What it is
Harold’s Cave Creek Corral is the bar the rest of Cave Creek grew up around. It opened in 1935, when Johnny Walker built an A-frame bar at the top of the road to serve the construction camps building Bartlett and Horseshoe dams on the Verde River, and fitted it with an 1880s mahogany bar he bought from the Crystal Palace Saloon in Tombstone. Six more bars opened for the dam workers. When the dams were finished in 1947 and the camps emptied, only the Corral was still pouring.
Ninety years later it is about 12,000 square feet of saloon, steakhouse and dance hall, with a long bar on one side, a dining room on the other, a dance floor where a country band plays most nights, and picnic tables outside under mesquite trees that were already old when Harold Gavagan put his name on the sign around 1950. The food is ribs, steaks, burgers, fried pickles and a breakfast that starts at eight in the morning, priced a tier below anything on Scottsdale Road.
The other thing it is, improbably, is the most serious Pittsburgh Steelers bar in the Southwest. The Piacquadio family bought Harold’s in 1987 after moving from Pittsburgh, started showing games in 1993, and formed a fan club in 1995 that now has more than three thousand members. On a Sunday in football season the dining room is a sea of black and gold and the place answers to its nickname, Heinz Field West.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Old Town’s two surviving saloons, the Rusty Spur and Porter’s, are fine for an hour and Harold’s is built for a night. It has the dance floor Scottsdale lost when its cowboy steakhouses closed, a band that plays country rather than a playlist, locals who have been drinking there for forty years, and a kitchen that feeds a family of four for what one entrée costs at a resort. Our country bars note puts Harold’s and the Buffalo Chip at the top of the list for the reason that they are still real.
The practical version
Forty-two minutes from Old Town: Scottsdale Road north to the Carefree Highway, west to Cave Creek Road, north into town. Harold’s is on the right at the top of the saloon strip, across the road from the Buffalo Chip. Parking is a big dirt lot. No reservations needed except for large groups; weekend nights fill by nine.
When to go
Friday and Saturday nights, October through April. The band is on, the dance floor is full, the patio is pleasant, and the crowd is the whole town: ranch families, bikers who rode up for the day, retirees from Carefree, a bachelorette party or two down from Scottsdale. Dinner at seven, dancing by nine.
Steelers Sundays. From September to January the fan club takes over, and if you are from western Pennsylvania you already know. If you are not, it is still worth seeing once: three hundred people in black and gold in a cowboy bar in the desert, the Terrible Towels going at every third down. Arrive an hour before kickoff.
Weekday lunch is the local version. The bikes are gone, the patio is half empty, the ribs and the burgers are the same, and the bartender has time to tell you about the lions.
Summer is slow and the patio is unusable until after dark, but the inside is cold, the band still plays on weekends, and a July Saturday at Harold’s is one of the few places in the north Valley with a crowd.
What to order
Ribs, which are the historical dish; a ribeye if you are making a night of it; the burger at lunch. The breakfast menu, served from eight, is diner food done properly and the reason the lot has trucks in it at nine in the morning. The bar pours domestic beer, well whiskey and margaritas, and nobody is going to talk to you about a tasting flight.
With kids, and the neighborhood
Children are welcome and common until about eight, when the band and the bar take over. The outdoor picnic tables are the family seats. Across the road the Buffalo Chip runs live bull riding two nights a week, which is the other half of a Cave Creek evening; see our Cave Creek guide for the order of operations. During Arizona Bike Week in April the whole strip becomes a motorcycle rally and Harold’s lot is wall-to-wall chrome.
The story
The Corral’s first customers lived in tents. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association were damming the Verde River through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, first Bartlett (finished 1939) and then Horseshoe, and the crews were housed in camps in the hills north of Cave Creek. Johnny Walker built the A-frame in 1935 to sell them beer, and sent to Tombstone for a bar worthy of it: the mahogany from the Crystal Palace, one of the Tombstone saloons of the 1880s. The dam boom lasted about eight years. When it ended in 1947 the six competing bars closed and the Corral stayed, serving the ranchers, miners and health-seekers who were the whole of Cave Creek then.
Harold Gavagan and his wife Ruth bought it around 1950, renamed it, and gave it its first legend: Harold kept lions and tigers in cages behind the building, a marketing stunt to get Phoenix families to drive the dirt road north on a Sunday. It worked well enough that people still ask about the cats. In the 1970s Hollywood came through; the 1975 road picture Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, with Alan Arkin and Sally Kellerman, shot scenes in the bar.
The modern era began in 1987, when Daniel Piacquadio Sr. moved from Pittsburgh and bought the place. His son Danny started showing Steelers games in 1993 and launched a fan club in 1995 with 80 charter members. It now has more than three thousand, the team acknowledges the bar, and the dining room on a fall Sunday is a transplanted piece of the North Side. In 2025, after twenty-one years, longtime co-owners Bill and Marie Vale handed their stake to Carefree residents Jim and Kris Ziebart, who run it with the Piacquadios and said the goal was to keep Harold’s locally owned; the 90th anniversary that October was marked with two outdoor concerts.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale had bars like this once. Reata Pass and the Pinnacle Peak Patio were the north-Scottsdale cowboy steakhouses where the tie got cut off and the band played on a dirt floor, and both are gone. Harold’s is the same idea, twenty minutes farther north, that never had to close because Cave Creek never let the land around it be subdivided. It is where Scottsdale’s own cowboy-steakhouse tradition went to live.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north about twenty miles to the Carefree Highway, west two miles to Cave Creek Road, then north about three miles through town; Harold’s is on the right just before the road bends toward Carefree. Pima Road to Cave Creek Road is the alternative from the east side. Allow forty-five minutes, and if you plan to dance and drink, book a car both ways; there is no transit and the rideshare wait at midnight is long.