What it means
The Entertainment District is the part of Old Town that made Scottsdale a verb. It is a compact grid of clubs, day clubs, taco-to-dance-floor bars and rooftop pools east of Scottsdale Road, between Camelback Road and Indian School Road, and its streets have the names of a 1950s western: Stetson Drive, Saddlebag Trail, Indian Plaza, Shoeman Lane. Locals compress all of it into one word. “We ended up on Stetson” means the night went long. “Saddlebag at midnight” is a warning.
The phrase is also a civic fault line, which is why the status above says contested. The city’s tourism office sells the district; the city’s neighbors file complaints about it; the council has spent two decades deciding whether it is Scottsdale’s future or its embarrassment. Our nightlife guide explains how a night moves through the grid and where the other, quieter Old Town begins. This entry is about the place and its names.
Where you’ll meet it
Thursday through Saturday nights, and on the bachelorette calendar from February through April. In rideshare apps, which know the pickup lanes. In the W Scottsdale, whose pool deck is the district’s daytime version. And at council meetings, under the heading of conditional use permits.
Where the word came from
The streets are older than the scene. Stetson Drive, Saddlebag Trail, Buckboard Trail and their neighbors belong to the western-themed naming that Scottsdale adopted as it grew around its 1950s “West’s Most Western Town” identity, and Stetson Drive was already a destination of a kind in the 1960s, when the Scottsdale Wax Museum, an affiliate of Madame Tussaud’s of London, operated there before moving to Van Buren Street in Phoenix, as the historian Joan Fudala records. Who chose the name Stetson, and whether anyone had a specific hat in mind, no source we could open says. The reading is obvious and the documentation is absent.
The bar district grew in layers. The block already had taverns when Martini Ranch opened at 7295 East Stetson in 1994 as a bar and grill and started booking bands almost at once. In 2001 the entrepreneur Randy Smith opened SIX Lounge at 7316 East Stetson and brought the ultra-lounge format, with model-grade servers and a unisex bathroom whose glass doors went opaque when they shut, to a town of resort piano bars. Mickey’s Hangover near Stetson and Brown stayed open until 3 a.m. through the 2000s. Axis/Radius, Myst and their successors filled Saddlebag and Indian Plaza, and a 2023 Phoenix New Times retrospective counts 25 legendary Scottsdale venues, most of them inside these blocks. The W Scottsdale’s 2008 opening on Camelback put a hotel brand on the scene and gave the district a front door.
“Entertainment District” as a label followed the clubs rather than creating them. The city uses the lowercase phrase in its codes for the area where bars and live entertainment need a council-approved conditional use permit, and it drew the one boundary it has, a Transportation Safety Zone under Resolution 9960, “east of Buckboard Trail, from Sixth Avenue to Camelback Road,” to manage taxi and rideshare lanes. The capitalized name is the marketers’ and the public’s.
What it is not
It is not all of Old Town. South of Indian School the same grid becomes the gallery district, the saloons on Brown Avenue and the dinner rooms, and the Waterfront along the canal is its restaurant-forward border rather than part of it.
The fine print
The district’s rules are mostly about transport and noise. The Transportation Safety Zone lets the city dedicate lanes and “Passenger Convenience Areas” for taxis, limousines, pedicabs and rideshare pickups, which is why the curbs on Saddlebag and Stetson are striped the way they are. Bars and live entertainment are permitted only with a conditional use permit from the council, and council reports on individual permits describe the surroundings plainly: a property “within an active entertainment district,” bounded by the W Hotel, a nightclub and “a mix of restaurants, bars, offices, retail and personal services.” The city has never drawn a zoning boundary called the Entertainment District, so every argument about it starts with the question of where it is.
The scene reinvents itself about once a decade. The 2020s version is upscale: the City Sun Times reported in August 2025 on Shiv Supper Club, a relaunched Maya Day + Night, the Kill Club at 7318 East Stetson, and a nightlife operator’s summary that “everyone is revamping, leveling up, chasing a more polished, elevated crowd.” The same report noted the city’s $40 million “Spruce Up Old Town” program for fiscal 2025-26. Whether the money civilizes Stetson or just raises the cover charge is the current version of a very old Scottsdale argument.
What the record lacks is the beginning of the names. The street dedications for Stetson Drive and Saddlebag Trail should be on plats in the county recorder’s files; nobody has pulled them for publication, and the city’s street histories skip these blocks. The wax museum is the earliest Stetson Drive business we can document, and it is a reminder that the street was built for tourists before it was built for drinking.