What it means
Marshall Way is Scottsdale’s gallery street. It runs north from Indian School Road through the heart of the downtown arts district to the Arizona Canal, and for most of that length the storefronts are galleries: Western bronzes, contemporary paintings, Native jewelry, glass. On Thursday nights the doors open for ArtWalk and the sidewalks fill; the rest of the week it is the quietest good street downtown. At the canal end stands Western Spirit, the city’s museum of the West, and at the Fifth Avenue corner the Bronze Horse Fountain, which is where people say “meet me at the horses.”
Locals use the name narrowly, for the gallery blocks between Indian School and the canal, and treat “Marshall Way and Main Street” as a single phrase meaning the arts district. The Fifth Avenue and Downtown guide covers the galleries and the walk; the ArtWalk event page covers Thursday nights. This page is about the name, which is older and odder than the galleries.
Where you’ll meet it
On every ArtWalk map; on the pedestrian bridge that carries the street across the canal to the Waterfront and Fashion Square; at the Main Street Arts District, where the two gallery streets meet; and in the 1910s chapter, when a vice president started spending his winters here.
Where the word came from
The street is named for a vice president of the United States, which almost nobody on it knows. Thomas R. Marshall was governor of Indiana and then Woodrow Wilson’s vice president for two terms, 1913 to 1921, the man who said what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar. His wife, Lois Kimsey Marshall, had parents who moved from Indiana to the little farm town of Scottsdale, and the Marshalls followed them out for the winters. Marshall was in town for the dedication of the Scottsdale Grammar School, the Little Red Schoolhouse, in February 1910, and in 1914, as sitting vice president, he established a winter home across from the Kimseys’. Through the early 1920s the couple made the long train trip from Washington to Phoenix as often as they could, which made Scottsdale, briefly, a place where the second-highest official in the country took his ease.
Marshall died in 1925. The town, not yet incorporated, named the north-south street near his house for him, and that is the whole origin: a memorial to a winter resident. Scottsdale Grammar School No. 2, a Spanish Colonial Revival building, opened on the street on September 17, 1928, and a wartime apartment complex called the Thunderbird Homes stood between First and Second Streets until 1960.
The galleries came in the 1960s, when the arts colony that had started on Fifth Avenue and Main Street spilled around the corner, and ArtWalk formalized the Thursday opening in 1975. The Bronze Horse Fountain arrived at the Fifth Avenue corner in 1989, the Loloma Transit Station at Second Street in 1997, the canal bridge in the early 2000s and Western Spirit in January 2015, which turned the north end of the street from a parking lot into the arts district’s front door.
What it is not
Marshall Way is not named for Marshall Trimble, Arizona’s state historian, a guess locals make often enough that it bears correcting; Trimble was born in 1939. It is not Main Street, the east-west gallery street that crosses it, though the two are one district. And the “Marshall Way bridge” is not the Soleri Bridge, which crosses the canal two blocks east at the Waterfront.
The fine print
The record for the naming is thin and consistent. The Scottsdale Progress’s history column and the city’s street-name compilations agree that the street honors Thomas R. Marshall and that the name followed his death in 1925; none gives the ordinance or the exact date, and since Scottsdale did not incorporate until 1951, the “town” that named it was the informal community and the county. Marshall’s Scottsdale house is not identified as standing; the Kimsey connection is documented through the Scottsdale Historical Society.
The street’s institutions carry firmer dates. Scottsdale Grammar School No. 2 opened September 17, 1928. The Thunderbird Homes, wartime housing, were demolished in 1960. The Loloma Transit Station, named for Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma, opened in 1997. Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West opened in January 2015 in a city-built, privately run building at Marshall Way and First Street. Herb Mignery’s bronze “Passing the Legend,” honoring the Hashknife Pony Express, stands nearby. The public art walking tour strings these together.
What the name has lost is the man. Marshall was a national figure when the street was named; today the galleries’ customers assume “Marshall” is a developer, a rancher or the state historian. The Gold Palette ArtWalk nights that fill the street each winter make no mention of him, and the city’s wayfinding signs say only “Marshall Way Arts District.” The vice president who liked Scottsdale winters survives as a street sign that nobody reads as a name.