What it means
The Civic Center Mall is the green heart of Old Town: the lawns, rose beds, fountains and lagoon that tie together City Hall, the Civic Center Library and the Center for the Performing Arts. Generations of visitors have arrived looking for a food court and found ducks. The word was always meant in the Washington sense, a formal public green between important buildings, and the joke has followed the place for half a century.
Locals use “the Mall” and “the Civic Center” interchangeably, and the age of the speaker tells you which one you will get. “Meet you by LOVE on the Mall” means the red Robert Indiana sculpture on the east lawn. “They’re setting up tents at the Civic Center” means a festival weekend, and parking is about to get interesting. Since the rebuild that reopened the grounds in 2023, the city itself mostly drops the word “Mall” and calls the whole campus Scottsdale Civic Center.
For the art, the stages and the best hour to visit, the Scottsdale Civic Center guide has the full story. This page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Festival listings for the Scottsdale Arts Festival, concerts on the new stages, the public art walk, Thursday ArtWalk nights spilling over from Marshall Way, and city council agendas, because the council meets inside the campus in a sunken chamber locals call the Kiva.
Where the word came from
The name comes straight from the plan. In 1966 the city hired architect Bennie Gonzales, whose master plan called for a library, City Hall, museums and commercial buildings arranged around a landscaped pedestrian mall with sculpture, fountains and pools. Voters approved a $2.4 million bond on the second try that year, and on October 11, 1968 the city dedicated City Hall, the library and the east side of the mall with a mariachi band on a flatbed truck. The pedestrian mall was the planning fashion of the decade; the word described a walkway lined with buildings, and in Scottsdale it stuck to the lawn.
What the plan replaced matters too. The ground was a Mexican-American barrio dating to the late 1800s, with homes, shops and a cultural life of its own. The city cleared much of it through eminent domain and federal urban renewal money, and a $5.2 million neighborhood redevelopment program in the early 1970s finished the job. Three buildings survived: the Little Red Schoolhouse, Our Lady of Guadalupe church and the building that houses Los Olivos restaurant.
The campus filled in over the next decade. The arts festival arrived in 1970, and the Center for the Arts opened on October 23, 1975. By the time the hotel and shops on the edges were built, “the Civic Center Mall” was simply the address for anything civic, cultural or outdoors in the middle of town.
What it is not
It is not Fashion Square, the actual shopping mall a mile north, and it is not all of Old Town. The Civic Center is a campus inside Old Town; the distinction between the tourist district and the city’s official downtown is a separate argument covered under Old Town vs. Downtown.
The fine print
By the 2010s the 1968 grounds leaked. The city ran public meetings from 2015 to 2017 and approved a master plan in 2018; voters funded the work in the 2019 bond election, and construction began in October 2021. The project was budgeted at $27.3 million and came in at about $33.5 million. It reopened in January 2023 with three new stages, a children’s garden built with the library, a water and fog plaza, and a busker platform.
The landscape architects, Dig Studio, cut the turf by half and shrank the lagoon rather than removing it; the fog plaza’s runoff now tops up what is left, and the changes save about 5.8 million gallons of water a year. The roughly 50-year-old shade trees were fenced off during construction to protect their roots, and new ones were planted. The award jury counted about 1.1 million visits in the first year, up 17.2 percent.
Not everyone was charmed. The Scottsdale Progress ran its 2023 review under the headline “Fowled project?”, with longtime users mourning the old lagoon and its birds. One claim to treat carefully: the site’s own lore sometimes puts the first Barrett-Jackson auctions on these lawns. The 1967 car show that started the partnership raised money for the library, but it was held at Scottsdale Stadium, and the early auctions ran beside the Safari Hotel.