What it means
Shea Boulevard is the 10600 North line of the Valley grid, and in Scottsdale it is more than a road. It is the line people draw across the city when they explain it. “North of Shea” means the desert half: newer, gated, golf, the Airpark and the Preserve. “South of Shea” means the older half: McCormick Ranch, the Greenbelt, Old Town and the postwar ranch houses beyond. The north versus south entry has the argument; Shea is where it starts.
The road itself is a six-lane workhorse. Between Scottsdale Road and the Loop 101 it carries the Shea Corridor: medical offices, HonorHealth’s Shea hospital, Scottsdale Ranch and its lake, and a celebrated run of good restaurants in beige strip malls. East of the 101 it passes the Mayo Clinic campus and then does something no other Scottsdale arterial does: it climbs through a pass in the McDowell Mountains and drops into Fountain Hills.
The neighborhood, restaurants and errands are in the Shea Corridor guide. This page is about the road and its name.
Where you’ll meet it
Real estate listings (“north of Shea”), hospital directions, the 51 and 101 exits, the route to Fountain Hills, and Valley Metro’s Route 80, which runs Northern Avenue and Shea.
Where the word came from
Shea is a person, and not the one newcomers guess. The Arizona Department of Transportation, in its account of how the Loop 101’s cross streets got their names, says James Shea “was a farmer who helped organize the Paradise Verde Irrigation District in 1916.” His partner in that venture was Harvey Bell, whose name is on Bell Road, four miles to the north. The district was an attempt to bring irrigation water to the open desert of Paradise Valley, north of the Phoenix Mountains, decades before anyone built houses there.
That makes Shea one of the Valley’s farm-era names, in the same family as Hayden Road and Bell Road: section-line roads named for the people who tried to make the land pay. How and when the road formally took Shea’s name is not something the sources we opened record, and this entry leaves it there.
What the name came to mean is later and better documented. As Scottsdale grew north through the 1970s and 1980s, Shea became the main east-west route through the middle of the city. Scottsdale Memorial Hospital built its second campus at 92nd Street and Shea, now HonorHealth’s Shea Medical Center, and on June 29, 1987, the Mayo Clinic opened its Scottsdale campus at 13400 East Shea. In June 1993 the city adopted the Shea Area Plan to govern the corridor. By then Shea was the city’s middle, and its dividing line.
What it is not
Shea Boulevard is not named for a developer or homebuilder. It is also not the same as the Shea Corridor, which is the band of neighborhoods along it. Nor is the Shea line an official boundary; it is a habit of speech, not a line on any city map.
The fine print
The road runs about 19.54 miles. It begins at 21st Place on the east flank of Stoney Mountain in the Phoenix Mountains, crosses the 51 at a single-point interchange, widens to six lanes east of 40th Street, and runs along the northern edge of the Town of Paradise Valley from Tatum Boulevard before entering Scottsdale. It crosses Scottsdale Road, meets the Loop 101 at another single-point interchange, passes Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, which heads north toward Taliesin, and crosses the Central Arizona Project canal.
East of the Mayo Clinic campus the straight line ends. Shea veers through the southern McDowells into Fountain Hills, narrows to four lanes at Fountain Hills Boulevard, curves southeast onto the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and ends at State Route 87, the Beeline. From the 51 to the Beeline it is part of the National Highway System.
The 10600 North figure comes from the City of Phoenix’s grid maps, which label it “Shea Blvd (10600N),” with Cactus Road at 12200 North a mile above. The Shea Area Plan of June 1993 covers the region from Hayden Road to the eastern city limit, with corridor rules applying about a quarter mile either side of the road; streetscape guidelines followed in 1994.