What it is
High Street is a four-block urban main street in Desert Ridge, just south of Deer Valley Road between Tatum Boulevard and 56th Street: restaurants and bars at sidewalk level, offices and apartments stacked above, a garage behind, trees down the middle. It opened in November 2008 as the first phase of CityNorth, which was going to be the downtown north Phoenix never had, a 5.5-million-square-foot district on 144 acres with Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Nordstrom anchoring the shopping, hotels and office towers around them and thousands of apartments above. The timing could not have been worse. The department stores pulled out in 2009, the rest of the plan was shelved, and in July 2010 the lenders took the finished street in one of the largest commercial foreclosures in Arizona history.
What they inherited turned out to be a decent main street, and it has filled in as one. Ocean Prime, the Cameron Mitchell steak-and-seafood house, is the anchor restaurant. Blue Martini is the bar with a band. Hula’s Modern Tiki is the Phoenix outpost of the Old Town original. Humble Bistro and its oyster-and-champagne sibling, Kanoki Sushi & Cocktails and a run of salons, spas and boutiques (Conscious Coterie, 42 Saint) fill the rest, with the apartments above providing the people who make a street feel like one on a Tuesday night.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
You do not, from Old Town. You come because you are staying at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge five minutes away, or at the Princess or in Kierland, and you want a dinner that is not at the resort and not at a mall. For that crowd High Street is the obvious answer, and on a first-Saturday morning the car show makes it a destination of a modest kind.
The practical version
Thirty-three minutes from Old Town up the 101, fifteen from Kierland. Free garage and street parking. Restaurants open for lunch and dinner; the bars run late on weekends. A three-level price at Ocean Prime, two at most of the rest. Events on weekend mornings in the cool months.
When to go
Dinner on a weeknight is the street’s steady state and its best self: resort guests and Desert Ridge residents, patios full from October to April, no crowd. First Saturday mornings bring Cars & Coffee, a few hundred cars parked down the street from 7:30 to 10, and the one event here that draws people from across the Valley. Sunday mornings in the cool season have the farmers market. October and November stack up a Halloween street party and a Cigars & Cars festival. Summer is slow; the restaurants are fine inside, and the street is empty by day.
What to do
- Ocean Prime. The dress-up dinner, with a lounge happy hour on weekdays that is the best deal on the street; our separate guide has the detail.
- Hula’s Modern Tiki. The tiki bar and kitchen that started on 1st Avenue in Old Town, with the same Mai Tais and the same patio instinct.
- Humble Bistro and Humble Oysters & Bubbles. The neighborhood’s own pair: breakfast and lunch at the bistro, oysters and sparkling wine next door in the evening.
- Kanoki Sushi & Cocktails. The sushi bar, good enough for a resort week.
- Blue Martini. Live bands, a long martini list, the late crowd; a different evening from the rest of the street.
- The shops. Conscious Coterie, the Fifth Avenue linen boutique’s second store, and 42 Saint for a browse between courses.
With kids
Fine at dinner, with wide sidewalks and a lawn, but it is an adults’ street at heart. The Desert Ridge Marketplace a half mile west has the splash pad and the cinema; the usual family evening is a movie there and a grown-up dinner here on another night.
The neighborhood
Desert Ridge: the JW Marriott and its golf courses to the north, the Marketplace to the west, the Mayo Clinic campus and the Musical Instrument Museum to the south, and the Kierland Quarter across the Tatum line to the east.
The story
In 2007 the Thomas J. Klutznick Company of Chicago, with Related Companies as partner, announced $379 million in financing for the first phase of CityNorth, the urban core of the Desert Ridge master plan. The whole thing was to run to 5.5 million square feet on 144 acres at the junction of the 101 and the 51: three department stores, a million square feet of shops, hotels, two million square feet of offices, and between 1,500 and 2,000 apartments, a downtown for a part of Phoenix that had grown to the size of a city without one. Phoenix wanted it badly enough to sign a sales-tax incentive agreement worth tens of millions of dollars, nominally to lease parking in the project’s garage, and the Goldwater Institute sued to stop it. High Street, the main-street phase with the restaurants, offices and apartments, opened in November 2008, two months after Lehman Brothers failed.
The next two years undid the plan. Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Nordstrom withdrew in 2009; the later phases were shelved. In January 2010 the Arizona Supreme Court let the city’s incentive stand while tightening the rules for future deals, a ruling that still governs how Arizona cities subsidize developers. It did not matter for CityNorth: on July 1, 2010, High Street went back to its construction lenders, who were owed about $290 million, in one of the largest single commercial foreclosures the state had seen. The street itself was sound, and through the 2010s new owners filled its storefronts with the restaurants and bars that make it work now. Crown Realty later acquired the master-developer rights to the surrounding land, and the rest of CityNorth’s acreage has since gone to more conventional development.
The Scottsdale connection
High Street is a mile from the Scottsdale line and closer to the North Scottsdale resorts than most of Scottsdale is. Two of its tenants are Scottsdale exports, Hula’s Modern Tiki and Conscious Coterie, and its restaurant mix is aimed at the same resort crowd that fills Kierland Commons. For visitors at the Princess, the Westin Kierland or the JW Marriott, it is the dinner street; for everyone else it is a footnote to a day at the Musical Instrument Museum.
Getting there
The 101 north to Tatum Boulevard or 56th Street, then north about a mile to High Street, which runs between them just south of Deer Valley Road; about thirty-three minutes from Old Town and fifteen from Kierland via Bell Road. The garage behind the north side of the street is free, and street parking is easy except during Cars & Coffee.