What it means
Downtown Scottsdale has three main streets where other towns have one. Scottsdale Road runs up the middle, four lanes and slow. A block or so either side, two boulevards split off from it near Osborn Road and rejoin it north of Camelback: Goldwater Boulevard on the west, built for southbound traffic, and Drinkwater Boulevard on the east, built for northbound. Locals call the pair “the couplet,” a traffic engineer’s word that escaped into ordinary speech, and they use the two roads as the bypass they were built to be. The signals are timed so that a driver holding 35 miles an hour gets green after green.
The names are the city’s memorial habit at work. Herb Drinkwater was mayor for sixteen years and died at the end of 1997; Barry Goldwater was the senator whose family store anchored Fashion Square, and he died in 1998. Each got the leg of the couplet nearest his life’s work: Drinkwater’s wraps the Civic Center and City Hall, where he presided for sixteen years; Goldwater’s passes the mall where Goldwater’s department store opened in 1961.
Where you’ll meet it
Driving to or from Old Town, where every set of directions includes one of them; the address of City Hall, the library and SMoCA, all on Drinkwater; the free Civic Center garage; and the statue of the mayor and his dog near the Kiva.
Where the word came from
The couplet began as a refusal. By the late 1970s Scottsdale Road through downtown was badly congested, and the standard fix, widening, would have taken the storefronts that made Old Town worth driving to. Someone in the city’s planning department, whom a 2020 Rose Law Group column calls a “highly creative and competent planning genius” without naming, proposed the alternative: leave Scottsdale Road alone and build two new streets around it, each leaning one way. The east leg, then called Civic Center Boulevard (some accounts say Civic Center Plaza), got three northbound lanes and two southbound; the west leg, 70th Street, got three southbound and two northbound.
The pieces arrived through the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1986 the city depressed Civic Center Boulevard where it passed the Civic Center and covered it with a wide landscaped pedestrian bridge, so the mall’s lawns run over the road. The west leg was built with a curve in Scottsdale Road itself, planned in 1988 and constructed from 1989, which gave the Scottsdale Galleria its bent facade when it opened in 1991; the column is firm that the curve came first and the building followed it. The city’s Old Town plan glossary describes the finished product plainly: a “vehicular circulation couplet” of Drinkwater northbound and Goldwater southbound “that allows pass-through traffic to divert from Scottsdale Road and circulate around downtown.”
The names came last. Drinkwater died on December 28, 1997, and the city renamed the east leg for him; Goldwater died the following year and the west leg became Goldwater Boulevard. A statue of the mayor with his dog followed on the boulevard in 2003.
What it is not
The couplet is not Scottsdale Road, and the distinction matters for addresses: the Civic Center is 3939 North Drinkwater, not Scottsdale Road, and the shops on Goldwater are behind, not on, the Fifth Avenue district. Nor is Goldwater Boulevard named for the store; it is named for the man, though the store’s corner is where it ends.
The fine print
Both roads carry some traffic in both directions. The design gave each leg an extra lane in its favored direction rather than making them pure one-ways, which is why you can turn south onto Drinkwater and why visitors do, slowly, in the wrong lane. The 35-mile-an-hour progression only works in the favored direction.
The record on dates is thinner than it should be. The 1986 bridging of Civic Center Boulevard is documented in the Society of Architectural Historians’ account of the Civic Center Mall, and the Galleria timeline (planned 1988, built from 1989, opened 1991) in the Rose Law Group column, but the council dates for the renamings are not in anything we could open online. Drinkwater’s came within months of his death; the city’s own 1997 retrospective counts the boulevard among his memorials. Goldwater’s followed his death in 1998, and the column ties it also to the earlier disappearance of the Goldwater’s name from Fashion Square, which May Department Stores retired in 1989 when the store became Robinson’s.
The Scottsdale Road curve has its own folklore, that the Galleria’s developers bent the city’s main street to suit their building. The traffic engineer’s answer is “curve first, Galleria second”: the realignment was in the couplet plan before the developers arrived, and they designed to it. The Galleria itself failed within a few years and is now offices, so the couplet’s one architectural flourish outlived its tenant, which is a very Scottsdale outcome.