What it means
McDowell Road is the 1600 North line of the grid and the main street of south Scottsdale. The city’s share is short, about three miles: from the Phoenix line near 64th Street, where Papago Park’s red buttes end, east past Scottsdale Road, Hayden and the Greenbelt to Pima Road and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Locals use the name for the corridor as much as the road: “the McDowell corridor” is the planners’ phrase for the belt of 1950s motels, car lots and shopping strips that the city has spent two decades trying to revive, and “south of McDowell” is a social category as much as a map reference.
The road’s three landmarks tell the town’s industrial history in order. At Hayden, the plant Motorola opened in 1957 gave farm-town Scottsdale its first big payroll and, later, its Superfund site. At Scottsdale Road, Los Arcos Mall (1969 to 1999) was the south side’s living room until it died, and SkySong, the ASU innovation center under its white tensile canopy, replaced it in 2008. At the west end, Papago Plaza and the gate to Papago Park mark where Scottsdale gives way to Phoenix.
Where you’ll meet it
The 101’s McDowell exit, Valley Metro Route 17, directions to Papago Park, the zoo and the Desert Botanical Garden, SkySong’s address at 1475 North Scottsdale Road, and every south Scottsdale real-estate pitch.
Where the word came from
The name is older than Phoenix. In 1865 California Volunteers established Camp McDowell on the west bank of the Verde River, near its junction with the Salt, to protect travel routes from Apache raids; it became Fort McDowell in 1867, named for Major General Irvin McDowell, the Union commander defeated at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 who went on to head the Army’s Department of the Pacific. The fort was the reason the Salt River Valley got settled: its hay contracts drew the first farmers, Jack Swilling’s canal company among them, and the road from the new town of Phoenix east toward the fort was the valley’s first real highway. When the township grid was laid down, the section line that road followed kept the name. ADOT’s history of the north Valley’s cross streets puts it in one line: McDowell Road is “named after Civil War General Irvin McDowell.”
The fort closed in 1890, and in 1903 its lands became the reservation of the Yavapai people, now the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, which is the subject of its own entry. The road outlasted the destination. It now runs the width of the Valley, from Buckeye through Avondale and 17 miles of Phoenix, across Scottsdale and the Community, along the Mesa line past Falcon Field, and ends at Ellsworth Road, with a stub in Apache Junction called McDowell Boulevard. The connection to the fort survives only in the name and in the Beeline Highway, which McDowell meets north of Mesa and which does go there.
Scottsdale’s piece became important in 1957, when Daniel Noble put Motorola’s Military Electronics Division at Granite Reef and McDowell, just outside the town limits. The subdivisions that housed its engineers filled the land south of Indian School, Los Arcos followed in 1969, and south Scottsdale’s identity as the working half of the city was set.
What it is not
Not the McDowell Mountains, which are named for the same general by way of the same fort but sit 15 miles north; “the McDowells” means the range and the Preserve, never the road.
The fine print
The grid number is 1600 North, which is why Valley Metro’s McDowell bus is Route 17 and why SkySong’s Scottsdale Road address is in the 1400s. It is the odd one among the big east-west streets: Thomas is 2900, Indian School 4100, Camelback 5000, because Phoenix’s original mile roads south of Camelback fall on half-mile offsets from Washington Street.
Wikipedia’s arterial survey gives the Scottsdale stretch as three miles, “just east of Galvin Parkway / 64th Street” to Pima Road, then three more miles through the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community to SR 87. That short run holds most of the city’s industrial legacy. Motorola’s 8201 East McDowell plant, sold to General Dynamics in 2001, still employs thousands; the trichloroethylene that leaked from the area’s plants into south Scottsdale’s wells put the Indian Bend Wash on the first Superfund list in September 1983, and treatment continues. Los Arcos, anchored by Sears and The Broadway, declined through the 1990s, was razed in the 2000s and became SkySong through a 2005 city and ASU Foundation partnership that opened in 2008.
The city’s McDowell Road corridor plans date from that redevelopment and have produced a slow turnover: apartments and offices where the car dealers stood, and the “Motor Mile” of the 1960s now mostly a memory. The road is also where south Scottsdale’s cheap-rent food scene lives, which the neighborhood guide covers. Fort McDowell itself, with its ruins and its casino, is 23 miles northeast of Phoenix by SR 87, and the Nation’s history is told at its own museum, not along the road that borrowed its name.