What it’s actually like
Most of Scottsdale has a personality. This corner has a calendar. On an ordinary Tuesday in October it’s a quiet resort district just past the freeway: a pink Spanish-colonial resort, two golf courses, a lot of empty parking and horse trailers ambling down Pima Road. On a Saturday in February it holds more people than most Arizona cities, and every one of them is trying to turn left onto Princess Drive.
Three institutions make it what it is, and they were built as a set. The Fairmont Scottsdale Princess opened in 1987 beside TPC Scottsdale, which took over the Phoenix Open that same year. The pitch was simple: a mega-resort to put the golf world up, and a course shaped like an amphitheater to put the golf in front of a crowd. It worked better than anyone planned. The WM Phoenix Open is now the best-attended golf tournament on Earth, 700,000-plus over the week, and its 16th hole, a short par-3 wrapped completely in grandstands, is the loudest place in the sport. The Princess, at roughly 750 rooms across 65 acres, is the tournament’s unofficial capitol and, in December, the home of Christmas at the Princess, which turns a luxury resort into a ticketed holiday park.
A mile east, WestWorld of Scottsdale is the city’s event ground: a flat, dusty, surprisingly vast campus of arenas, barns, polo fields and exhibition halls. It hosts the world’s biggest collector-car auction, the world’s biggest Arabian horse show, the world’s biggest Quarter Horse circuit and a pro rodeo, and none of that is an exaggeration. The Equidome and the North Hall, the climate-controlled buildings added in the 2010s, mean WestWorld now works in summer too. In between sit the Scottsdale Sports Complex, 71 acres of tournament fields off Princess Drive, and Bell94, six more fields at Bell and 94th that moonlight as Phoenix Open parking.
About the golf, since it’s the one thing here you can do any day of the year. Both TPC courses take public tee times. The Stadium Course is Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish’s desert layout built for sightlines and mounds, and playing the 16th in total silence, with the empty grandstands looming, is one of the odder thrills in Arizona sport. It’s priced like the bucket-list round it is. The Champions Course next door is the same address and the same desert for far less money, and it’s where most locals actually play.
Where to eat and drink
The Princess is the district’s restaurant row, and all of it is open to non-guests. Bourbon Steak is Michael Mina’s steakhouse, open since 2007: butter-poached prime, the duck-fat fries trio before every meal, and a cellar of about 3,000 bottles. It’s the room the rest of the Valley’s steakhouses get measured against. La Hacienda has been here since the resort opened in 1987 and is still its best argument. Richard Sandoval reimagined it as modern Mexican, and its tequila list works as a second menu. Ironwood American Kitchen is the all-day workhorse, and its patio facing the plaza is the smartest seat in December, when you can watch the light show over a real dinner and skip the festival food line.
Across the golf course, Toro is Sandoval’s pan-Latin grill and rum bar in the TPC clubhouse. Since 2015 it has overlooked the 18th green, and at sunset, with the green gone gold and the McDowells gone purple, it’s the best view in the district. The ghost is Marquesa, the Princess’s gilded Catalan dining room. It held Five Diamond honors, and its champagne Sunday brunch was where a generation of Valley families did Easter and graduations, until regular service ended around 2010.
Off the resort, the district eats like the Airpark it borders. Sushi Brokers has run its twice-daily happy hour at Scottsdale Road and Bell since 2000. The rolls are oversized and sauced, the bar fills by four, and nobody there is pretending to be an omakase counter. The Americano, up Scottsdale Road, is the scene steakhouse: Scott Conant’s dry-aged bistecca and spaghetti pomodoro, with Beau MacMillan running the kitchen since 2026. The one locals guard is The Thumb on Bell Road, a gas station, car wash, market and competition-grade barbecue joint in one building, right across from the Bell94 fields. It’s where soccer parents and horse-show crews eat brisket while their trucks get washed.
Getting there and parking
On a normal day this is the easiest drive in north Scottsdale. The Loop 101 has exits at Scottsdale Road, Hayden and Princess/Pima, all of them within a few minutes of everything, and every venue has free lots or valet. Old Town is twenty to twenty-five minutes south on Scottsdale Road or Hayden, and the airport is about half an hour. Nothing here is walkable from anything else except the Princess to TPC, which is the point of the Princess.
Event weeks are different. For the Phoenix Open there’s essentially no public parking at the course. Use the official shuttle lots, with WestWorld the classic one and Bell94’s fields built partly for this. Or take a rideshare to the drop zones near Hayden and Bell and walk to the far side before you call your ride home. Or ride in and use the free bike valet, which is the smartest move in the district. For Barrett-Jackson, the Arabian show and the Sun Circuit, WestWorld runs its own big lots off Pima and Bell. Those are fine until the evening sessions, when the exits back up, and the Frank Lloyd Wright side is usually faster for a pickup than Pima.
The real trap is the overlap. A late-January or February Saturday can put an auction or horse show at WestWorld, the Open or its setup at TPC, and a regional soccer tournament at the Sports Complex all onto the same few miles of Princess Drive and Bell Road. Check all three calendars and come in from the south on Hayden or from the west on Bell. However long you think it’ll take, add twenty minutes.
When to go
Pick a lane. If you want the district at full volume, January and February are the peak: nine days of Barrett-Jackson, eleven of the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, then the Open, when every room and table at the Princess is spoken for. Go to the Open on a Thursday for actual golf. The turn of March brings the free Arizona Sun Circuit, the free Cactus Reining Classic, the Parada del Sol Rodeo and Scottsdale Art Week. In April comes Arizona Bike Week, with the Tour de Scottsdale rolling out of WestWorld the same month. November brings the Goodguys Southwest Nationals and the Bentley Polo Championships, then Christmas at the Princess.
If you want the district quiet, the answer is the edges. October has the heat gone, the patios open, TPC in good shape and the Barrett-Jackson Fall Auction at a third of January’s crowd. September is the hidden season. The air-conditioned Equidome hosts the Arabian National Breeder Finals and the West’s Most Western Rodeo, and the Princess discounts hard. Even summer has a pulse: the Scottsdale 4th of July puts a barbecue and a rodeo under WestWorld’s roofs, and in August the Night Trip Festival builds a nightclub inside the North Hall.
How it got this way
In the early 1980s this was open desert at the far edge of a city that had just annexed its way north, with the Airpark’s runway to the southwest and the Central Arizona Project canal cutting across the empty land. The Phoenix Open had spent decades as a pleasant tour stop at Phoenix Country Club. The Thunderbirds, the civic group that had run it since 1939, wanted a bigger stage. The answer was TPC Scottsdale, a public course designed as a stadium, with a resort to match. The Open moved north in 1987, the Princess opened the same year, and its restaurants, Marquesa and La Hacienda above all, gave the giant resort a fine-dining reputation it spent the next twenty years polishing.
WestWorld came together at the same time. The city began developing the site in 1986, originally as Horseman’s Park, as a home for the Arabian Horse Show, which had outgrown every venue it had used since 1955. The show moved in by 1989, and so did Barrett-Jackson, which had been selling cars in Scottsdale since 1971. Over the decades the rodeo, Bike Week, Goodguys and the polo joined them.
The 2010s changed WestWorld most. Covered and climate-controlled arenas, the Equidome among them, and the North Hall let the place host in September, July and August, not just in winter. The Princess expanded into towers and villas under Fairmont and launched Christmas at the Princess in 2010. Bell94 opened in 2021, turf grown in on a deadline so it could park Open traffic the following February. What began as a golf course and a horse show is now a year-round event machine that happens to have a pool.
Nearby
South and west across the freeway, North Scottsdale and the Airpark is the office-park engine room this district borders, with the strip-mall restaurants to match. Southwest at Scottsdale Road and the 101, Kierland and Scottsdale Quarter is the walkable dinner-and-shopping district. North up Hayden and Scottsdale Road, Grayhawk is the golf-community side of the same boom. East up Pima and Thompson Peak Parkway, DC Ranch and McDowell Mountain Ranch climb toward the McDowells.