What it means
The Motor Mile was McDowell Road when it sold cars. From the mid-1960s until about 2010, the stretch of McDowell through south Scottsdale, roughly from 64th Street east past Scottsdale Road, was a continuous run of dealerships: Chevrolet, Ford, Pontiac, Cadillac, Lincoln Mercury, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Audi, some 32 brands at the peak. If you grew up in the Valley before 2000, your family’s cars came from here, and the dealer’s name was in the radio jingle.
Today the word is used in the past tense. “Back when McDowell was the Motor Mile” introduces a story about south Scottsdale before the apartments; “losing the Motor Mile” is what city officials say when explaining why Scottsdale leans so hard on sales tax and chases every big retailer. The dealerships are gone; the phrase stayed because it names a hole in the budget as much as a place. The South Scottsdale guide covers what replaced it.
Where you’ll meet it
In the budget and taxes guide, as the cautionary tale; in the Progress’s history columns; in the memories of anyone who bought a car from Ray Korte or Bill Heard; and at SkySong, which sits on the mall that anchored it.
Where the word came from
The name came thirty years after the thing. Scottsdale’s early car dealers, Walter Smith first, then the Petersons and John Woudenberg, who was mayor in 1964, sold out of small lots downtown. In July 1964 Gray Madison opened Madison Chevrolet on McDowell Road, the first major new-car dealership on the strip, drawn by land cheap enough for inventory and by the traffic that would come when Los Arcos Mall opened in November 1969. The others followed the Chevrolet dealer: Bud Beck Pontiac, Bill Watkins Ford, Bud Brooks Cadillac, Jack Ross Lincoln Mercury, Woudenberg Pontiac. Ray Korte bought Madison Chevrolet in 1970 and his daughter Virginia became a Valley celebrity through its advertising. Linda Brock-Nelson ran a multi-brand auto mall of BMW, Volkswagen, Oldsmobile, Jeep and Eagle. By the 1980s the strip was the Valley’s car market, and it did not have a name beyond “McDowell.”
In 1996 twenty of the dealerships pooled their marketing and called the strip the Motor Mile, with the tagline “More Square Deals in One Square Mile.” The coinage was defensive. Auto malls were opening on freeway frontage elsewhere in the Valley, and the McDowell dealers wanted a brand that made their old surface-street strip sound like a destination. It worked as a name and failed as a strategy. Los Arcos closed in 1999. The Loop 101 opened its last link in April 2002 and gave the whole region freeway access to new dealer rows at the Scottsdale Airpark, Mesa Riverview and Chandler, where cities offered sales-tax rebates to lure them. Through the 2000s the Motor Mile dealers sold, closed or moved, one by one.
What it is not
The Motor Mile is not the Airpark’s dealer row along the 101 at Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, which inherited many of its franchises and all of its tax revenue; nobody calls that the Motor Mile. It is not Camelback Road’s smaller dealer cluster in Phoenix. And it is not a mile: the dealerships spread well beyond the “one square mile” of the slogan.
The fine print
The numbers come from the Tribune’s reporting in the fall of 2008, when Power Pontiac Buick GMC closed as the sixth dealership to leave. The city’s economic vitality director, Harold Stewart, put the Motor Mile’s expected sales tax at about $8 million for fiscal 2007-08, and each departing dealership at $500,000 to $1 million a year. Bill Heard Chevrolet and Scottsdale Audi had closed; Scottsdale Nissan and Scott Toyota had moved to Mesa Riverview for freeway exposure and rebates; Chapman BMW had announced a move to Chandler. AutoNation still had three stores on McDowell selling Subaru, Chrysler, Jeep, Isuzu and Hyundai, and its spokesman blamed General Motors’ consolidation plan, two years in the making, for the Pontiac closing. The 2008 crash finished what the freeway started.
What replaced the lots is the part of the story the Progress calls rebirth: SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center, rose on the Los Arcos site in the late 2000s, and the dealership parcels became apartment and condominium complexes, restaurants, gyms and services, the housing that south Scottsdale’s north-versus-south argument now turns on.
The record’s holes are small but real. The full list of 32 brands exists only as a count in the Progress; no one has published the roster. The exact boundaries of the “square mile” were a slogan, not a survey. And no source gives the day the last new-car franchise left McDowell, which is why this entry says “about 2010.” For how the city’s car culture made a mile of dealerships feel like civic infrastructure, see that entry.