What it is
The Heritage District is downtown Gilbert, which for most of the twentieth century meant a railroad siding, a water tower and a couple of blocks of brick stores serving the alfalfa farms around it. Gilbert was a town of a few thousand people as late as the 1970s. It is a city of about 287,000 now, and the old downtown, four or five blocks of Gilbert Road south of the tracks, became the thing every East Valley suburb wanted: a main street with restaurants in it.
The landmark is the water tower, put up in 1927 and lit at night, standing over a plaza that opened in 2008 with a splash pad and the restored adobe pump house that was the town’s first jail. Around it, in the original buildings and a lot of new ones built to look like them, are the restaurants: a barbecue house in a 1929 grocery, an all-day café in a 1936 one, Mexican, tiki, cocktail bars, a theatre on Page Avenue and a Saturday farmers market.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Old Town is a resort town’s main street and this is a real town’s, and the difference shows in the prices, the crowd and the pace. The Heritage District is where Gilbert and Chandler go to dinner, which means the rooms are full on a Tuesday, the happy hours are honest and the patios are built for the weather. It is also the easiest way into the two other Gilbert guides in this section, Joe’s Real BBQ and Liberty Market, which sit a block apart on Gilbert Road.
The practical version
Thirty-five minutes from Old Town with no traffic: Loop 101 south, US 60 east, Gilbert Road south. Two free garages. Go for dinner on a weeknight or for the farmers market on a Saturday morning, October through April; summer evenings work after sundown. Allow an evening, not a day. Our getting around note has the rideshare math for the drive home.
When to go
October through April is the season, the same as everywhere in the Valley, and the district is built for it: nearly every restaurant has a patio and most of them have heaters. Weekday evenings are the sweet spot. Friday and Saturday nights are busy from six, and the wait at the popular rooms runs an hour.
Saturday mornings are the other version of the district: the Heritage District Farmers Market behind the University Building at 92 West Vaughn Avenue, roughly 8 to noon in the cool months and 7 to 11 in summer, with the Agritopia farm’s produce among the stalls. The brunch note covers the Scottsdale rooms; this is the East Valley alternative, with a shorter line.
Summer is for after dark. The tower is lit, the splash pad runs late, and the bars with air conditioning do fine. Lunch in July is a mistake.
What to do
- Eat. Joe’s Real BBQ at 301 North Gilbert Road, pecan-smoked and counter-service since 1998, is the district’s founding restaurant. Liberty Market at 230 North Gilbert is the all-day café from the same family. Barrio Queen has a Gilbert room for the Mexican dinner, and The Parlour Room and the UnderTow tiki bar cover the late end of the evening.
- Walk it. Water Tower Plaza, the pump house and the tower, then the side streets, Page and Vaughn, where the newer patios are.
- HD South. The town museum in the 1913 Gilbert Elementary School, on the National Register, at the south end of the district.
- Hale Theatre Arizona at 50 West Page Avenue, with musicals and tribute concerts through the year; book ahead, the room is small.
With kids
The splash pad at the plaza, the picnic park and smoker pavilion at Joe’s, and the farmers market. Agritopia, ten minutes southeast, is the better full afternoon, with the farm and the Quonset-hut makers’ barn. Our Scottsdale with kids note has the heat rules, which apply here with more force; there is less shade than Old Town.
The story
Gilbert exists because a rancher named William Gilbert gave the Arizona Eastern Railway a strip of his land in 1902 for the Phoenix-to-Florence line, and the siding took his name. Alfalfa did the rest. By the 1910s the town was shipping so much hay out of the yard by the tracks that it called itself the Hay Shipping Capital of the World, and the brick stores along Gilbert Road, the 1913 elementary school and the 1920 incorporation all came out of that one crop. The water tower went up in 1927 and held the town’s water until 1985.
Then the farms sold. Gilbert went from a few thousand people to a quarter of a million in forty years, and the old downtown spent the 1980s and 1990s as the forgotten end of a town that had moved to the freeways. What turned it was a restaurant: Joe Johnston, whose family farmed cotton and wheat off Higley Road, bought a derelict 1929 Safeway building that had been a theater, a lamp factory and a church, and opened Joe’s Real BBQ in 1998 when the town was half its present size. Liberty Market followed in 2008 from the same family. Water Tower Plaza opened the same year, the town built the garages, and the Phoenix restaurant groups came after the crowds. By the late 2010s the Heritage District was the East Valley’s dining district, which is a sentence nobody in 1998 would have written.
The Scottsdale connection
Old Town and the Heritage District are the two main streets in the Valley that still have their original buildings and still have people in them after dark, and they got there by opposite routes. Scottsdale’s downtown was built for tourists from the 1950s on, galleries and Western storefronts for the resort guests. Gilbert’s was built for farmers, left for dead, and rescued by restaurants for locals. If you live in Scottsdale and have run out of rooms you have not tried, this is where the next ones are.
Getting there
Loop 101 south from Old Town to US 60 east, then the Gilbert Road exit and two miles south to the tracks; thirty-five minutes with no traffic, closer to an hour on a Friday at five. From the Camelback corridor and North Scottsdale the 101 is still the route, and the drive runs forty-five to fifty minutes. There is no rail here; Valley Metro buses serve downtown but not usefully from Scottsdale. It is a car or rideshare evening, and the rideshare home is twenty minutes longer than you expect at closing time.