What it means
The Airpark is Scottsdale’s workplace. The word covers about 2,600 acres of North Scottsdale wrapped around the single runway of Scottsdale Airport: office parks, hangars, machine shops, car dealerships, medical suites, the Penske museum, a community college campus, and the lunch places that feed them. The city counts more than 2,500 companies and 48,000-plus employees there, which it ranks as the third-largest employment center in Greater Phoenix. Most visitors never see it, because nothing in it is a resort, and most residents north of Shea drive through it twice a day.
You will hear it as a destination (“he works in the Airpark”), a market (“Airpark office space”), a traffic condition (“Airpark at five, forget it”) and occasionally as a stand-in for the airport itself, though the airport is the small part. Our airport and Airpark guide tells the whole institutional story; this entry is about the word and where it came from.
Where you’ll meet it
On every job listing north of the Loop 101. On the airport’s own signs and the business association’s. In North Scottsdale directions, where “just past the Airpark” means Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. And overhead in January, when the Barrett-Jackson and Phoenix Open jets stack up on approach.
Where the word came from
The runway came first, and it was the Army’s. Thunderbird Field II opened on June 22, 1942 as a primary flight school for Army Air Forces cadets; in its peak month, November 1943, 615 cadets flew 1,845 takeoffs and landings a day, and more than 5,500 pilots had graduated by the time training stopped on October 16, 1944. After the war Arizona State Teachers College tried to run the field and gave it up. In 1953 the Arizona Conference of Seventh-day Adventists bought it for a boarding school, Thunderbird Academy.
The academy had the idea that made the name. In 1963 it commissioned what the city’s own history calls “the first combined-use design of a clean industrial park surrounding an airport”: give the runway to the city, keep the land around it, and sell lots to companies that wanted a taxiway at the back door. The architect was George Tewksbury, and the word for the product was airpark, an aviation term for a small airport with businesses or homes attached that already existed elsewhere but had never been applied to a whole Scottsdale district. The city said yes. It took title to the 201-acre field in 1966 for $750,000, picked its first fixed-base operator in April 1967, and welcomed the first business jets in August 1967.
The name then did what good names do: it outgrew its origin. “Scottsdale Airpark” began as the church’s industrial subdivision and became, by the 1980s, the generic term for every office park, dealership and hangar between Scottsdale Road and the freeway. Nobody decided this. The airport is the Airpark’s middle, and the Airpark is simply everything the airport made valuable.
What it is not
It is not Sky Harbor, and it is not a place to catch an airline flight in the normal sense; the Scottsdale Airport entry covers that. And it is not Kierland or the Quarter, the shopping district on its western edge, though the two bleed together along Scottsdale Road.
The fine print
The airport’s numbers are the Airpark’s heartbeat. One runway, 8,249 by 100 feet, at an elevation of 1,510 feet; about 164,000 operations in 2025 by the city’s count, 186,514 in 2019 by Wikipedia’s, which made it one of the busiest single-runway general-aviation airports in the country; roughly 400 based aircraft as of 2017. A 2022 study put the airport’s own economic benefit at about $1 billion for fiscal 2019 (Wikipedia gives $688 million for the same year, a difference of method), supporting several thousand jobs, and the non-aviation activity of the Airpark around it at ten times that. JSX’s scheduled flights, which began on January 10, 2024, are the first regular commercial service in the field’s history and a running argument with the neighbors.
Governance is split in the way the 1963 plan intended. The city owns and runs the airport as an enterprise fund, with federal grants for improvements and a $27 million city bond behind the 2018 terminal. The land around it is private, zoned industrial and mixed-use, with the taxiway access the FAA negotiated in the 1960s still the Airpark’s distinguishing asset: a company on the right lot can roll its own jet to the runway.
The record’s soft spot is the beginning. The city’s history credits “the academy” with the 1963 plan; the fuller institutional account names Tewksbury’s Landel Inc. as the money behind the city’s purchase and reports that the church later returned the $750,000 as a gift, but the deed trail has not been published. And “Airpark” as a proper noun has no birth certificate; it appears on plats and signs in the late 1960s and was simply what everyone called it by the time anyone thought to ask.