What it’s actually like
If Old Town is the town’s front porch, this is its living room, and it is the room I send people to when they tell me Scottsdale felt like one long bar.
Fifth Avenue curves west from Scottsdale Road as a 1950s shopping street that never got redeveloped, which is the whole charm. The storefronts are low and shaded, the side courts are tucked behind them, and the pace is a browse. Craftsman Court is a single block off Fifth that packs in more good food per foot than anywhere in the city. Stetson Drive runs parallel, a half-step livelier, closer to the canal and the bar district.
Cross Scottsdale Road to the east and the mood shifts again. Marshall Way and Main Street are the gallery district, where the ArtWalk has been opening doors every Thursday night since 1975. Then the grid gives way to the Civic Center: Bennie Gonzales’s white-walled City Hall and library from 1968, the contemporary art museum, the performing arts center, fountains, rose gardens and the lawn with Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture. It was rebuilt in a renovation completed in 2023, and it is the best free acreage in the city.
The district is quiet after ten, which is precisely its point.
Where to eat and drink
This is the part of Scottsdale where I actually make reservations.
FnB in Craftsman Court is the most important restaurant in modern Arizona: weekly menus from Arizona farms, an all-Arizona wine list, a James Beard Award and a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Order the leeks. Citizen Public House, on Fifth Avenue proper, is the gastropub the rest of the Valley measures itself against, home of the chopped salad that started at Cowboy Ciao before that restaurant closed in 2018. Marcellino on Stetson makes its pasta by hand every day with the chef at the stove. The Herb Box is the homegrown farm-to-table option when FnB is full. The Ends is the newest of the bunch and the most fun.
Coffee is a two-way argument: Berdena’s, tiny, with a permanent line, or Cartel, roomier and for the coffee nerds. On the Civic Center side, AZ88 is the martini-and-art room facing the lawn, and it has been since 1988.
The ghosts here are especially good. Trader Vic’s poured mai tais at Fifth and Craftsman Court from 1962 to 1990. La Chaumière was the formal French cottage where a generation learned what a fancy dinner was. Anderson’s Fifth Estate was the nightclub for twenty-five years. Merkin Vineyards came and went on the wine front. Locals of a certain age will still direct you by all four.
Getting there and parking
Same directions as Old Town: the 101 to Indian School or Chaparral, west to Scottsdale Road; or Camelback Road straight in from Phoenix. The airport is typically twenty to thirty minutes.
The Civic Center parking garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is the smart move for the entire district: it is typically free, it is central, and it puts you on the lawn in two minutes and on Fifth Avenue in seven. There is a second public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal. Street parking on Fifth itself exists but is short-term and scarce on winter afternoons. The city’s free trolley loops through here on its Old Town route.
Walk once you are parked. The whole district is flat, mostly shaded and under a mile end to end. Cyclists coming in off the Greenbelt can follow the canal path west and arrive at the Waterfront without touching a road.
When to go
The Civic Center lawn is the district’s calendar. Sunday A’Fair puts free concerts on the grass on select Sundays from January into April. The Arizona Indian Festival takes it over for a February weekend. The Scottsdale Arts Festival fills it for three days in March, and the Culinary Festival follows in April. Thursday ArtWalk is year-round, but the gallery district is at its best on a winter Thursday around sunset.
Shopping and patio weather run October through April; November is the quiet-good month before the holidays land, and Scottsdazzle turns the whole downtown festive from Thanksgiving on. In summer, Fifth Avenue is a morning-and-evening street: coffee at Berdena’s before it heats up, dinner after dark, nothing in between. June is the trade-off month where hotel rates crater and the restaurants are easy to book.
How it got this way
Fifth Avenue was Scottsdale’s first deliberate shopping district, laid out in the early 1950s just as the town incorporated and decided to sell itself as a western resort village. The curved street, the courtyards and the arcaded storefronts were a conscious alternative to the strip mall; Craftsman Court was built as an artisans’ lane. Within a decade it was where the Valley bought turquoise, ate at Trader Vic’s and gawked at the Sugar Bowl’s Family Circus clientele.
The Civic Center arrived in the late 1960s when the city moved its government out of the old downtown and hired Bennie Gonzales to design a City Hall and library in white plaster with no straight hallways, arranged around lawns and fountains. The Center for the Performing Arts followed in the 1970s, the contemporary art museum in the 1990s. The gallery district grew up between the two, on Main and Marshall, and the 1975 ArtWalk made Thursday nights the town’s arts ritual. Everything here was built for people who walk, which is why it still works better than most of what came later.
Nearby
Old Town proper — the Rusty Spur, the Entertainment District, the Waterfront — is across Scottsdale Road and north along the canal. South Scottsdale begins at Osborn Road, a short bike ride down the Greenbelt. The Camelback Corridor resorts are ten minutes north on Scottsdale Road.