What it means
Brown Avenue is the street locals mean when they say “the historic part” of Old Town. It runs north and south one block east of Scottsdale Road, from Indian School Road down past Main Street to Second Street, and for the first thirty years of the town’s life the corner of Brown and Main was the whole of downtown. The general store was there, then the bank, the pool hall, the post office, the blacksmith and the church, and most of those buildings are still standing with their original walls. “Meet me on Brown” means a saloon with a real past; “the Brown Avenue blocks” is how people separate the 1920s town from the bar district four blocks north.
The name belongs to E.O. Brown, the Wisconsin storekeeper who ran the corner from 1904 and whose family left its name on half the modern map. The Brown guide tells his story; this page is about the street.
Where you’ll meet it
The city’s historic walking tour, which starts at the Little Red Schoolhouse and spends most of its hour within sight of Brown and Main. The Parada del Sol parade route. Western Week, when the hat shops and saddle makers along the avenue are briefly the point of the whole city. The Old Town on foot guide, which treats the avenue as the anchor of every walk.
Where the word came from
In 1897 a man named J.L. Davis put up a wood-frame building on the corner of what are now Brown Avenue and Main Street and opened Scottsdale’s first store, with the post office inside it. The town was a decade old, a farm colony on Winfield Scott’s townsite, and the store was its only commerce. In 1904 Sarah Thomas, originally from Wisconsin, bought it and sent for her brother-in-law, Edwin Orpheus Brown of Janesville, to run it. Brown stayed. He replaced Davis’s frame building with cement block in 1909, added an ice plant run on a gasoline generator in 1920, the year electricity reached town, and with partners opened the Farmer’s State Bank, Scottsdale’s first, next door on Main Street on January 22, 1921. He was also postmaster, school trustee and irrigation director, and from 1916 he ran cattle at the foot of the McDowells under the DC brand. When the town needed a name for the street past his store, the choice was obvious, though no record this site has found says exactly when the name was adopted.
The buildings around his corner went up in a single decade. George Cavalliere, a blacksmith who arrived around 1910 and was told by town leaders to set up “out on the edge of town,” replaced his tin shop with the adobe one at 3805 North Brown in 1920; the Cavallieres still run it. Johnny Rose’s Pool Hall, with its glazed white brick, followed in 1923 and doubled as a silent-movie house. The two-story First U.S. Post Office opened at 3944 North Brown in 1929, ending the era of mail sorted inside Brown’s store. And in 1933 Mexican settlers led by Jesus Corral built Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the Old Adobe Mission, from 14,000 adobe blocks made on the site; the first Mass was said that October.
What it is not
Brown Avenue is not the Entertainment District, which is the bar blocks on Saddlebag Trail and Stetson Drive to the north, and it is not Marshall Way, the gallery street west of Scottsdale Road. The Western storefronts on the avenue are mostly 1950s additions made to match the West’s Most Western Town slogan; the adobe, brick and block buildings behind them are the real thing.
The fine print
The store that named the street is gone. Brown closed it in the mid-1930s; in the 1940s the old store and ice plant became the Arizona Craftsmen, the first arts and crafts center in the Valley, and in 1950 the building burned, scattering the silversmiths and weavers to Fifth Avenue and eventually to Craftsman Court. Bischoff’s Shades of the West stands on the corner now.
What survived went onto the books. On May 23, 2000, the city placed the Little Red Schoolhouse, Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop, the Farmer’s State Bank and the First U.S. Post Office on the new Scottsdale Historic Register; Johnny Rose’s Pool Hall followed that October, the Mission in April 2001 and Saba’s, the 1921 Sterling Drug Store at Brown and First Avenue, in May 2001. The Mission reached the National Register in September 2018. The bank closed in the Depression, housed the Chamber of Commerce for a time and reopened as the Rusty Spur Saloon in 1951, which stores liquor in the old vault.
The Brown name travels farther than the avenue. The DC brand that E.O. Brown and his partners ran from 1916 became the DC Ranch community in the 1990s; the family range in the McDowells became the Preserve’s Brown’s Ranch trailhead in 2013. One storekeeper’s name is on a downtown street, a 1,800-acre subdivision and a trailhead, which is about as much map as any Scottsdale family has claimed. The gap in the record is the street itself: the plat that first labeled it Brown Avenue has not surfaced in any source this site has opened, so the honor is documented and the date is not.