What it means
Old Town means two different sizes of the same place, and which one depends on who is talking. To the city, to the hotels and to anyone who arrived after 2018, Old Town Scottsdale is the whole downtown: the square mile and a half from the Arizona Canal south to Osborn Road, taking in Fifth Avenue, the gallery streets, the Civic Center, the Waterfront and the bar district along Stetson Drive. To people who have lived here a long time, Old Town is the four or five blocks of 1920s storefronts on Main Street and Brown Avenue, where the sidewalks are boards and the Rusty Spur is in the old bank.
Downtown was the city’s word for the big version for sixty years. It is still what the planners say in meetings and what residents of a certain age say when they mean the whole district. Calling the Waterfront “Old Town” is the fastest way to be identified as a newcomer. The Old Town neighborhood guide and the walking guide cover the place; this page covers the fight over the word.
Where you’ll meet it
On every wayfinding sign, which now says Old Town; in the General Plan, where the district is a Character Area; in council hearings over building heights, where “Old Town” is the thing the heights threaten; and in the nightlife guide, where the distinction decides which side of Scottsdale Road you drink on.
Where the word came from
“Old Town” grew up naturally. The townsite Albert Utley platted in 1894 was the only town there was, and when the city spread north after incorporation in 1951, the original blocks became the old town by default. The merchants on Main and Brown leaned into it; “the West’s Most Western Town” was a slogan built on those board sidewalks, and the city’s own historic register, assembled from a 2000 to 2001 survey of some 750 downtown buildings, is thickest there.
“Downtown” was the planners’ word. The city adopted a Downtown Plan in 1984, under Mayor Herb Drinkwater, to guide a district that already ran well beyond the townsite, and updated it in 2009 after an 18-month process in which more than 1,200 residents took part. In that document Old Town was one district among several, alongside Fifth Avenue, the Arts District, the Waterfront and the Entertainment District. The city’s marketing used “Downtown Scottsdale” and spent money on it. Almost nobody else did.
The surrender came on January 24, 2018. At a gathering of city officials and merchants at the Saguaro resort, tourism and events director Karen Churchard presented research the city had commissioned showing that residents and visitors already called the whole downtown “Old Town,” and announced that the city would stop fighting it. The brand would apply to the entire district, backed by $200,000 in marketing, half from the general fund and half from the hotel bed tax. The program ran under the name “Downtown 2.0,” which is the last time the city used the D-word with conviction. That same year the Downtown Plan was retitled the Old Town Scottsdale Character Area Plan.
What it is not
Old Town is not the whole city, which visitors who book “a hotel in Old Town” sometimes discover from a resort at Pinnacle Peak. It is not Fifth Avenue in the mouths of the people who built Fifth Avenue; see that entry. And the historic Old Town is not “Western Week” or a theme park: the buildings on Main and Brown are the actual 1920s town, which is why residents bristle when the name gets spent on a rooftop bar.
The fine print
The official boundaries are in the Character Area Plan: the Arizona Canal on the north, Osborn Road on the south, roughly Goldwater Boulevard on the west and the Civic Center area on the east, with Scottsdale Road as the spine. The plan is a Level 2 Character Area under the 2001 General Plan and names Old Town a Growth Area, which is planning language for “this is where the tall buildings go,” and the reason the name fight is really a height fight. The historic register, by contrast, is a list of specific buildings, most of them in the townsite blocks.
The research the city cited in 2018 has never been published in full; the New Times reported its conclusion, not its method. The $200,000 figure and its split come from Churchard’s presentation. Whether the rebrand changed anything in local speech is doubtful: residents said Old Town before 2018 and say it after, and the city simply stopped contradicting them. What changed is that the word now has an official definition that most of the people using it reject.
The contest is live. Every proposal for a hotel or apartment tower in the district is argued as a question of whether it is “in Old Town,” and the answer depends on which Old Town you mean. The West’s Most Western Town slogan, which the city still owns, is the older half of the same argument. For how the 1894 blocks got their look, start with the townsite entry and the 1920s chapter.