What it means
The Waterfront is the Scottsdale Waterfront, the cluster of condo towers, offices and restaurant patios along the Arizona Canal where it passes Camelback and Scottsdale roads, directly across from Fashion Square. It is Old Town’s dressed-up northwest corner: the place for a canal-side dinner, a walk across the Soleri Bridge, or a crowd of thousands watching light sculptures float on the water in November.
Locals use the word without irony and explain it immediately. “The Waterfront, you know, on the canal” is the standard formula, because anyone from outside hears “waterfront” and pictures a lake, a marina or at least a beach. The water is real. It is just a working irrigation canal, a concrete-lined channel carrying water from the Salt and Verde rivers to farms and cities downstream.
The restaurants, parking and seasons are in the Scottsdale Waterfront guide, and the walk that strings it together with the galleries is in Old Town on foot. This page is about the name.
Where you’ll meet it
Dinner reservations, the Canal Convergence festival every November, art-walk nights on Marshall Way, the canal path, and directions that start “across Camelback from the mall.”
Where the word came from
The canal is the old part. William J. Murphy’s crews completed the Arizona Canal in May 1885, and it has run past this corner ever since, from Granite Reef Dam on the Salt to New River in the west Valley. For most of the twentieth century the town treated it as plumbing: a fenced bank behind the commercial strip, something to cross, not something to face.
The name is the new part. In 2003 the developers Starwood Capital Group and Golub and Co. unveiled plans for the southwest corner of Camelback and Scottsdale roads: 935,500 square feet of condos, shops and offices, with two towers planned at 155 feet, which would make them the tallest structures in the city. The project was the “Scottsdale Waterfront” from the start; who among the developers or the city first used the phrase is not recorded in anything we could find. Construction had to begin by March 2005, and the towers and patios went up in phases over the following years.
The name was a stretch, faintly absurd in a desert city, and it stuck anyway because it was useful. It told you exactly where to go. When the city dedicated the Soleri Bridge on December 11, 2010, and Canal Convergence arrived in 2012, the Waterfront became a civic place as well as a real estate project.
What it is not
It is not a lake, and it is not Tempe Town Lake or the lakes of McCormick Ranch, the nearest real bodies of open water. You cannot swim, paddle or fish in the canal. And “the Waterfront” is not the whole canal: the path continues for miles in both directions, past neighborhoods nobody would call waterfront.
The fine print
The Waterfront was a public-private bargain. The 2003 plans committed the city to about $5.35 million, possibly $6.8 million with interest, and included 400 public parking spaces. The condos were priced from $250,000 to $1 million, at an average of about 3,000 square feet, which in 2003 was a statement about where Scottsdale thought downtown was heading. A Fiesta Bowl museum was part of the early pitch.
The canal itself is not the city’s. It belongs to the Salt River Project’s system, and SRP still runs water through it and lowers or drains it for maintenance from time to time, when the Waterfront briefly overlooks a concrete trench. The paths beside it are shared-use and connect to the Greenbelt and the wider canal network.
The district’s character has shifted from shopping toward dining over the years, with steakhouses and patios replacing shops along the water. The Soleri Bridge, with its two 64-foot pylons that mark solar events with a blade of light on the plaza, remains the one piece designed to outlast the tenants.