What it means
Fifth Avenue is the curving shopping street that leaves Scottsdale Road just south of the Arizona Canal and bends west toward Goldwater Boulevard. Locals use the name for the whole district around it: the courtyards, Craftsman Court, Stetson Drive, the jewelry cases and the restaurants in the side courts. “Meet me on Fifth” is a Scottsdale sentence that puzzles New Yorkers and nobody here.
The irony drained out of the name decades ago. When the street was cut in 1950 it was a boast and a wink; today it is simply where the shops are, and a certain kind of visitor spends an afternoon looking for Fourth Avenue. There is no Fourth. There is no First. The name arrived fully formed, and the grid it implies does not exist.
The Fifth Avenue Shops guide covers the stores, the restaurants and the parking; the Fifth Avenue and Downtown neighborhood guide covers the wider district. This page is about the word.
Where you’ll meet it
On the street signs and at the Bronze Horse Fountain at Marshall Way; on Thursday nights, when ArtWalk spills over from Main Street; in the 1950s chapter of the city’s history, where the street is the center of the arts colony; and in any argument about what counts as Old Town.
Where the word came from
The street exists because a building burned. In 1946 a group of artists opened the Arizona Craftsmen center in a former market at Brown Avenue and Main Street: leatherworker and fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New, silversmith Wes Segner, wood-carver Phil Sanderson, painter Lew Davis and sculptor Mathilde Schaefer among them. Eleanor Roosevelt dropped in that year. The concept, a shop where you watched the maker work, was new and it sold. In 1950 the building burned.
The displaced artists bought a piece of farmland east of present-day Goldwater Boulevard and south of the canal, graded a road through it and, according to the Scottsdale Historical Society’s account, named it Fifth Avenue after “New York’s swanky shopping boulevard.” New and Segner get the credit in the record; the city’s own historic-preservation report adds that Anne McCormick, whose money underwrote half of mid-century Scottsdale, helped fund the rebuilt crafts center, first in a cluster of frame buildings Segner designed.
The name was a piece of marketing aimed at the resort crowd, and it worked faster than anyone expected. By 1955 the artists had outgrown the frame buildings and architect T.S. Montgomery built Craftsman Court at the corner, seven contemporary studio buildings around a patio, “modern architecture with an Old West accent.” New’s Kiva Craft Center followed. On winter Saturdays the street staged fashion shows for tourists; once a year the Thieves’ Market sold the leftovers to everyone else. In 1956 Life magazine wrote about “the gold-plated town of Scottsdale.” A borrowed name had become a real address.
What it is not
Fifth Avenue is not a numbered street. Scottsdale’s downtown grid uses First through Fourth Streets, running east-west south of Indian School Road, and those have nothing to do with it; the avenue is a stand-alone name with no siblings. It is also not Main Street or Brown Avenue, the 1920s blocks east of Scottsdale Road that longtime residents mean by “Old Town.” The two halves are a five-minute walk apart.
The fine print
The naming story rests on two sources that agree: the Scottsdale Historical Society’s Salt River Stories entries and the city’s 2002 Historic Significance report for Craftsman Court (Scottsdale Historic Register No. SHR-02-12). Neither names a date for the christening beyond “1950,” and neither records who first wrote “Fifth Avenue” on a plat.
What survives physically is less than the name suggests. The frame buildings Segner designed are gone. Craftsman Court stands, listed on the Scottsdale Historic Register in 2002 after a survey of some 750 downtown commercial properties identified about two dozen worth protecting; it is still retail, now trading as the Kiva Center, with far fewer working studios than in 1955. Trader Vic’s, at the corner from 1962 to 1990, is a memory. The Bronze Horse Fountain, Bob Parks’ galloping Arabians at the Marshall Way end, dates only to 1989, which surprises people who assume it was always there.
The word has drifted in one direction: outward. In the 1950s “Fifth Avenue” meant a few hundred feet of shops. Today the merchants’ association, the city’s wayfinding signs and most locals use it for the whole wedge between Scottsdale Road, the canal and Goldwater Boulevard, including Stetson Drive, which has become part of the bar scene the avenue itself never joined. Since the 2018 decision to call all of downtown Old Town, Fifth Avenue is officially a district of Old Town Scottsdale, a formulation the people who named it would have found funnier than anyone.