What it means
Scottsdale Road is the line the whole city hangs from. It is the 7200 East street of the Valley grid, nine miles east of Central Avenue, and it runs the length of Scottsdale: up from the Salt River at Tempe, through Old Town, past Fashion Square, the resorts of the Camelback and Lincoln corridors, the Airpark and Kierland, and out into the desert to Carefree. If you are lost anywhere in Scottsdale, finding Scottsdale Road solves it.
Locals use it as a ruler. “East of Scottsdale Road” and “west of Scottsdale Road” are directions, but north of Cactus they are also civic facts, because there the road is the city line: one side Scottsdale, the other Phoenix. It is also the parade route. Parada del Sol brings its horses down Scottsdale Road through Old Town every winter.
Transit and traffic are covered in getting around Scottsdale. This page is about the road and its name.
Where you’ll meet it
Almost every address in the city that matters to a visitor: the Scottsdale Quarter at 15279 North, the old Rawhide site at 23023 North, El Pedregal at the Boulders at 34505 North. Valley Metro’s Route 72 runs it end to end.
Where the word came from
Before it was Scottsdale Road it was Paradise Road. The historian Stephanie McBride-Schreiner, writing for Salt River Stories, records that the road began as a north-south path from the Salt River basin to the farm country that became known as Paradise Valley. By 1907 graded dirt roads linked Scottsdale to its neighbors; in 1921 Scottsdale Road was slated for paving as part of the Maricopa County highway system, and in 1922 it got a 30 mph speed limit. Service stations followed in the mid-1920s, and by World War II the pavement ran from Curry Road north to the airfield on what is now Thunderbird Road.
The new name was simply the town’s. ADOT’s account of the Loop 101 cross streets says the road is “named after the city of Scottsdale,” which was named for its founder, the Army chaplain Winfield Scott. When exactly Paradise Road became Scottsdale Road is not something the sources we opened pin down.
The road’s modern meaning came in 1964. After years of competing annexations, Scottsdale and Phoenix adopted matching resolutions on January 30, 1964, fixing Scottsdale Road as their boundary from Cactus Road north to Jomax. The truce gave Phoenix the land west of Scottsdale’s own namesake road and gave Scottsdale an uncontested path north, which is why the city is long and narrow and why Kierland, across the road from the Quarter, is in Phoenix.
What it is not
It is not Rural Road, though it is the same grid line: the name changes at Rio Salado Parkway in Tempe. North of Carefree Highway it becomes Tom Darlington Drive in Carefree. And downtown, the street with the Scottsdale Road name is the narrow one; Goldwater and Drinkwater boulevards are the bypasses that carry most of the traffic.
The fine print
Driving north, the road’s segments read like a history of the city. It begins at Rio Salado Parkway at the north end of ASU’s Tempe campus, crosses the Salt River, meets the Loop 202 and enters Scottsdale at McKellips Road. Through downtown it carries four lanes while Drinkwater splits off to the east and Goldwater to the west. North of downtown it runs along the east side of the Town of Paradise Valley, then through the Shea Corridor.
North of Cactus Road it becomes the border, with Phoenix’s Paradise Valley and Desert View villages to the west. It passes west of Scottsdale Airport between Thunderbird Road and Bell Road, crosses the Central Arizona Project canal, meets the Loop 101, and narrows to four lanes with a center turn lane through open desert before ending at Carefree Highway. The whole length is part of the National Highway System as a principal arterial.
The 7200 number is easy to check: one-mile blocks on the east-west axis carry about 800 house numbers, so 7200 East is nine miles from Central Avenue. Valley Metro numbers its route accordingly, Route 72, and the City of Phoenix labels the line “72nd Street/Scottsdale Road” on its own grid maps.