What is the Tempe Festival of the Arts?
In 1968 three businesses on Mill Avenue, then a tired main street beside a college, formed a loose alliance they called the Mill Avenue Merchants Association and put a handful of artisans on the sidewalk at the southeast corner of Mill and Fourth. It sold enough that they did it again in 1969. The fair became the Hayden’s Ferry Arts and Crafts Fair in the 1970s, the Old Town Tempe Festival of the Arts in the 1980s, and today’s Tempe Festival of the Arts, produced by the Downtown Tempe Authority, which closes Mill Avenue from Third to Seventh streets twice a year.
The scale now: more than 350 juried artists from around the country, more than $10,000 in artist awards each edition, three beer gardens pouring Four Peaks and Pedal Haus, an Arizona Wine & Spirits Tasting at Centerpoint Plaza, a stage at Seventh and Mill with nine 90-minute sets over the weekend, a DJ lounge at Fifth, a Chalk-A-Lot street on Fourth where muralists paint live, a Kids Block and a Young Artist exhibition of 300 K–12 works. It is free, and cash-free. The organizer claims nearly 225,000 visitors a weekend; nobody counts, but every garage in downtown Tempe is full by Saturday noon.
The two editions sit at either end of the Valley’s outdoor season. The fall festival, the original, is the first weekend of December (December 4–6, 2026). The spring festival is a weekend in mid-March (March 13–15 in 2026; March 12–14, 2027), when the patios are full and the street is at its best. Twenty minutes from Old Town down the Loop 101 and the 202, or one light-rail ride from a park-and-ride, it is the easiest big art fair a Scottsdale visitor can reach and the oldest one still running in the East Valley.
How to do it
Take the train. The Valley Metro light rail stops at Third Street and Mill Avenue, which is the north gate of the festival. From Scottsdale, drive the 202 or McClintock to a Tempe or Mesa park-and-ride and ride in; the alternative is one of downtown Tempe’s garages, which hold 20,000 cars and are full by Saturday noon anyway. On Sunday the street meters are free. Rideshare drops at the lake end, by Rio Salado Parkway, are the least painful.
Walk it south to north, early. Start at Centerpoint Plaza by Seventh Street and work north while it is cool and the artists are fresh. Booths run the length of Mill with spurs onto the cross streets: Chalk-A-Lot on Fourth west of Mill, where nine muralists paint on a theme over Saturday and Sunday and the crowd votes a People’s Choice; the Lo-Fi Lounge at Fifth; the Kids Block and Young Artist tent facing each other.
Wine after two. The Arizona Wine & Spirits Tasting at Centerpoint Plaza runs Saturday and Sunday with seven Arizona wineries and distilleries pouring, a ticketed tasting inside a free festival, and the afternoon is when the artists start to deal. Food is 20-plus vendors plus every restaurant on the avenue; Pedal Haus is on the street and Four Peaks a short drive east on Eighth.
Weather and the two seasons. The December weekend is 65 and sunny with a cold evening; bring a layer. March is 80 by noon, and spring training crowds double the foot traffic. In December, the Fantasy of Lights events are separate weekends: the street parade and tree lighting the Saturday after Thanksgiving (November 28, 2026) and the boat parade on Tempe Town Lake the Saturday after the festival (December 12, 2026). People assume the boats are festival weekend. They are not.
Make a day of it. The Hayden Flour Mill stands at the north end of the street and Hayden Butte is a short, steep climb before the booths open.
Fifty-eight years of the same idea
The merchants’ fair outlasted the Mill Avenue it was invented for. In 1968 the street was a strip of hardware stores and bars between a flour mill and a railroad; the fair was a way to get residents and Arizona State students to walk it. The association ran “Hayden’s Ferry Fair Days” through the 1970s with city help, and by the 1980s the Old Town Tempe Festival of the Arts carried the association’s acronym in its name. Then Mill Avenue was rebuilt, with chain stores and Tempe Town Lake in the 1990s and the light rail down the middle of the street in the 2000s, and production passed to the business-improvement district that became the Downtown Tempe Authority.
The festival’s own edition counts are a mess, which is what happens to an event that has changed hands and names. The fall festival marked fifty years in 2018, consistent with 1968. The spring festival is described on the organizer’s site as 42 years old and in a 2026 press release as “in its 49th year”; the two cannot both be right, and we could not find a dated first spring edition. What is not in dispute is that the fall fair has run every year since 1968, that Sunshine Artist magazine has ranked it among the top 100 classic and contemporary craft shows in the country, and that it won the International Festivals & Events Association’s Pinnacle Award.
Why Tempe’s survived and Scottsdale’s did not
Scottsdale had its own big juried fair, the Scottsdale Arts Festival at the Civic Center, from the early 1970s until 2019; it was ticketed, tightly curated and, when the Civic Center closed for renovation, gone. The weekly ArtWalk is a gallery event, not a booth show. Tempe’s fair never depended on one institution or one lawn. It belongs to a street, it is free, and the merchants who invented it still profit from it. A free fair on a closed main street with a train running through the middle is a hard format to kill, and after fifty-eight years nobody has managed. Go in March for the weather, in December for the light, and take the train either way.