What it’s actually like
Turn north off Shea anywhere east of 96th Street and within a few blocks the curbs thin out. The lots get wide, the houses sit back behind deep front yards of desert, and sooner or later there’s a horse looking at you over a rail fence. You are two miles from the Airpark, one of the biggest job centers in Arizona, and it feels like the 1970s edge of town. That’s the Cactus Corridor: the residential belt along Cactus Road between the Shea Corridor’s restaurants and the Airpark’s office parks.
It has two personalities, and the city drew the line itself. East of 96th Street, out toward Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, is the horse end: big lots, minimal street improvements, deep setbacks, protected by a 1992 city plan that kept it rural on purpose. West of 96th and across the 101 toward Scottsdale Road, along Cactus and Sweetwater Avenue, it’s semi-custom homes and ranch-house subdivisions, the kind of quiet, mid-century-to-1990s Scottsdale that people buy into for the schools and the location and then never leave.
What there is to do is mostly municipal and mostly wet. Cactus Park, at Cactus and Scottsdale roads, has the city’s 50-meter pool, the place serious swimmers in Scottsdale end up, plus 17 acres of fields and courts. Aztec Park on 100th Street is the east end’s neighborhood park, nine acres of courts, ballfields and a playground. At Scottsdale Road and Sweetwater, the Ina Levine Jewish Community Campus has been a civic anchor since 2002 (our Jewish Scottsdale note has the story). And at the corridor’s east edge, on Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, is Taliesin West, Wright’s desert camp, which was the reason anyone drove out this way in the first place.
Where to eat and drink
Honestly, you don’t eat here. The corridor is zoned for houses and horses, and the city plan’s whole point was to keep it that way. The good news is that it sits between two of the best dining stretches in north-central Scottsdale, each five minutes away.
South on Shea: Sweet Republic for ice cream, Salt & Lime and Ling & Louie’s in the same center at 94th Street, Chompie’s for bagels, and the tasting menu at Course near Scottsdale Road when it’s a night that calls for one. North in the Airpark: Hush Public House, the Michelin-listed strip-mall room at Scottsdale and Thunderbird, and Volanti, upstairs in the airport’s Aviation Business Center, where dinner comes with business jets. Our Shea Corridor and Airpark guides have the rest.
Getting there and parking
The Loop 101 runs straight up the corridor’s middle along the old Pima Road line, with exits at Shea and at Cactus Road. From Old Town, take Hayden or Scottsdale Road north; it’s about fifteen minutes to Cactus Road. Cactus Park and Aztec Park both have free lots.
Cactus Road is the local’s route across. In 1992 the city classed it as a “neighborhood collector” rather than an arterial, which is planning language for “don’t make this a highway.” Share it with horse trailers and riders; the same plan called for a neighborhood trail loop for exactly that traffic. Thunderbird Road, the northern edge, is the fast road, and the one to avoid at 5 p.m. when the Airpark empties.
When to go
It’s a residential district, so “when to go” really means when to swim and when to look at houses. The 50-meter pool at Cactus Park is the summer anchor, from May through September, when the public pools are the city’s real social life. October through April is when the horse properties are at their best, with riders out in the morning and the McDowells sharp on the horizon past Taliesin West. House-hunters: come in February or March, when the snowbird market is busy and you can see the corridor’s character with the windows open.
How it got this way
Cactus Road is the line where Scottsdale’s northward march began. On January 30, 1964, Scottsdale and Phoenix adopted matching resolutions making Scottsdale Road their boundary from Cactus Road north to Jomax, the truce that pointed Scottsdale’s growth north and east from exactly this corner. The corridor itself settled slowly: horse properties on acre-plus lots, ranch houses on streets named for the desert (Sweetwater, Mescal, Cholla), and a lot of open ground in between, with Taliesin West at the far end, where Wright had camped since 1937.
By the late 1980s the Airpark was booming to the north and Scottsdale Ranch was filling in to the south, and the corridor was squeezed. The city’s own summary of what happened next is unusually candid. Owners of the larger lots told the city the equestrian life was declining and their land would be worth more as subdivisions; builders wanted to put semi-custom homes on medium lots; and the homeowners already living on big lots feared exactly that. The Cactus Corridor Area Plan, approved by the City Council on May 5, 1992, split the difference along 96th Street. West of it, the land moved to the Suburban Character category, allowing one to four homes an acre and the redevelopment of horse properties. East of it, the Rural Character category stayed, with no land-use changes, a recommendation that new building “reflect a low density, and where feasible an equestrian flair,” and a proposed new name, “Cactus Acres,” that nobody uses.
It was the first of the seven character area plans the city has adopted, ahead of the Shea Area plan a year later and the Greater Airpark plan in 2010, and it explains the corridor you drive through today: subdivisions and semi-custom homes from the 101 to 96th Street, and then, abruptly, a horse looking at you over a fence.
Nearby
South is the Shea Corridor, and across Shea, Scottsdale Ranch and its lake. North across Thunderbird is the Airpark, and beyond the 101 the Princess, TPC and WestWorld. East past Taliesin West, the McDowell foothills climb toward DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch. West across Scottsdale Road is Phoenix, and a few minutes up it, Kierland and Scottsdale Quarter.