What it means
In Scottsdale, Mayo needs no second word. “My dad’s at Mayo.” “She’s a doctor at Mayo.” “We moved here partly for Mayo.” It means Mayo Clinic in Arizona, the third campus of the Minnesota institution, and since June 29, 1987 it has been one of the most important things about the city to people deciding where to retire, where to winter or where to get a second opinion.
The word hides a geography lesson. Mayo opened as a clinic at the far east end of Shea Boulevard, in low desert-colored buildings at 134th Street, and that campus is still there: outpatient visits, outpatient surgery, imaging, labs, pharmacy and two research buildings. The hospital is not. It opened in 1998 in north Phoenix, at 5777 East Mayo Boulevard near the 101 and 56th Street, and the cancer center, the proton beam facility and the medical school are there too. So “going to Mayo” can mean either end of a 14-mile drive across the north Valley.
The full institutional story, from the 1985 site decision to the $1.9 billion Phoenix expansion, is in the Mayo Clinic in Arizona guide. This page is about the word.
Where you’ll meet it
In the Shea corridor, where the clinic anchors the east end; in conversations with winter visitors who time their stays around appointments; and in the medical shorthand of every family with a parent in treatment.
Where the word came from
The name is a family’s. Dr. William Worrall Mayo began practicing medicine in Rochester, Minnesota in 1864, and his sons, William James Mayo and Charles Horace Mayo, joined him after medical school in the 1880s. Physicians who traveled to Rochester to watch the brothers operate called the group practice “the Mayos’ clinic,” and when the practice’s 1914 building opened, “Mayo Clinic” was carved over the door. Nobody in Rochester planned the brand; visitors named it.
Arizona had a claim on the family before it had a campus. In the 1930s both Mayo brothers kept retirement homes in Tucson, and when Mayo tells the story of its Arizona expansion it begins there. The Scottsdale clinic opened on June 29, 1987, with about four dozen physicians and roughly 220 allied staff. Before the doors opened, 1,800 patient appointments had been booked.
The shortening to “Mayo” came with the institution; it is what people call the Rochester clinic too. What is local is the ambiguity. For its first decade “Mayo” in the Valley meant one place, the Shea campus, and patients who needed a bed went to Scottsdale Memorial Hospital North, now HonorHealth Shea. After 1998 the word split in two, and it has stayed split.
What it is not
Mayo is not HonorHealth, the Scottsdale-based hospital system whose Shea campus sits seven miles west of the clinic, and it is not Banner Health, the Phoenix-based system. It is also not one building: a hospital admission at “Mayo Scottsdale” will put you in Phoenix.
The fine print
The two campuses are 14 miles apart, and Mayo runs a courtesy shuttle between them every half hour from 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. The Scottsdale campus still houses research labs and, from 2017, a four-year campus of the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine, which moved to the Phoenix campus in 2024. In 2026 Mayo asked Scottsdale to rezone 49 acres behind the clinic for houses, a sign that the Shea campus has stopped being where the institution grows.
The numbers in circulation vary. Mayo’s own history page counts 46 physicians on opening day; other accounts say 47. Arizona employment is reported anywhere from about 9,000 to more than 10,000, depending on the year and the source. What does not vary is the local shorthand.
Local memory credits Mayor Herb Drinkwater and the city’s boosters with courting Mayo to Scottsdale; Mayo’s institutional histories describe Arizona as its board’s own choice after study, helped along by the brothers’ old affection for the state. Both may be true, but only the second is written down.