What it means
Craftsman Court is two things with one name. It is a short street that runs off the curve of Fifth Avenue just west of Scottsdale Road, and it is the low 1955 complex at the corner, seven modern buildings with deep eaves and big windows arranged around a shaded patio and its water features. Locals stretch it a little further, to mean the small, quiet pocket of shops and patios around that corner.
You will hear it most often as a dinner address. “We’re at FnB, it’s on Craftsman Court” is how half the city learned the name, and the FnB storefront sits inside the historic complex. You will also hear it from gallery people and preservationists, for whom it is the best surviving piece of the 1950s arts colony downtown.
For the shops, the restaurants and the parking, read the Craftsman Court guide. This page is about the name and what it stood for.
Where you’ll meet it
On restaurant reservations and ride-share drop-offs, on walking tours of the old arts district along Fifth Avenue and Marshall Way, on Thursday ArtWalk nights, and in city historic preservation documents, where it carries register number SHR-02-12.
Where the word came from
The name is literal. After the war, Scottsdale’s craftspeople worked in the open. In 1946 Tom Darlington opened a craftsmen’s center in a former market at Main Street and Brown Avenue, and artisans including silversmith Wes Segner, wood carver Phil Sanderson, painter Lew Davis, sculptor Mathilde Schaefer and a young Cherokee leather designer named Lloyd Kiva New worked where tourists could watch. The city’s history of that era calls these combined workshops and sales rooms demonstration studios, and they became the signature of downtown.
The building burned in 1950. The Arizona Craft Center reopened in a small cluster of frame buildings on the new Fifth Avenue, with help from Anne McCormick, and quickly ran out of room. In 1955 a purpose-built complex went up at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and the side street: modern design by architect T.S. Montgomery, described at the time as contemporary “with an old west accent.” It was built in phases through 1958. New, who had become the most successful designer of the group, built and ran it, and so the same buildings are also remembered as the Kiva Craft Center, and in recent decades simply the Kiva Center.
The court got national attention fast. In 1956 Life wrote about “the gold-plated town of Scottsdale,” and the magazine People and Places gave an issue to the town’s craftsmen, naming Craftsman Court and New. Who formally named the street is not recorded in anything we found; the name and the buildings appear together.
What it is not
It is not the Craftsman architectural style of bungalows and porches; nothing here is Arts and Crafts. It is not a mall or a single shop, and it is not the whole of Fifth Avenue, which it hangs off. The site’s own guides have treated the Kiva Craft Center and Craftsman Court as neighbors; the city’s register report treats them as one complex.
The fine print
The city got serious about the court in 2000 and 2001, when its preservation staff, with Arizona State University interns and local historians, surveyed about 750 downtown commercial buildings for ties to Scottsdale’s history as an arts colony and tourist destination. Around two dozen made the shortlist. Craftsman Court was listed on the Scottsdale Historic Register on July 1, 2002, and the city wrote a preservation plan and design guidelines for it.
The report is precise about what makes it worth saving. The complex sits on about 0.82 acre. Most walls are painted concrete block in two sizes, one building adds a two-story volume in tongue-and-groove wood, and the roofs range from flat to barely pitched gables, finished in red stone aggregate over exposed wood eaves. Glass often runs from floor to gable. The courtyard’s water features are built of desert stone, ceramic tile and glass block. The original program mixed demonstration studios with office space for two architects.
What changed is the work inside. The report notes the shops are still retail but with “less focus on demonstration crafts,” and the best-known tenant is now a kitchen. That is a fair trade for a block built so the public could watch people make things by hand.