What it means
The Pavilions is the sprawling shopping center on the east side of the 101 at Indian Bend Road: big boxes, chain restaurants, a movie theater, an indoor kart track and an ocean of free parking. It is not glamorous, and it does not try to be. It is where north-central Scottsdale buys a television, a bag of dog food and a cart of groceries in one stop.
Locals use the name casually and constantly. “I’ll grab it at the Pavilions” means an errand run. “Meet at the Pavilions” before a ballgame means the lot is free and Salt River Fields is close. And “going to the Pavilions Saturday” usually means the car show, when hot rods, exotics and lifted trucks fill the northeast lot and owners sit in lawn chairs beside them.
The name has a quiet surprise in it. The center sits on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, not in Scottsdale, even though every address reads Scottsdale. The Pavilions guide covers the stores and parking; the car show guide covers Saturday nights.
Where you’ll meet it
Errand talk, spring training parking advice in the Cactus League guide, car-club calendars, and the Talking Stick entertainment district between the casino and the ballpark.
Where the word came from
The name is retail-industry plain: the center opened as Scottsdale Pavilions, borrowing the city’s name for land outside the city, and nobody has published who chose it. Its owners say it was built in two phases from 1989 to 1991, a large open-air power center on land the Loop 101 would later border.
The land is the story. The Community’s reservation was created by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879, cut from about 680,000 acres to 46,627 within months under pressure from settlers, and today covers about 54,585 acres. Its two peoples are the Onk Akimel O’odham, the Salt River People, and the Xalychidom Piipaash, the Upriver People; outsiders long called them Pima and Maricopa, which is where the Community’s legal name comes from. Reservation land is held in trust and leased rather than sold, so when the Valley grew out to the Community’s western boundary, retail arrived on long-term leases, and the Pavilions was one of the early ones.
In the 2010s the center took the Community’s Talking Stick brand, the name already on its golf club, its casino resort and its spring training ballpark, and became the Pavilions at Talking Stick. Locals mostly kept saying “the Pavilions.”
What it is not
It is not Talking Stick Resort, the casino tower across the district, and it is not in the City of Scottsdale. It is not a mall in the indoor sense either, and it should not be confused with Fashion Square or the Scottsdale Quarter, which are the city’s dress-up shopping.
The fine print
By its owners’ current count the Pavilions is a 1.3-million-square-foot power center on 128 acres with more than 100 tenants, anchored by Target and a long list of national chains, plus entertainment tenants such as Roadhouse Cinemas and Octane Raceway. The leasing and marketing are handled by a private management firm; the land beneath it remains the Community’s.
That arrangement matters more than the mailing address suggests. Because the center is on Community land, the Community’s government, laws and police have jurisdiction there, not the City of Scottsdale’s. The Community’s own government guide explains how its constitution, adopted in 1940 under the Indian Reorganization Act, sets up an elected president, vice president and council.
The car show is the center’s best-known tradition. The site’s event guide dates it to April 1990, started by the franchisee of the McDonald’s on the property, and says it paused during the 2020 pandemic before returning in 2021. We could not open a primary source for those details while writing this page, so hold the founding date a little loosely; the Saturday crowds are easy to confirm in person.