded that less was the point. First Federal Savings & Loan’s uptown branch on Central Avenue, from the 1950s, was one of them. Phoenix lost most of its Beadle commercial buildings to the redevelopment of Central Avenue, and by the 2000s the former bank sat on a corner that was mostly parking.
Upward Projects had already shown, with Postino in a 1940s Arcadia post office and Windsor across the street, that an old building with a patio and a neighborhood could carry a restaurant. The group restored the bank, keeping the glass, the terrazzo and the drive-through lane, installed a wood-fired oven, and opened Federal Pizza on October 9, 2012, with the pizzas designed by chef MJ Coe. The name was the bank’s. The drive-through became a pickup window, which made the local press and then made sense. A second Federal Pizza followed later at PV, the redevelopment of the Paradise Valley Mall, closer to North Scottsdale, with the same menu and none of the architecture.
The Scottsdale connection
Beadle’s work in Scottsdale, like much of the city’s midcentury commercial fabric, is largely gone, and the midcentury historic districts note is partly an inventory of losses. Federal Pizza is the counter-example, a Beadle building that survives because it was given a job, and it is the one place a Scottsdale visitor interested in the architecture of the postwar Valley can sit inside it with a beer.
Getting there
Camelback Road west from Old Town for seven miles to Central Avenue, then north two blocks; the restaurant is on the west side of Central at Colter Street, about twenty-two minutes with no traffic. Park in the lot behind or on Colter. The Central/Camelback light-rail stop is a block south, useful from a downtown hotel; from Scottsdale, drive or rideshare.