The hole at the front door
Los Arcos Mall had opened in 1969 as south Scottsdale’s enclosed downtown and died in 1999 when Sears, the last anchor, left. A hockey arena for the Coyotes was proposed and abandoned; the mall was demolished in May 2000; and for most of a decade the 42 acres at the northwest corner of Scottsdale and McDowell — the first thing a visitor from Sky Harbor saw of the city — was a fenced dirt lot. The McDowell Road corridor around it, Motorola’s old neighborhood, was aging with it.
The answer came from Tempe. In 2005 the city and the ASU Foundation agreed to build an innovation center on the site — university offices, technology companies and international firms in a mixed-use campus — and in 2006 Plaza Companies was named master developer. The design’s signature was a white tensile sail, a shade structure that reads from the freeway; the name was SkySong.
March 27, 2008
On Thursday, March 27, 2008 SkySong opened its first building: 157,000 square feet, with Ticketmaster, Canon and a roster of startups and foreign technology companies as tenants. ASU president Michael Crow described it as “a way to unite the resources at ASU with the needs of the city of Scottsdale.” Six months later Lehman Brothers failed, and the Valley — one of the most housing-leveraged metros in the country — froze solid. SkySong’s second building was already under way, and it filled.
The model
SkySong 3 opened in 2015, SkySong 4 in 2016, a hotel and SkySong 5 in 2019; the campus now holds thousands of workers and the city’s most-cited example of a redevelopment that worked. It anchored the revival of McDowell Road — Papago Plaza came down in 2019 for apartments, the Motorola plant became General Dynamics and then something else — and it gave the south side, which had watched the city’s money move north for thirty years, a reason to stop watching. The SkySong guide picks up the site’s story; the 2000s chapter covers the crash it opened into.