What it is
Roosevelt Row is the half mile of downtown Phoenix where the city’s artists went in the 1990s because the bungalows were cheap and the warehouses were empty, and where, thirty years later, the murals they painted cover three-story walls, the galleries and studios have been joined by the densest run of independent bars and restaurants in Phoenix, and the apartment towers that follow artists everywhere have arrived. The district runs along Roosevelt Street from Central Avenue east to 7th Street, with 5th and 6th streets and the Garfield blocks beyond it as the quieter edges. By day it is a walk through murals and coffee shops; by night it is where Phoenix under forty goes out.
First Friday is downtown Phoenix’s monthly art walk, run for decades by the nonprofit Artlink: on the first Friday of every month, galleries, studios and pop-ups across downtown open in the evening, and the Phoenix Art Museum at the top of Central waives admission from 5 to 8. For most of the 2010s Roosevelt Row’s version grew into a street festival, the A.R.T.S. Market, with the street closed, 150-plus vendor booths and crowds past 20,000. In 2026 that stopped. After a shooting following the March event, the Roosevelt Row CDC and Downtown Phoenix Inc. suspended the street closure and the vendor booths indefinitely; as of September the city council was considering a pilot program to let permitted vendors back in a smaller form. The art walk itself, the galleries and bars and the museum’s free evening, carries on.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has an art walk of its own, the Thursday ArtWalk on Main Street and Marshall Way, and it is older, calmer and sells more art. What it does not have is the place where art is made and the city that grew up around it. Roosevelt Row is the Valley’s one real arts district, and the bars that came with it are the reason a Scottsdale visitor’s twenty-something kids keep asking to go downtown.
The practical version
Twenty-four minutes from Old Town, 202 to 7th Street or Scottsdale Road to McDowell to 7th. The light rail’s Roosevelt/Central stop is at the west end. Murals by weekday morning, an hour on foot. First Friday in the evening; park at or near the Phoenix Art Museum, start with its free hours, walk south and east. Check Artlink’s Artinerary map the week of, and check the Row’s own site for the current state of the vendor market, which in 2026 is a moving target.
When to go
First Friday evening, October through April, is the one to plan a visit around; the summer editions are hot and smaller. A weekday morning in any month is for the murals, which photograph best before ten and are a different, emptier district without the crowd. Saturday night is the bar version, with no art walk pretext and the same bars.
A First Friday, in order
- 5 PM, the Phoenix Art Museum. Free from 5 to 8 on First Fridays; park there, see the Kusama room, and walk out the front onto Central.
- Central Avenue south past the galleries and studios between McDowell and Roosevelt, which are the most consistent participants.
- Roosevelt Street east from Central to 7th, the heart of it: galleries in bungalows, pop-up shows, the murals lit up, food from whatever the current rules allow.
- The Churchill, at 1st Street and Roosevelt, the shipping-container courtyard with ten small bars and kitchens around a shaded patio; it has its own guide.
- Back to the car by the museum, or to the Roosevelt/Central train.
The murals
The walls change, but the geography does not: Roosevelt Street itself, 5th Street and 6th Street north of Roosevelt, the alleys between them, and the big walls on Garfield to the east. An hour on foot covers it. The district’s organizers publish a mural map; the better method is to walk the grid and look up.
Eating and drinking
The Row has more independent restaurants and bars per block than anywhere in the Valley, and they turn over. The reliable moves are The Churchill’s courtyard for a group with different tastes, the bungalow cafés along Roosevelt for coffee and a morning pastry, Welcome Diner a few blocks east in Garfield for a Southern-leaning brunch or dinner, and Valley Bar’s basement on Central for the late show; all three have guides in this section. Cibo, the wood-fired pizzeria in a 1913 bungalow, is a mile west on 5th Avenue.
With kids
The murals by day, yes; First Friday evening is fine for older children in the early hours and a bar crowd by nine.
The story
In the early 1990s the blocks along Roosevelt Street between Central and 7th were what downtown Phoenix had instead of a neighborhood: early twentieth-century bungalows, half of them empty, a few warehouses, the freeway trench to the north and a downtown to the south that closed at 5. Artists moved in because nothing else wanted the space, opened studios in the houses and galleries in the storefronts, and started staying open late on the first Friday of the month because Artlink, the downtown arts nonprofit, had begun organizing a First Friday walk among the scattered galleries in the 1990s. By the early 2000s the Row had a name, a merchants’ group that became the Roosevelt Row Community Development Corporation, and murals on walls that landlords had stopped caring about.
The 2010s were the boom. The light rail opened along Central in 2008 with a stop at Roosevelt. The street market grew from a few card tables to a closed street with 150 vendors and crowds over 20,000. Bars opened, then restaurants, then the apartment buildings that artists’ neighborhoods always end in, and the galleries that had made the district began losing their leases to them. The Churchill’s shipping containers opened in 2018 on a lot that had been dirt. The pandemic shut First Friday for a year; it came back in April 2021, barricade by barricade. The 2026 suspension of the street market, after a shooting that followed the March event, was the first time the district’s own organizers had stopped the festival since it began, and the argument over how to bring it back, which the city council took up in September, is the Row’s current chapter.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale invented the Valley’s art walk. The Thursday ArtWalk on Main Street has run since 1975, and the lexicon entry explains how it became the model for every city in Arizona that wanted one. Roosevelt Row’s First Friday is the model’s opposite number: no Western bronzes, no collectors, no 1950s galleries, and a crowd that treats the art as the occasion for the evening rather than the purchase. Some of the artists who show on Roosevelt Row sell on Marshall Way; some of the Scottsdale gallerists started downtown. The two districts have spent thirty years pretending not to need each other.
Getting there
From Old Town, Loop 202 west to 7th Street, north to Roosevelt; or Scottsdale Road south to McDowell, west to 7th Street, south two blocks. Twenty-four minutes with no traffic. Street parking on the Row is scarce on a First Friday; the Phoenix Art Museum lot at Central and McDowell and the garages along Central are the move, with a ten-minute walk. The light rail’s Roosevelt/Central stop is at the district’s west end, and a First Friday by train from a Tempe park-and-ride is the way to do it without a designated driver; our getting around note has the details.