What it means
Fashion Square is the mall. In a city that has the Quarter, Kierland Commons, the Pavilions and a dozen strip centers, it is the only shopping place that gets the definite article: “I was at the mall” means Scottsdale Fashion Square, the roughly 2.1-million-square-foot center at the corner of Scottsdale Road and Camelback Road. You will hear it in directions (“north of Fashion Square, past the canal”) and in weather talk (“it’s 114, we’re walking Fashion Square”).
The full name, Scottsdale Fashion Square, appears on the signs and in the press releases. Locals use it only when talking to someone from out of town. Nothing else competes for the clipped version; Los Arcos, at McDowell and Scottsdale Road, was always “Los Arcos,” and it closed in 1999.
This page is about the word. The Scottsdale Fashion Square guide covers the anchors, the parking, the luxury wing and what to eat there.
Where you’ll meet it
On Camelback and Scottsdale Roads, where the garages sit; in every summer itinerary; on the 1961 history page, where it opens eight days before the city votes itself a charter; and across Camelback at the Waterfront, which the mall’s Nordstrom bridge made walkable.
Where the word came from
The name was the developers’ from the start. Scottsdale Fashion Square opened on October 9, 1961 as a three-story open-air center designed by Edward L. Varney Associates, with two Phoenix anchors: the Goldwater’s department store of the family that produced Senator Barry Goldwater, and an AJ Bayless supermarket. “Fashion Square” was a generic mid-century name for an upscale open-air center, and because this was the first thing in Scottsdale to make the pitch, the generic name became a proper noun here.
The clipping to “Fashion Square” followed almost at once; the Goldwater’s store was the landmark and the center was simply where Goldwater’s was. The name then survived every rebuild. A 1974 expansion nearly doubled the center and added a Diamond’s. In 1977 a rival, Camelview Plaza, opened across 70th Street with a Bullock’s and a Sakowitz and an arthouse cinema. Westcor bought both in 1982, bridged them with a two-story retail span across the street, finished a redevelopment in 1991 that brought Neiman Marcus in 1992, and in 1996 retired the Camelview Plaza name and folded everything under Scottsdale Fashion Square. The 1998 expansion added Arizona’s first Nordstrom and pushed the whole thing to two million square feet, at the time the thirteenth-largest enclosed mall in the country. Macerich has owned it since 2002. Our Goldwater’s and Camelview Plaza pages carry the stories of the names it absorbed.
What it is not
Fashion Square is not the Waterfront, the open-air strip south of Camelback along the canal, even though a pedestrian bridge connects them and the flagship P.F. Chang’s sits on the Waterfront side. It is not the Quarter or Kierland, which are eleven miles north and mostly in Phoenix.
The fine print
The word’s stability hides how much the thing has changed. The 1961 center was open to the sky, three stories, with a grocery store; nothing from it survives in the current building, and the Goldwater’s name left Arizona retail in 1989 when the chain was absorbed into Robinson’s. What locals call Fashion Square today is essentially the 1991 to 1998 Westcor complex plus the 2010s luxury wing along Goldwater Boulevard, where Nobu, Ocean 44 and Toca Madera turned the mall’s west edge into the densest big-check dining block in the state.
The numbers move too. Wikipedia and Macerich filings put the gross leasable area at about 2.12 million square feet with roughly 200 stores; press releases round to “two million.” The anchor list has churned: Bullock’s, Sakowitz, Diamond’s and Sears have all come and gone. The one constant is the location, which is why the word attached to the corner rather than to any tenant.
Two things people misstate. First, the mall is not in Phoenix; the Scottsdale line runs along 64th Street, several blocks west, and the city collects the sales tax, which is part of why Scottsdale’s budget leans so hard on TPT. Second, the original P.F. Chang’s opened inside Fashion Square on July 20, 1993; the big glass flagship across Camelback is a later move. The 1990s chapter shows how the mall’s expansion coincided with Los Arcos’s decline on McDowell Road, a shift of the city’s retail center of gravity that the word “Fashion Square” quietly records.