What it’s actually like
Most of Scottsdale’s visitors drive straight through the Airpark without knowing it has a name. It’s the grid of office parks, hangars, showrooms and stucco medical buildings between Scottsdale Road and the Loop 101, north of Thunderbird Road, wrapped around the single 8,249-foot runway of Scottsdale Airport. The city counts more than 2,500 businesses and 48,000-plus employees here and calls it the third-largest employment center in Greater Phoenix. It is where north Scottsdale goes to work, buys its cars, sees its dentist and eats lunch.
It’s not pretty and doesn’t try: the architecture is 1980s and 1990s office park with a fresh coat of desert tan, and the street names (Butherus, Northsight, Raintree, Greenway-Hayden Loop) mean nothing to anyone who doesn’t work here. But it has two things a visitor can use. The first is beds: the Airpark and the Perimeter Center, the office park just north of the freeway at Pima Road, hold the cheapest decent hotel rooms within a few minutes of TPC Scottsdale, WestWorld and the Princess. The second is food, because 48,000 people need lunch and some very good cooks moved in to feed them.
The lexicon entry explains the word, and the airport and Airpark profile tells the institution’s story. This guide is the district on the ground.
Where to eat and drink
The runway table first. Volanti is upstairs in the city’s Aviation Business Center at 15000 N. Airport Drive, a full-service restaurant and bar overlooking Scottsdale Airport; you don’t pass through security, the covered lot is across the street, and the patio is first-come and in demand. Come at golden hour, when the business jets are landing and everyone on the patio stops talking at once. It’s a six-minute walk from Scottsdale Quarter, which almost nobody knows.
The best meal in the district hides in a strip mall at Scottsdale Road and Thunderbird. Hush Public House is Dom Ruggiero’s small, pub-minded room, opened in 2019, that landed in the first Michelin Guide Southwest without changing a thing about itself. Book it, and order whatever the kitchen is excited about that week.
For beer, the Airpark’s light-industrial blocks are where the north’s brewing lives. Loco Patrón, the Old Town Mexican restaurant, brews its own beer at its north Scottsdale location on Northsight Boulevard: tacos, margaritas and a house brewery a few minutes from WestWorld. OHSO, the Valley’s nano-brewery-and-distillery, has its north Scottsdale room on Hayden Road; our breweries guide has the rest of the roster, which changes often.
The lunch economy is the other reason to come. Butters Pancakes & Café, the McCormick Ranch breakfast favorite, has a location at Northsight Crossing for the breakfast-meeting crowd. At the north end, the Scottsdale Promenade at Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard holds Picazzo’s, the gluten-free-before-it-was-cool Italian kitchen that has been there since 2003, and The Capital Grille, where the Airpark takes its clients. For a full evening out, Kierland and the Quarter are across the road, and the Princess’s Bourbon Steak and La Hacienda are five minutes north.
The lost ones say a lot about the Airpark’s nightlife, such as it was. Sapporo lit its gas torches near Scottsdale Road and Acoma for about eighteen years of hibachi and weekend lounge. Barcelona on Greenway-Hayden Loop was the 2000s steak-house-turned-dance-club until 2009. And CrackerJax, thirty years of go-karts and mini golf on Scottsdale Road, closed in 2023 to become a mixed-use development.
Where to stay
The Airpark is a hotel district disguised as an office park, and the hotels sort into three groups.
Inside the Airpark. The Best Western Plus Thunderbird Suites is a 120-suite courtyard hotel on Butherus Drive next to the runway, named for the wartime flight school whose ground it sits on. The Holiday Inn Scottsdale North Airpark at Raintree and the 101 has 117 rooms and its own restaurant. The Residence Inn Scottsdale North at Bell and Frank Lloyd Wright has kitchens and sits across from the Promenade’s Trader Joe’s.
The Perimeter Center. North of the freeway and west of Pima Road, this office park backs onto TPC Scottsdale’s Champions Course. The Scottsdale Marriott at McDowell Mountains, opened in 1999, is all two-room suites; the Hilton Garden Inn Perimeter Center is the 122-room event-week workhorse a couple of minutes from WestWorld; and the Scottsdale Links vacation-club resort rents one- to three-bedroom suites with full kitchens.
The Phoenix side of Scottsdale Road. At Bell Road, technically in Phoenix and facing the Airpark across the street, are the Courtyard, SpringHill Suites, Hampton Inn and Sleep Inn. They are the budget end of the district.
Getting there and parking
The Loop 101 brackets the district, with exits at Raintree Drive, Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard and Pima/Princess; from Old Town, Scottsdale Road or Hayden north is twenty to twenty-five minutes. Parking is free and plentiful everywhere except during event weeks, when the WestWorld and TPC lots spill over and the Phoenix Open runs its own shuttle lots.
The traffic is the catch. Weekday rush on Frank Lloyd Wright, Raintree, Hayden and the Greenway-Hayden Loop is the worst in the city, roughly 7 to 9 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m. Plan Airpark meetings for mid-morning and dinners for after 6:30.
When to go
The Airpark’s calendar is the event calendar. January brings Barrett-Jackson and the Celebration of Fine Art tents; February is the Arabian Horse Show and the WM Phoenix Open, when rooms here sell out and rates climb; March and April are spring-training and Bike Week traffic. Summer is the bargain: business travel keeps the restaurants open, the hotels discount, and Volanti’s patio is the place to watch a monsoon roll over the runway.
How it got this way
The runway came first, and it was the Army’s. Thunderbird Field II opened on June 22, 1942 as a primary flight school, graduated more than 5,500 cadets, and stopped training on October 16, 1944. In 1953 the Seventh-day Adventists bought it for a boarding school, Thunderbird Academy, and in 1963 the academy commissioned what the city’s own history calls “the first combined-use design of a clean industrial park surrounding an airport.” The city bought the airfield in 1966, chose its first fixed-base operator in April 1967, and saw the first business jets land that August. In August 1968 Casa Precision broke ground as the first Airpark tenant, and the private land around the runway began filling in exactly as the church’s plan intended.
It filled fast. By the 1980s the Airpark was the engine of north Scottsdale, and the PGA Tour’s Stadium Course (1986) and the Princess (1987) next door gave the desert north of it a second economy, golf and events. The Perimeter Center grew up in between as its own office park, and the Loop 101, finished in 2002, made all of it a freeway exit from anywhere in the Valley. By 2004, when Host Marriott bought the McDowell Mountains Marriott for $57.5 million, it was calling the Perimeter Center one of the fastest-growing office parks in the Phoenix area.
The city wrote it all down in 2010. The Greater Airpark Character Area Plan, adopted that October, draws the district from Thunderbird Road to Grayhawk and from Scottsdale Road to the 101 and WestWorld, and notes that it contains the largest industrial-zoned area in Scottsdale. The plan has been amended several times since, as housing and mixed-use projects have pushed into a district built for hangars. The airport itself added a new Aviation Business Center in 2018, the building where Volanti now serves dinner, and scheduled public charter flights on JSX began on January 10, 2024, the first regular commercial service in the field’s history.
Nearby
West across Scottsdale Road are Kierland and Scottsdale Quarter, the Airpark’s after-work district. North of the 101 are the Princess, TPC and WestWorld and then Grayhawk. South across Thunderbird is the Cactus Corridor, and below it the Shea Corridor, where much of the Airpark goes home. For the big picture of the city’s north, start with the North Scottsdale overview.