What it means
Doubletree Ranch Road is the road through the middle of McCormick Ranch, the planned community of lakes and golf that taught Scottsdale what a master plan looked like. It leaves Scottsdale Road between Indian Bend and Shea, passes the gates of Gainey Ranch and the Grand Hyatt on the north side, runs between the McCormick lakes and Rotary Park, crosses Hayden Road and the Loop 101, and keeps going east through Scottsdale Ranch toward the foothills. You hear it as a neighborhood marker (“we’re off Doubletree”) and as the address of a hotel that is not a DoubleTree.
That last confusion is the thing to clear up first. The Hyatt Regency at Gainey Ranch opened in 1986 at 7500 East Doubletree Ranch Road and is now the Grand Hyatt Scottsdale. The DoubleTree hotel chain, by coincidence, was also born in Scottsdale, when Samuel Kitchell opened the first Doubletree Inn at Fashion Square in January 1969. The two share a city and a word and nothing else that anyone has shown. The McCormick Ranch guide carries the neighborhood’s story; this page is about the road and the name on it.
Where you’ll meet it
Directions to the Hyatt and the Gainey Ranch shops, the 101’s Doubletree exit, the Camelback Walk and lake paths, and the real-estate listings of the 85258 and 85259 zip codes.
Where the word came from
Here the record runs out, and it is worth saying so plainly. Scottsdale’s road names usually come with a story: Hayden for a farming family, Jomax for two sisters, Shea and Bell for irrigation partners. Doubletree Ranch Road has the shape of such a story, a ranch called Doubletree somewhere along the alignment, and no documented owner, date or location. The city’s street-name histories, the Historical Society’s published accounts and the McCormick Ranch histories we could open do not explain it. Nobody has claimed it.
What can be said is where the name sits. The land the road crosses was the McCormick Ranch, bought in 1943 by Anne and Fowler McCormick, heirs to the International Harvester and Rockefeller fortunes, who moved their Black Angus and Ayrshire cattle to Scottsdale and later bred Arabian horses there. The ranch ran to about 4,200 acres between Indian Bend Road and Shea Boulevard. In 1969 it sold to Kaiser-Aetna in what the Scottsdale Progress called the largest single piece of property ever sold for a planned community, and the first houses went up in the early 1970s. A master-planned community needs cross streets, and Doubletree Ranch Road became the Ranch’s, with the lakes and the golf course laid out on either side of it.
The name may well predate the sale. “Doubletree Ranch” could have been a neighboring spread, a brand, or a McCormick-era name for part of the operation, and the daughter community north of the road, Gainey Ranch, took its name from Daniel Gainey’s Arabian farm, which shows how literally these developers named their streets. But “could have been” is not a source.
What it is not
It is not named for the hotel, and the hotel is not on it. The DoubleTree Resort by Hilton Paradise Valley is on Scottsdale Road; the Grand Hyatt is on Doubletree Ranch Road. Deliveries go wrong on this weekly.
The fine print
The road is a community spine rather than a Valley-wide arterial, which is why it carries no Valley Metro route number and why its grid position is not one locals quote. West of Scottsdale Road the alignment continues into Paradise Valley as Doubletree Ranch Road too, past the 1956 Al Beadle house at 5302 East, so the name crosses a town line that the McCormick plan never did.
Rotary Park, at 7960 East on the north side, was folded into the McCormick master plan and honors Scottsdale’s Rotary clubs; the Rotary Club of Scottsdale added its Unity Plaza there in 2002. The Camelback Walk paths that loop the McCormick lakes cross the road nearby and are the best reason to stop on it.
On the name, we record the gap rather than fill it. A ranch called Doubletree presumably stood somewhere between Scottsdale Road and the Indian Bend Wash before 1970; the Scottsdale Historical Society or the McCormick family papers may hold the answer. Until someone finds it, Doubletree Ranch Road is a street whose name everyone uses and nobody can explain, which in a city that renames roads for mayors and architects is its own small distinction.