What it is
Mill Avenue is Tempe’s main street, and the only one in the metro that works the way a main street is supposed to: a straight run of six blocks from the Salt River bridges at the north end to the university at the south, with brick buildings from the 1890s on both sides, a cinema from 1938, a light-rail stop in the middle and 50,000 students a block away. It is named for the flour mill Charles Hayden built at the foot of the butte in the 1870s, which is still standing, white and shut, where the street begins.
The district is the avenue and the blocks on either side between Rio Salado Parkway and University Drive. Mill itself has the storefronts and most of the chains; 5th, 6th and 7th Streets east of it have the patios, the bars and the kitchens that locals use. The avenue was torn up through 2025 and the first half of 2026 for the Downtown Tempe Refresh project, which replaced the paving, widened the brick sidewalks, planted 120 desert trees and hung a 94-foot MILL AVE sign over the road north of University. It reopened ahead of the Fourth of July, and the mayor spent the spring announcing the restaurants coming in behind it.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because it is the night out that Old Town used to be before the rooftop bars: a walkable street with a university at the end of it, dinner for half what Scottsdale Road charges, an art-house cinema, and a crowd that is there because it lives there. It is also the front door to everything else in Tempe, the lake at one end and the campus at the other, so a visit to either turns into a walk down Mill.
The practical version
Eighteen minutes from Old Town: Scottsdale Road south to the westbound 202, one exit, then south over the bridge. Park in the W6 garage off 6th Street, which most restaurants validate. Go on a weeknight for dinner, a fall Saturday for the game-day crowd, and in early December or spring for the arts festival that closes the street. Avoid weekend nights after eleven unless you are a student or want to study them.
When to go
October through April is the season, as it is everywhere here, and the street is at its best in the two festival weekends: the Tempe Festival of the Arts in the first days of December and again in spring, when Mill closes to cars and fills with several hundred artist booths, a beer garden and music, a bigger and older fair than Scottsdale’s own. Fall Saturdays with a home football game are the other show; the stadium is three blocks east, the avenue fills from noon and every patio has the game on. Our live music note sends people here for the club calendar, which is better than Scottsdale’s.
Summer is quiet and oddly pleasant on weeknights after sundown, when the students are gone and the patios have room.
What to do
- Walk the avenue end to end. Start at the mill and the butte at the north end, where the 1931 bridge crosses to the lake, and finish at University Drive under the new sign; it is a fifteen-minute walk and the whole district is visible from it.
- The Valley Art Theater at 505 S Mill has been a single screen since 1938 and shows what the multiplexes do not.
- Eat on 6th and 7th. Pedal Haus at 7th and Mill has the biggest patio downtown and its own beer; the side streets have the rest.
- Climb the butte. Hayden Butte is twenty minutes up from the north end of the street and looks down on all of it.
The neighborhood
Four Peaks is a mile east on 8th Street, past the campus, and Casey Moore’s is three blocks west on Ash in the old neighborhood: the two places Tempe locals go instead of Mill, and both a ten-minute walk.
The story
Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Connecticut merchant, started a ferry across the Salt River at the foot of the butte in 1871 and a flour mill soon after, fed by the Tempe Irrigating Canal that his neighbors dug. The settlement was Hayden’s Ferry until an Englishman thought the butte and the river looked like the Vale of Tempe in Greece. The Territorial Normal School opened at the south end of the street in 1886, the drugstores and hardware stores filled in the blocks between, and by the 1890s Mill Avenue was the main street it still is. Hayden’s son Carl, born in the adobe house by the mill in 1877, went to Congress in 1912 and stayed until 1969. The family ran the mill for three generations; the concrete building you see dates from 1918 and ground flour until 1998.
The avenue had a long slide after the war, when the highway bridges carried traffic through rather than to it, and a revival from the 1980s on, driven by the university and then by the lake. The light rail arrived in 2008. By the 2010s the street had become mostly chains and college bars, and the city’s 2024 decision to spend on repaving, trees and sidewalks was an attempt to pull it back toward a main street for everyone. As of 2026 it is working, in the way these things do: new restaurants announced, the mill still waiting for a tenant.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale and Tempe are the two main streets of the East Valley, and they have been trading crowds for sixty years. Old Town’s entertainment district took the twenty-somethings in the 2010s that Mill had in the 1990s; Mill kept the students and the arts festival. The ASU presence in south Scottsdale at SkySong means the two downtowns are now ten minutes apart along Scottsdale Road, and the late-night food note ends up on Mill more often than it admits.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south to the 202 west, one exit to Mill Avenue, then south across the river. Or the 101 south to the 202 from anywhere north of Shea. The light rail stops at Mill and 3rd Street, with a direct line to the airport’s Sky Train connection, so this is one of the few trips on this site that works without a car; our getting around note has the details.