What it means
Arcadia is the neighborhood on the other side of the line. It lies at the south foot of Camelback Mountain, between 44th and 68th streets and between Camelback Road and the Arizona Canal, and almost all of it is in Phoenix. Scottsdale pages mention it constantly anyway, because Arcadia is where Scottsdale residents eat breakfast, ride bikes and envy the trees. The lots are big, the ranch houses are low, the grapefruit and orange trees are seventy years old, and every few weeks the lawns disappear under a sheet of canal water that the rest of the Valley gave up on decades ago.
You will hear it as a place and as a style. “She lives in Arcadia” means a flood-irrigated lot under the mountain and a Phoenix tax bill. “It’s very Arcadia” means a teardown rebuilt as a white modern farmhouse with a $3 million price and a citrus tree spared for effect. The Camelback Corridor guide covers the resorts on the mountain’s north side; this page covers the name on its south side.
Where you’ll meet it
Restaurant recommendations, since the strips along Indian School Road and around 40th Street and Campbell fill with Scottsdale plates every night. The Arizona Canal path, which runs straight through it to Arizona Falls. Real estate listings, where the name is applied to anything within a mile of the original plat. And Old Town, where the Arcadia Farms Cafe borrowed it for a tea room.
Where the word came from
The name is Greek. Arcadia was the mountainous region of the Peloponnese that Virgil and later poets turned into a byword for unspoiled, pastoral countryside, and by the nineteenth century American developers were pinning it on anything with trees. The Phoenix version was pinned on orchards. Arizona’s first commercial citrus grove went in around 56th Street and Indian School Road in 1899, on the fertile ground below the mountain where the Arizona Canal that W.J. Murphy finished in 1885 could deliver water. The trees did well, and promoters saw a colony.
The plats followed: Citrus Homes in 1915, then the original Arcadia subdivision in 1919, laid out as five-acre orchard homesites between the canal and Camelback Road, from 44th Street east to Scottsdale Road. That same year developer Seymour Jordan and partners founded the Arcadia Water Company to lift water from the canal and pipe it through the groves. By 1924 the company had built pumping plants and laid fifteen miles of underground concrete pipe, enough to water about 2,100 acres. For thirty-five years Arcadia was a working orchard district with houses in it, shipping fruit east before the California crop ripened.
Air conditioning ended that. In the 1950s the groves were cut into residential lots, mostly for low ranch houses on a half acre or more, and the orchard irrigation rights came with the deeds. That is the accident that made the place. While the rest of the Valley turned to gravel yards and drip lines, Arcadia kept flooding, and the flood irrigation entry explains how a 1919 water system still runs under 2020s mansions.
What it is not
Arcadia is not Scottsdale, except for the strip east of 64th Street, and it is not Paradise Valley, which is the town on the other side of the mountain. It is also not as big as the listings say: “Arcadia Lite,” the blocks south of Indian School and the canal, is a 2000s coinage by agents selling proximity, and people inside the 1919 plat answer with “Arcadia Proper.”
The fine print
The canal is the neighborhood’s spine and its best monument. At 56th Street the Arizona Canal drops twenty feet over a natural fall, and the Phoenix Light and Fuel Company built a hydroelectric plant there between 1901 and 1903, one of two on the canal that gave Phoenix its first electricity. The Water Users’ Association rebuilt it from 1911 and ran it from 1913 until October 2, 1950, when maintenance costs killed it. In 1998 the Phoenix Arts Commission proposed turning the ruin into a park; the rebuilt Arizona Falls came online in April 2003 at 750 kilowatts, enough for about 150 homes, and opened to the public on June 21, 2003, as a working power plant with poetry cast into its decks. It sits a few miles downstream of Scottsdale’s Waterfront on the same path.
The border matters more than visitors think. Arcadia’s eastern edge at 64th Street is also the Scottsdale city line, so a house a block east pays Scottsdale taxes, calls Scottsdale police and votes in Scottsdale elections while sharing the irrigation district, the school and the name. Arcadia High School, which took its name from the neighborhood, is a Scottsdale Unified school in Phoenix, one of the oddities the Scottsdale vs. Phoenix entry catalogs.
What the record lacks is the exact author of the name. The 1919 plat and Jordan’s water company are documented; the person who first wrote “Arcadia” on a survey is not, and the lexicon credits the developers as a group. The Greek original, for what it is worth, was rocky, poor and famous mainly for its shepherds, which the people watering half-acre lawns under Camelback need not dwell on.