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Landmark day • Friday, November 21, 1969

November 21, 1969: Los Arcos Mall Opens

South Scottsdale gets its own enclosed downtown, with Mexican murals, fireworks and a Sears the size of a city block — and thirty years later loses it.

Illustrated plaque for November 21, 1969 in Scottsdale history SALOON TRADING POST MOTEL NOVEMBER 21 1969 BOOMTOWN

What happened

Los Arcos Mall held its formal opening on November 21, 1969, at 7505 East McDowell Road, the northwest corner of Scottsdale and McDowell. Developed by Westcor (Russ Lyon Jr. and John L. Holmes) as the company's first enclosed mall, it covered 607,350 square feet on 41.9 acres, with Sears (253,318 square feet) and Broadway Southwest as anchors; the anchors had opened October 20. The dedication featured fireworks and a speech by Arizona Secretary of State Wesley Bolin.

Why it matters

Los Arcos was south Scottsdale's commercial heart for a generation and the first of the Valley's enclosed regional malls to fail: the last anchor, Sears, left in February 1999, demolition began in May 2000, and after a decade of false starts the site became ASU's SkySong innovation center in 2008. Its rise and fall is the story of the McDowell Road corridor — Motorola, Los Arcos, Papago Plaza — and of how the city's center of gravity moved north.

The enclosed downtown

Scottsdale’s first shopping mall, Fashion Square, had opened in 1961 as an open-air center. Eight years later the city got an enclosed one, and it belonged to the south side. Los Arcos — “the arches” — rose on 41.9 acres at the northwest corner of Scottsdale and McDowell Roads, in the neighborhoods that Motorola’s payrolls had filled with ranch houses through the 1950s and 1960s. Its developers were Westcor, the company Russ Lyon Jr. and John L. Holmes had formed, and it was their first enclosed mall, built in a Spanish motif with Mexican murals and a cost variously reported at $6 million for the mall and $8 million for the complex.

The anchors opened first, on October 20, 1969: a Sears of 253,318 square feet and Broadway Southwest. On Friday, November 21, 1969 the whole 607,350-square-foot mall was formally dedicated, with fireworks and a speech from Arizona Secretary of State Wesley Bolin, who would be governor a decade later. For south Scottsdale it was a downtown with air conditioning.

Thirty years

Los Arcos had a good run and a hard ending. The malls that followed — Fashion Square’s 1992 expansion, Paradise Valley Mall, the Pavilions on Salt River land — drew the retail north and east, the McDowell corridor aged, and one by one the tenants left. Sears, the last anchor, closed on February 13, 1999. A proposed arena for the Phoenix Coyotes came and went; demolition began in May 2000, and for most of a decade the corner was a fenced lot at the entrance to the city.

The recovery was the city’s smartest deal of the 2000s. In 2005 Scottsdale and the ASU Foundation agreed to build SkySong, the university’s innovation center, on the old mall site, and on March 27, 2008 its first building opened under the white sail — the anchor of the McDowell Road revival that the 2000s chapter follows. The Los Arcos guide covers the mall’s stores and its afterlife; the 1960s chapter covers the boom that built it.