What it means
SkySong is the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center, a campus of offices, apartments and a hotel on 42 acres at the northwest corner of Scottsdale and McDowell roads, and the first thing a visitor driving in from Sky Harbor sees of the city. The name does three jobs. It is the address (“they moved to SkySong”). It is the landmark: the white tensile shade sail over the central plaza, which locals call “the sail” and which reads from the freeway. And in south Scottsdale it is a kind of verdict, the proof that the corner where Los Arcos Mall died could come back as something the whole city points to.
You will hear it from ASU people, from startup people and from anyone giving directions along McDowell Road. The Los Arcos guide tells the mall’s full story, from its 1969 opening to its 1999 death; this entry is about the thing that replaced it and the word.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Loop 202 and at the Scottsdale Road exit, where the sail is the skyline. In the South Scottsdale guide, as the anchor of the McDowell Road revival. And in every city council argument about redevelopment, where “look at SkySong” is the standing rebuttal.
Where the word came from
The corner had a long bad decade before it had a name. Los Arcos Mall opened on November 21, 1969, with Sears and The Broadway as anchors and about 70 inline stores in 607,350 square feet, and for a generation it was south Scottsdale’s air-conditioned downtown. Fiesta Mall in Mesa pulled customers in the late 1970s; Fashion Square pulled the retailers in the 1990s; Sears, the last anchor, closed in February 1999 and the co-tenancy clauses emptied the rest.
Developer Steve Ellman had bought the property in 1996 and proposed a $600 million redevelopment built around a $140 million arena for the Phoenix Coyotes. Voters approved a stadium district and a sales tax in 1999, but Ellman and the team’s owner fell out over money and timing, Ellman took the arena to Glendale, and a retail plan that followed died under neighborhood opposition in early 2004. The mall was demolished in 2000. For most of the 2000s the 42 acres were a fenced dirt lot at the city’s front door.
The answer came from Tempe. In 2004 Ellman agreed to sell the land for $41.5 million under an arrangement with the City of Scottsdale and the ASU Foundation, and the two announced an innovation center: university offices, technology companies, foreign firms wanting a United States base, with retail and housing mixed in. Plaza Companies became master developer in 2006. The signature was the shade structure, tensile white fabric over the plaza, which the Los Arcos history says was inspired by the canopies of Barcelona’s La Rambla. The name attached to the project was SkySong. On March 27, 2008 the first building opened, 157,000 square feet with Ticketmaster and Canon among the tenants. Six months later Lehman Brothers failed. SkySong’s second building was already under construction, and it filled.
Why “SkySong”? No announcement we could find explains it. The sail points at the sky and the brand wanted something that sounded like neither a mall nor a university; that is as far as the record goes.
What it is not
It is not an ASU campus in the sense of classrooms and students; ASU’s presence is its foundation, offices and an incubator. And it is not a shopping center, whatever the corner used to be.
The fine print
The build-out ran longer than the opening suggests. SkySong 1 and 2 came with the 2008 launch; SkySong 3 opened in 2015, 4 in 2016 and 5 in 2019 along with a hotel, and the campus site now lists six office buildings and the SkySong Apartments. The Wikipedia history of Los Arcos gives slightly different years for the later buildings (2015, 2017, 2019), a reminder that “opened” can mean topped out, leased or occupied. Tenants have ranged from Ticketmaster and Canon at the start to Oracle and Groupon later, with ASU’s own units and a business incubator throughout.
The city’s stake is the part that matters locally. Scottsdale assembled the deal, carried the public infrastructure and gave up what might have been a sales-tax-producing retail corner for an office campus whose value shows up in jobs, payroll and the surrounding land. The bet paid off in the way the city measures these things: Papago Plaza across the street came down for apartments in 2019, the old Motorola plant on McDowell cycled through new owners, and the Motor Mile dealerships along McDowell began to turn over. The 2000s chapter covers the crash SkySong opened into; the 2010s cover the recovery it anchored.
The record’s gaps are in the money. The $41.5 million land price is public; the city’s total contribution across infrastructure and incentives is scattered across council records we have not assembled, and the campus’s current employment count is quoted differently by every party. The naming memo, if one exists, is not public either.