What it means
Kierland is the corner of Scottsdale Road and Greenway Parkway and everything the name has been attached to there: the Westin Kierland resort, the 27-hole Kierland Golf Club, the office towers, the apartments and above all Kierland Commons, the open-air shopping street that locals simply call “the Commons.” Say “I’m at Kierland” and you could be at a spa, a tee box or a Crate and Barrel; context sorts it out.
The local joke, which is also the local fact, is that Kierland is not in Scottsdale. The 730-acre master plan sits on the Phoenix side of Scottsdale Road. Phoenix zoned it, Phoenix polices it and Phoenix collects its sales tax. It has Scottsdale mailing addresses, Scottsdale prices and Scottsdale’s reputation, and the moment you cross Scottsdale Road to the Quarter you are in Scottsdale for real. The Kierland and Quarter neighborhood guide covers the shops, the resort and the restaurants; this page is about the name and the line.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Westin’s sign and the Commons’ valet stands; in the is Scottsdale in Phoenix confusion, where it is exhibit A; at the Kierland Fine Art and Wine Festival each winter; and in the 1990s chapter, when the corner went from creosote to retail in a decade.
Where the word came from
The name is a woman’s. Katherine “Kax” Kierland married George Robert Herberger, whose family ran department stores in Minnesota, and the two of them moved to the Valley in 1949. In the 1950s they bought 730 acres of raw desert at the Scottsdale-Phoenix line, north of Bell Road and south of the Central Arizona Project’s future canal, and then did something unusual for Arizona land owners: they sat on it for forty years while the city grew out to meet them. Bob and Kax Herberger spent those decades giving money away, to the Phoenix Art Museum, to Arizona State University, where the arts college carries their name, and to the downtown Phoenix theater that does too.
When the time came to develop, the family partnered with Woodbine Development of Dallas, and in 1991 the Phoenix council approved the Kierland master plan unanimously, the largest rezoning case in the city’s history to that point. The plan put Kax’s maiden name on the whole thing, which was both a tribute and a shrewd choice: “Kierland” sounds like an old estate rather than a subdivision, and it was unclaimed by any road or town in the state.
The pieces arrived in order. The first residential land sold in 1993. The Kierland Golf Club opened in 1996, 225 acres of the plan given to fairways. Construction on Kierland Commons began in 1995 and the first stores opened in 2000, a 38-acre “main street” of shops with apartments above that was Arizona’s first lifestyle center and the template for the Quarter, the Waterfront and every open-air center since. The Westin Kierland opened in 2002 on a 37-acre site surrounded by the golf course. By 2005 the Commons was full and “Kierland” had become a word people used for the entire corner, Phoenix and Scottsdale sides alike.
What it is not
Kierland is not Scottsdale Quarter, which is across the road in Scottsdale and opened in 2009, though everyone shops them as one district. It is not in Scottsdale at all, apart from the strip of frontage along the road. And it is not “Kierland Commons” in local speech; that is the shopping center’s legal name, and residents say “the Commons” or just “Kierland.”
The fine print
Woodbine’s own land budget for the 730 acres: 225 for the golf course and clubhouse, 138 for single-family housing, 78 for apartments, 123 for offices, 38 for retail, 11 for vacation ownership and 11 for parks. The retail parcel is the Commons, 436,776 square feet of leasable space built for about $65 million with roughly 75 tenants. Those are developer figures, and the “first lifestyle center in Arizona” claim is the industry’s, repeated by Wikipedia; it depends on a definition the shopping-center trade coined in the late 1990s for open-air centers without department stores.
The city line is the fact that bites. Because the Commons and the Westin sit in Phoenix, their sales tax goes to Phoenix, and Scottsdale’s share of the district is the Quarter and the frontage on the east side of the road. The two cities have competed over this corner for thirty years, which is one reason the Quarter was built directly across from the Commons and why both centers look the same. The Fashion Square entry explains why Scottsdale guards its mall revenue so closely.
Two things are missing from the record. The price the Herbergers paid for the land in the 1950s is not in any source we could open, and the exact date of the 1991 council vote appears only as the year in Woodbine’s history. Kax Herberger is remembered by the Arizona Historical League as a Historymaker for her philanthropy, not for the land deal; the development that bears her name is, in that telling, a footnote to the museum wings.