What it is
Heritage Square is one city block, Block 14 of the original Phoenix townsite, between 5th and 7th Streets south of Monroe, and it is the only block downtown where the Victorian-era houses were saved instead of scraped. Eleven buildings stand on it, from an 1881 carriage house to a 1929 machine shop, and in the middle is the Rosson House, a Queen Anne mansion finished in 1895 for Dr. Roland Rosson, a physician who had practiced in Phoenix since 1879 and was elected mayor the year the house was done, and his wife Flora, who had bought the block in 1882. The house was a rooming home for most of the twentieth century, sheltering more than 150 lodgers before the city bought it in 1974, restored it and opened it as a museum in 1980.
The rest of the square has gone to restaurants and shops. The 1928 Baird Machine Shop holds Pizzeria Bianco, which is how most people find the block; the 1909 Thomas House holds Bar Bianco; the other houses hold a coffee and bouquet bar, a South American restaurant, an Afro-diasporic one, a boutique and the museum store. The Arizona Science Center shares the park.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has almost no built history before 1900, and what it has, the Titus House and the adobe mission, is a farmhouse and a church. This is the Valley’s one standing block from the territorial decades, when Phoenix was a town of brick storefronts and Victorian houses along canals, and the Rosson House tour is the best hour of local history you can buy downtown. Our museums and attractions note sends people here for exactly that reason, and the 1890s history page tells the Scottsdale side of the same decade.
The practical version
Tours are guided, about an hour, Thursday through Saturday at 10, 11, 1 and 2 and Sunday at 12, 2 and 3; closed Monday through Wednesday. Adults $14. Book online for weekends. Park in the Heritage Garage at 5th and Monroe and bring the ticket for validation. About 24 minutes from Old Town, or the light rail to 3rd Street and Washington and a four-block walk.
When to go
October through April, when the square’s gardens and the Lath House are pleasant and you can wait for pizza outside. The house is air-conditioned, so the tour itself works in summer, but the square is a shade-and-brick island in July and the walk from the garage is the hard part. Thursday and Friday tours are quiet; Saturday tours fill, and the 11 AM is the one to book because it ends when Pizzeria Bianco opens.
What to do here
Take the tour. It runs room by room through the house as the Rossons would have known it, with the volunteer guides filling in the lodging-house decades that followed, which is the story worth asking about: a mansion that became a rooming house for railroad workers, nurses and the people who built the Phoenix that surrounds it. Then walk the square. The Burgess Carriage House is the oldest building and the only one moved here from elsewhere; the Bouvier-Teeter House was built in 1899 by a cattleman and flour miller; the Silva House dates from 1900; the Stevens houses from 1901 were rentals built by Constance Stevens. The Lath House Pavilion, the long slatted structure on the 7th Street side, dates from the 1980 reopening and hosts the square’s events.
Then eat. Pizzeria Bianco in the machine shop needs no introduction on this site and has its own entry in the Beyond section’s central Phoenix list; the wait is managed from Bar Bianco next door. Que Sazón, elsewhere on the square, is the ceviche-and-South-American alternative, and Latha the Afro-Brazilian-Caribbean one.
With kids
The tour is for roughly age eight and up. Younger children get the square’s gardens, the Science Center next door and the Children’s Museum of Phoenix a few blocks away; our Scottsdale with kids note has the downtown-morning plan. Matt’s Big Breakfast is a five-minute drive north for the start of that morning.
The neighborhood
The square sits on the east edge of downtown’s historic core, with the Science Center on the park, Chase Field two blocks south and the convention center a block west. It is the quiet corner of a busy district, and on a non-game day the brick paths are nearly empty between tours.
The story
Flora Murray married Roland Rosson in 1880 and bought Block 14 in 1882, when the Phoenix townsite was a grid of a few dozen blocks between the Salt River and the canals. The couple lived first in an adobe house on the lot, then commissioned a mansion from A. P. Petit, a San Francisco architect whose plans closely resemble a published pattern-book design of the day; Petit died the month the house was finished in 1895. Roland Rosson, by then a civic figure, was elected mayor of Phoenix that same year and resigned in 1896. The Rossons sold to the Goldberg family in 1897 and left; Flora died in Los Angeles in 1911.
The house’s second life was longer than its first. Through the twentieth century it was a rooming house and a boarding house, home to more than 150 people over the decades, as the neighborhood around it declined and the city’s other Victorian blocks were cleared for parking and offices. By the 1960s, downtown Phoenix had almost nothing left from the territorial years. The National Register listing in 1971 bought time, and in 1974 the city, pushed by Mayor John Driggs, bought the house and the rest of the block from its last private owner. A nail-pulling ceremony in 1976 began the restoration; the house opened as a museum in 1980, with the new Lath House Pavilion and the restored neighbors around it, and the Heritage Square Foundation and Guild has run it since. The Science Center arrived on the park in 1997, Pizzeria Bianco took over the machine shop, and the block became what it is now, a history lesson with a lunch attached.
The Scottsdale connection
In 1895 Scottsdale was Winfield Scott’s farm and a handful of neighbors; our 1890s page covers the decade, and it is a story of ditches and barley, not mansions. The Rosson House is the Valley’s surviving example of what the money looked like in those years, and it was built on the same canal water that irrigated Scott’s fields twelve miles east. The two stories are the same decade seen from the town and from the farm, which is a good thing to keep in mind on the tour.
Getting there
From Old Town, west on McDowell Road to 7th Street, south to Monroe Street, then right; the Heritage Garage entrance is on Monroe at 5th Street, and the square is just south of it. The light rail stop at 3rd Street and Washington is four blocks away for anyone arriving from Tempe or the Camelback corridor stations. On a Diamondbacks game day, come before the game or expect garage prices to triple; our getting around note has the parking and rideshare math.