What it means
Lincoln Drive is resort row. From the Phoenix line east to Scottsdale Road, it runs through the saddle between Camelback Mountain and Mummy Mountain, and strung along it are the places that made this corner of the desert a winter destination: the Camelback Inn at 5402 East since 1936, El Chorro, Mountain Shadows at 5445 East since 1959, Sanctuary on the mountain above, Montelucia and, newest, the Ritz-Carlton at the Scottsdale Road corner. McDonald Drive is its quieter partner a mile south, the road to the Echo Canyon trailhead and the old Camelback Cemetery. When a Scottsdale local says “out on Lincoln,” they mean this stretch, and they usually mean a resort bar at sunset.
Almost none of it is Scottsdale. The Town of Paradise Valley incorporated in 1961 to keep exactly this land low, quiet and resort-zoned, and the resorts carry PV addresses. The Scottsdale connection is the Scottsdale Road end, where both roads cross into the city, and the fact that the whole corridor has sold itself as Scottsdale for ninety years. The Camelback Corridor guide covers the resorts; this page covers the roads and their names.
Where you’ll meet it
Resort addresses and spa bookings, the directions to Echo Canyon (“McDonald Drive, lot fills at dawn”), the PV photo-enforcement notices, and the 51’s Lincoln Drive exit, the usual way in from the airport.
Where the word came from
John C. Lincoln founded the Lincoln Electric Company in Cleveland in 1895 and made a fortune in arc welders. He came to Arizona for his wife’s health, bought desert land between Camelback and Mummy Mountains, and in the mid-1930s backed a young sportswriter named Jack Stewart, who wanted a pueblo-style resort rather than another dude ranch. Lincoln put in more than $200,000 and the land; the Camelback Inn opened on December 15, 1936, with room for 77 guests. In 1934 he had opened the Judson School for Girls on 22 acres along the same road, the campus that became El Chorro Lodge in 1937. The road through his holdings took his name, and Wikipedia, the Scottsdale Progress’s Joan Fudala and the Lincoln family’s own accounts agree on the attribution; none gives a date for the naming, which likely happened informally as the county adopted the alignment.
The road is older than the name. West of the Phoenix Mountains the same east-west line is Glendale Avenue, one of Phoenix’s mile arterials, and the name changes as the road bends around the mountains into the resort country. That “becomes” is a Valley habit (Dunlap becomes Olive, Northern becomes Shea’s neighbor) and a local historian has written a whole post about this one.
McDonald Drive has no such story on record. It runs a mile south of Lincoln on the alignment that continues east into Scottsdale as the road to Chaparral Park. Along it, at 6914 East, is the small Camelback Cemetery on land the pioneer Hans and Mary Weaver homesteaded, and at the mountain’s foot is the Echo Canyon trailhead. Who McDonald was, nobody has documented. It may be a landowner, as Lincoln was; it may be a county official. We record the gap.
What it is not
Lincoln Drive is not Abraham Lincoln’s, and it is not in Scottsdale, and the Camelback Inn is not on Camelback Road. All three mistakes are made daily, usually by the same visitor.
The fine print
The corridor’s jurisdiction is the thing to get right. Paradise Valley’s 1961 incorporation drew the town around the resort land specifically to keep it from Phoenix and Scottsdale, so Lincoln Drive from roughly Tatum Boulevard to Scottsdale Road, and McDonald Drive across the same span, are town streets with town police, and the town’s speed cameras are among the Valley’s most productive. Scottsdale’s share begins at Scottsdale Road, where Lincoln continues east toward Indian Bend Road and McDonald runs on to Hayden and the Greenbelt. Addresses west of Scottsdale Road say Paradise Valley 85253; the resorts’ marketing says Scottsdale.
The resort chronology on Lincoln is the corridor’s history in one street. The Judson School (1934) became El Chorro (1937). The Camelback Inn (1936) was bought by Marriott in 1967 and is now a JW Marriott. Smoke Tree Resort opened in 1954 as a rebirth of the Lazy K Guest Ranch. Mountain Shadows (1959) drew the Hollywood crowd, closed in 2004, was demolished in 2014 and reopened in 2017 as a $100 million modern rebuild. Lincoln’s daughter Louise Lincoln Kerr bought 20 acres south of Lincoln Drive in the 1950s, built an adobe music studio there in 1959 and left the Kerr Cultural Center to Arizona State University at her death in 1977; it still stands on Scottsdale Road.
Neither road carries a grid number locals quote, and we did not find an official designation to cite, so we leave the numbers out. McDonald Drive’s namesake remains the open question; the Camelback Cemetery piece in the Daily Independent, which reaches back to the Weavers’ homestead, is the closest any published account comes to the road’s early history, and it does not say.