What it’s actually like
Cross the Loop 101 heading east from McCormick Ranch or Old Town and you’ve left Scottsdale — not the metro area, the actual city. Everything on the far side of the freeway belongs to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, a sovereign nation of the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples whose land runs from here to the Salt River and out past Mesa. The “Scottsdale, AZ” on the addresses is a postal convenience. The 15-story casino tower that visitors assume is Scottsdale’s skyline is, in every legal sense, somebody else’s.
That distinction is the whole point of the place. The Community can do things the city can’t — run a casino, build a ballpark for two big-league teams, put up an indoor waterpark next to an aquarium next to a jousting arena — and it has done all of them in a tight strip along the freeway that functions as Scottsdale’s entertainment annex. Talking Stick Resort is the anchor: a hotel-casino with the state’s flashiest gaming floor, a big showroom, and views that go all the way to the McDowells and Camelback. Salt River Fields is the ballpark. Topgolf is the driving range with cocktails. The Pavilions is where you buy a television.
It is not subtle, and it is not pretending to be. But on a March afternoon with a spring-training game at one end and a rooftop-level sunset at the other, it’s one of the most purely fun places in the Valley.
Where to eat and drink
The room to know is Orange Sky, fifteen floors up the Talking Stick tower with 360-degree glass and the desert sunset it’s named for — steak, seafood and a serious wine list, and the single best view east of the 101 at 6:30 p.m. in October. The rest of the resort’s dining stacks below it, and the lounge next to Orange Sky is the move if you’d rather drink the view than pay for it.
The local secret is a few miles south at Casino Arizona on McKellips: Cholla Prime Steakhouse, a white-tablecloth prime-rib room inside a casino that has quietly served the Valley’s best-value steak dinner for decades, at prices the Scottsdale resort corridor can’t touch.
For the family-and-ballgame crowd, Spinato’s at The Block does the Chicago tavern-style thin crust and the cult spinach pie from one of Arizona’s most beloved family restaurant groups, and it’s the right answer for the after-game crowd that doesn’t want a casino. Beyond that, the district’s dining is honest chain territory around the Pavilions and Topgolf — which, when you’re wrangling kids after four hours at the aquarium, is not a complaint.
Getting there and parking
The Loop 101 runs straight through the middle of it, with exits at Via de Ventura, Indian Bend and Talking Stick Way delivering you to the resort, the ballpark and the Pavilions in that order. From Old Town it’s ten minutes east; from the Airpark, ten minutes south. There is no transit worth mentioning; ride-shares are plentiful because the casino keeps them busy all night.
Parking is the district’s superpower. The casino has a garage and vast lots, free. The Pavilions has a sea of big-box parking, free. Salt River Fields charges for its lots on game days but sits within walking distance of both, and the smart money parks across the street and walks. Topgolf has its own lot; Great Wolf Lodge and OdySea are self-park.
The one traffic warning: the end of a spring-training game dumps thousands of cars onto Indian Bend and the 101 at the same moment, and the Pavilions’ Saturday-night car show does something similar on a smaller scale most weekends of the cool season. Both clear in half an hour.
When to go
March is the reason the district exists. Cactus League spring training puts the Diamondbacks and Rockies at Salt River Fields for a month of afternoon games with the McDowells over the outfield, and the whole strip runs at full tilt — hotel rates, casino floor, Topgolf bays, all of it. February is the quieter start of the same season.
October is the local’s pick: the Arizona Taco Festival takes over Salt River Fields for a weekend, the Arizona Fall League plays out in front of scouts and nobody else, and the sunset from Orange Sky is at its most ridiculous. Summer, counterintuitively, is when this district earns its keep for families: Great Wolf’s indoor waterpark is held at the same temperature in July as in January, the aquarium is air-conditioned, and the casino has never cared what the weather is doing.
How it got this way
The Community predates the city by a long way. The Akimel O’odham had farmed the Salt River for centuries when the reservation was established by federal order in the 1880s, a decade before Scottsdale had a name. For the next hundred years the two places grew up back to back: Scottsdale building west of the wash, the Community farming east of it, connected mostly by the Pima Road boundary and not much else.
The turn came at the end of the 1980s, when the Community built the Pavilions — one of the first large-scale shopping centers on tribal land anywhere in the country, and a statement that the reservation’s western edge was going to be developed on the Community’s own terms. Casino Arizona followed at McKellips in the late 1990s after Arizona’s tribal-gaming compacts, and the Loop 101 arrived alongside it, putting the whole strip five minutes from every part of Scottsdale.
The 2010s built the district you see now: Talking Stick Resort in 2010, Salt River Fields in 2011 as the first spring-training complex on tribal land, Topgolf, OdySea Aquarium and Butterfly Wonderland through the middle of the decade, Great Wolf Lodge in 2019. Scottsdale, which had spent decades arguing with itself over height limits and casinos, watched its skyline, its second ballpark and its biggest family attractions get built by a neighbor it can’t regulate. Depending on whom you ask in city hall, that’s either a lesson or an irony. From the top floor of the tower at sunset, it just looks like the Valley.
Nearby
Straight across the 101 is McCormick Ranch, the lakes-and-golf suburb whose residents treat the Pavilions as their grocery run. Ten minutes southwest is Old Town, where the Giants play their half of spring training at Scottsdale Stadium. Down the freeway at McKellips, Casino Arizona sits across from South Scottsdale, the other end of the city’s long boundary with the Community.