Why it matters
On June 29, 1987 the most famous name in American medicine opened a clinic at the far east end of Shea Boulevard. Mayo Clinic Scottsdale was the institution’s third campus and the first it had chosen for itself, after a century as a single clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Forty-seven physicians saw patients that first day in 110-degree heat; 1,800 people had booked before the doors opened. Scottsdale, which had spent the decade annexing desert and landing resorts, now had a name that meant something in every referral network in the world.
What it became is bigger than anyone planned and sits mostly in a different city. Mayo Clinic in Arizona employs more than 10,000 people, runs the state’s top-ranked hospital and is spending $1.9 billion on its next expansion. The hospital, opened in 1998, the cancer center, the proton beam, the medical school since 2024 and the Discovery Oasis biotech corridor are all in north Phoenix. The Shea campus is an outpatient clinic with two research buildings, and in 2026 Mayo asked the city to let it build houses on 49 acres out back.
Where to find it today
13400 East Shea Boulevard. The 1987 clinic, grown to several buildings in desert colors held low by Scottsdale’s zoning so the mountains stay in view, at the eastern edge of the Shea corridor. Outpatient care, outpatient surgery, imaging, labs, pharmacy, and the Samuel C. Johnson and Collaborative Research buildings.
5777 East Mayo Boulevard, Phoenix. Mayo Clinic Hospital and the specialty and cancer buildings, 14 miles west at 56th Street and the Loop 101.
HonorHealth Shea, 92nd Street. The former Scottsdale Memorial Hospital North, the community hospital Mayo relied on for its first decade. HonorHealth has its own page.
How it started
The void was Mayo’s, not Scottsdale’s. For a hundred years the clinic had been one place, and its mystique rested on it: you went to Mayo. In 1983 the board decided that Rochester, a small city in a cold state, was not enough, and began studying where else a Mayo could stand. The first answer, announced in August 1984, was Jacksonville, pushed by that city’s Davis family; it opened in October 1986. The second, approved in 1985, was Arizona, and Mayo’s own history is careful about the difference: here “Mayo’s leaders proactively identified Arizona as a place where its unique model of care could bring added value.” Will and Charlie Mayo had bought adjoining retirement houses in Tucson in the 1930s, and the Southwest balanced the map.
Scottsdale’s own account, told on this site’s June 29, 1987 page and in every tribute to Herb Drinkwater, is of years of courtship by Valley civic leaders with the mayor out front. The two stories are not in conflict, but only one is documented. What is on the record is the site, 180 acres at the base of the McDowells in territory the city had annexed only a few years earlier, and the man who built the practice: Dr. Richard Hill, who with his wife Barbara flew out one week a month from 1985 to the opening and served as first chief executive until 1992. He recalled a mountain lion on the property, melting tennis-shoe soles, and zoning rules “that no one ever had to deal with in Minnesota,” buildings kept below a height that would block sight lines to the mountains and finished in colors approved to match the desert. The general plan and zoning guide explains where those rules came from.
The founding constraint was the one Mayo chose: no hospital. Scottsdale’s clinic had Scottsdale Memorial Hospital North, seven miles west at 92nd Street, as a community partner. That worked for a decade and no longer. Phase II construction began three years ahead of schedule, a 244,000-square-foot expansion with an underground garage followed in the 1990s, and the Johnson research building opened on November 9, 1993 with ten labs and a transgenic mouse facility only a handful of centers had. The practice Hill had insisted would not be a “satellite” was outgrowing its host hospital.
The decisions that locked it in
A full clinic, not a branch (1987). “From the start,” Hill said, “we determined that Arizona would not be a satellite location. We planned a full Mayo Clinic presence of patient care, research and education.” A referral office would have fed Rochester; a full practice needed labs, residencies and eventually a hospital of its own. Everything since follows from that sentence.
The hospital goes to Phoenix (1990s). When Mayo decided to build the first hospital it had ever designed itself, it judged the Shea campus too small for long-term growth and bought roughly 200 acres of desert in northeast Phoenix, near 56th Street and the future Loop 101. Mayo Clinic Hospital opened September 12, 1998, with 268 beds, 21 operating rooms and former First Lady Barbara Bush, then a Mayo trustee, as keynote speaker, the first hospital in the country designed entirely by its own physicians and staff. The alternative, more beds in Scottsdale or a deeper deal with Scottsdale Memorial, was passed over, and the center of gravity moved 14 miles west for good. The city that had annexed its way to the McDowells, as the annexation guide describes, found that the prize it had landed needed more room than it had.
Research and teaching follow the hospital (1993–2024). The Collaborative Research Building, 110,000 square feet given by an Arizona couple, opened at Shea in 2005, and the Alix School of Medicine opened its four-year Arizona campus there in 2017. But in 2018 Mayo announced “Arizona Forward,” a $648 million plan that grew to $748 million to double the Phoenix campus by 2024, with 2,000 new jobs, and in December 2021 it bought 228 acres of state trust land beside the hospital at auction for the appraised $139.75 million, the only bidder. Arizona State University’s $80 million Health Futures Center was already rising there; the two institutions, talking since 2013, named the district Discovery Oasis. The $134.6 million Integrated Education and Research Building opened in Phoenix in 2024 and the medical students moved from Shea. In March 2025 Mayo announced the next phase: $1.9 billion, 1.2 million square feet, 11 operating rooms, 48 beds and 3,500 jobs by 2031, all in Phoenix.
Selling the back forty (2026). In May 2026 Mayo filed to rezone 49.1 acres at Via Linda and 136th Street, behind the Scottsdale clinic, from campus and commercial use to 122 residential lots, a $300 million project, arguing the homes would use 90 percent less water and generate 90 percent less traffic than the zoning allowed. It is the first time Mayo has proposed shrinking its Scottsdale footprint.
The years it nearly ended
There were none, and that is itself a finding. Mayo arrived with its own capital, its own physicians and a waiting list, and the record shows expansions brought forward, not retrenchments. If there is a survival story here it belongs to the Shea campus, which has watched the hospital, the medical school and the capital leave across 27 years and is now proposing to sell part of itself for houses.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The mission has held with unusual fidelity. Hill’s 1987 formulation, patient care, research and education as a full Mayo presence, is exactly what the Arizona practice does in 2025: a hospital grown from 268 beds to nearly 400 and ranked first in the state, laboratories on two campuses, a medical school. What changed is the map, and the change served Mayo, the City of Phoenix and the State Land Department, which collected $139.75 million for desert it held in trust for schools. Scottsdale’s interest was served in 1987 and diluted since by decisions in which it had no vote. The Scottsdale clinic is not diminished as a clinic; it is diminished as a headquarters.
Scottsdale Memorial, the community hospital that took Mayo’s inpatients in the first decade, became Scottsdale Healthcare and then, after merging with the John C. Lincoln network, HonorHealth, a system that competes with Mayo across the Shea corridor it once shared. The Chamber of Commerce still lists Mayo as a member; the hospital it brags about is in Phoenix.
Who the record leaves out
The official history is a physicians’ history. Hill’s recollections, the Proceedings commentary and Mayo’s anniversary pieces name the doctors who flew in and the trustees who gave; the 225 allied health workers of opening day, more than four-fifths of the staff, appear as a number. So do the 1,800 patients who had booked before the opening; who they were and what they could pay is not recorded.
The land is the other silence. Someone owned 180 acres on Shea in 1985 and 228 acres of state trust land in 2021; the first transaction is undocumented in anything we could read, and the second was a public auction with one bidder. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, whose boundary runs a few miles south of the Shea campus, does not appear in any Mayo account of Arizona.
What it didn’t have to become
Mayo did not have to leave Scottsdale, and the decision that it would was taken in the 1990s over a hospital. Had Mayo built on or beside the Shea campus, or on the land behind it that it now wants to turn into houses, the hospital, the medical school, the proton beam and the $1.9 billion would be Scottsdale’s, and Discovery Oasis would sit at the foot of the McDowells instead of beside the Loop 101. Mayo judged the site too small, and Phoenix had 200 acres and then 228 more to sell.
The other contingency is older. In 1985 Mayo could have chosen Tucson, where its founders had retired, or any Sun Belt city with a hospital to partner with. It chose a resort town that had just annexed the desert around it and had a mayor who, by local account, would not stop asking. Scottsdale got the first decade and the name. Phoenix got the rest.