What it means
Drive east on Bell Road through north Phoenix and at Scottsdale Road the signs change to Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. Nothing else does, at first: same alignment, same 17000 North line on the grid. Then the medians fill with mesquite and palo verde, the walls along the road pick up Wright’s horizontal lines and his red, and 3.5 miles later you are at the gate of Taliesin West, the architect’s winter camp and the reason for the name. Locals shorten it to “FLW,” as in “the Costco on FLW” or “take FLW to the 101.”
The two names describe two roads that happen to meet. Bell Road is one of the Valley’s great workhorses, 34.6 miles from Surprise to Scottsdale, the busiest arterial in Arizona where it crosses the Agua Fria. Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard is a short, deliberately handsome city street built in the early 1990s to carry the Airpark and the new northern subdivisions. The Frank Lloyd Wright Spire, a 125-foot turquoise needle lit in 2004 in a shopping-center parking lot, marks the seam.
Where you’ll meet it
Any directions to the Airpark, Taliesin West, the Promenade or the 101’s northern exits. The Bell Road exit and the Frank Lloyd Wright exit on the 101 are the same cross street; use the name that matches the side you want.
Where the word came from
Bell Road honors Harvey Bell, a farmer who in 1916 joined James Shea to form the Paradise Verde Irrigation District, an attempt to bring Verde River water to the dry land north of the Arizona Canal. The district never built its dam, but both men got a road: Shea’s is Shea Boulevard, a mile and a half south. Bell Road’s present route was pieced together in the mid-1970s as the Central Arizona Project canal was built across the north Valley, and in Scottsdale a 1.4-mile gap still breaks it.
The Scottsdale end got its new name when the city decided to build it properly. By the late 1980s the desert north of the Airpark was filling with subdivisions, Taliesin West was a National Historic Landmark reachable by a rough road, and the city wanted a boulevard worthy of the destination. Voters approved a $5.1 million project in 1989: four lanes, raised medians, curb, gutter and sidewalks, built below the surrounding grade to keep the noise and the headlights out of the houses. In February 1991 the council adopted the Frank Lloyd Wright Streetscape Design Guidelines, which still govern the corridor from Scottsdale Road to Shea: a desert planting list, meandering sidewalks stamped with a Wright symbol every 50 feet, development walls with his horizontal and vertical offsets, and a nine-color palette including Taliesin Red, East Wind and Terra Cotta.
The finished boulevard was dedicated on the evening of April 14, 1994, at Taliesin West, with Mayor Herb Drinkwater and Richard Carney of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation hosting a trolley tour and reception. Wright had been dead 35 years; he would have liked the attention and disliked the shopping centers.
What it is not
It is not Frank Lloyd Wright’s road. He reached Taliesin West by Shea Boulevard, which then was dirt, and famously fought the power lines strung across his view. The boulevard is the city’s tribute, not his design.
The fine print
The grid number is exact: Bell Road is the 17000 North alignment, which is why TPC Scottsdale’s address is 17020 North Hayden Road and why the Bell Road bus is Route 170. Wikipedia puts the Frank Lloyd Wright segment at about 3.7 miles and the city’s guidelines at 3.5; the difference is where you start counting at the Scottsdale Road intersection.
The name change technically happens east of 66th Street, a block shy of Scottsdale Road, and the boulevard is not continuous with Bell Road’s eastern stub beyond Shea. Hayden Road also breaks here: the Greenway-Hayden Loop swings around TPC and the Princess, and a second Hayden segment resumes north of FLW. All of this reflects the mid-1970s CAP canal construction, which bent several north Scottsdale arterials around the aqueduct that crosses just north of the Scottsdale Road intersection.
The 1989 bond vote and the 1991 guidelines are in the city’s records; the exact council date for adopting the name is not in anything we could open online, and the Peek at the Peak account says only that the road was “named after Frank Lloyd Wright” as part of the project. The streetscape guidelines were amended in September 2011 and remain in force, which is why a gas station on FLW has to paint in Taliesin Red and a gas station on Bell Road, a hundred yards west, does not.