Every Scottsdale park, decoded by a local
Scottsdale turned a flood-prone wash into eleven miles of lakes and grass, put a steam railroad in a city park, and protected a third of its own land as desert preserve. Below is every park in the city plus the places of interest that belong on the same map — every Preserve trailhead, the canal paths, the historic landmarks and the mountains on the city line — all 128 that are open today, plus the ones that are gone — each with an insider’s guide you can skim in 30 seconds or read like a rabbit hole. Use the map, the search box, or the filters to find yours. For the campgrounds, trailheads and swimming holes beyond the city line — the Superstitions, the Rim, Sedona, Tucson, the Grand Canyon — see camping and hiking near Scottsdale.
The park map
Every dot is a park — tap one to open its guide. Want streets, districts and everything else? Open the full city map.
- Open today
- Gone
- Greenbelt
152 of 152 parks shown
104th Street Trailhead (104th/Bell)
A small lot on the north side of Bell Road at 104th Street that the city's trail map labels the 104th/Bell Trailhead. The 104th Street Trail runs north from it to the Levee Trail and the Gateway trail network, about half a mile away. This is a back way into the Preserve's busiest area for people who live nearby or can't find a space at Gateway.
The McDowell Mountains / McDowell Mountain Ranch
Adero Canyon Trailhead
The Town of Fountain Hills' main trailhead, opened in November 2018 at the top of Eagle Ridge Drive after more than twenty years of planning and land buying. It's the hub of the town's 824-acre McDowell Mountain Preserve, with a paved road, restrooms, water and a shade ramada, and it's the quieter back door to Sunrise Peak via the Andrews-Kinsey Trail.
Fountain Hills / McDowell Mountains
Agua Linda Park
A four-acre neighborhood park near McDonald Drive and Pima Road with a shaded playground, a lighted full basketball court, sand volleyball, two drop-in ramadas — and spray poles that make it one of central Scottsdale's most underrated summer cool-downs.
Central Scottsdale
Apache Park
Apache Park, at 1201 N. 85th Pl. in south Scottsdale, is nine acres with a full reservable soccer field, a lighted basketball court, a playground, two drop-in ramadas and a restroom. Free, sunrise to 10:30 p.m., and rarely crowded outside league nights.
South Scottsdale (85257)
Appaloosa Library
Scottsdale's newest branch library, opened November 4, 2009, on part of the ground where Rawhide's cowboy town stood for 34 years. It's 21,242 square feet, LEED Gold, and has four pieces of public art: ninety glass orbs over the reading room, a resin panel with landfill material embedded in it, a 10½-foot steel sculpture with red discs that spin in the wind, and an aluminum abstract that won a 300-entry competition in 1979. Nothing of Rawhide is left on the site.
North Scottsdale / Scottsdale Road at Pinnacle Peak
Arabian Library
A 20,875-square-foot branch library that its architects, Richärd + Bauer, modeled on the slot canyons of northern Arizona. You enter through a narrow 'canyon' of leaning weathered-steel walls into a reading room lined in acoustic wood. Since opening in September 2007 it has collected a national AIA/ALA Library Building Award and a string of regional honors. It's free, air-conditioned and open seven days a week, and it's the best piece of public architecture in north Scottsdale.
McDowell Mountain Ranch / North Scottsdale
Arizona Canal Path
The oldest continuous public right-of-way in Scottsdale is a maintenance road on the bank of an 1885 irrigation ditch. The Arizona Canal path crosses the city on the diagonal — Pima Road to the Waterfront to the Phoenix line — and it is the flattest, straightest, most historically loaded walk or ride in town.
Waterfront / Chaparral / Central Scottsdale — the canal spine
Ashler Hills Park
Scottsdale's northernmost park and one of its newest — opened in 2025 from the 2019 bond, with eight pickleball courts, a shaded playground, exercise equipment and walking paths on 17 acres near Scottsdale and Lone Mountain roads.
Scottsdale North / Desert Foothills edge
ASU Kerr (Louise Lincoln Kerr House and Studio)
Two small adobe buildings, a five-room house from 1948 and a music studio from 1959, that violinist and composer Louise Lincoln Kerr designed, built with bricks made on the site, and filled with chamber music for the rest of her life. Arizona State University has run them as a concert venue since the early 1980s. The studio is still the best small room in the Valley to hear acoustic music, and the building itself is a large part of why.
Camelback Corridor / Scottsdale Road at McDonald Drive
Aztec Park
Nine acres between Cactus and Thunderbird east of the 101, with a playground rebuilt in 2020, lighted courts for tennis, basketball and sand volleyball, and enough open grass for pickup ball. The definition of a neighborhood park that quietly does everything.
North-central Scottsdale / 100th Street corridor
Bajada Nature Trail
A half-mile, barrier-free nature trail laid out as a figure eight right beside the Gateway Trailhead building. Hard, stabilized decomposed granite, an average grade of about 3 percent, a tread around eight feet wide, and interpretive signs the whole way. It is the McDowell Sonoran Preserve trail built for wheelchairs, walkers, strollers and anyone who wants the desert without a climb.
The McDowell Mountains / Gateway area
Bell94 Sports Complex
Bell94's six lighted fields are numbered 11 to 16: 11 nearest Bell Road, 12 north of it, then 13 and 14 side by side and 15 and 16 along the north edge, each pair west to east. Park in the long main lot (from Bell Road or 91st Street) or the small lot off 94th Street. The field map is right below.
Bell Road corridor, North Scottsdale / WestWorld
Black Mountain Summit Trail (Cave Creek)
The dark peak between Cave Creek and Carefree that you can see from every north Scottsdale road. It's a short, steep, rocky out-and-back: about 2.2 to 2.5 miles round trip and 1,050 to 1,300 feet of climbing to a 3,398-foot summit with a flag and a 360-degree view. Parking is a few dirt pull-offs, and that's the hardest part to get right.
Cave Creek / Carefree border
Brown's Mountain Summit Trail
The summit hike for people who don't want a mountain: about 3.2 miles round trip from Brown's Ranch Trailhead, roughly 550 feet of climbing, and a flat caprock top at 3,253 feet with the whole northern Preserve laid out around it. Almost all the effort is packed into the last quarter mile.
North Scottsdale / northern desert
Brown's Ranch Rock Formations (Cathedral Rock, the Amphitheater, Balanced Rock, Brown's Mountain)
Three granite outcrops with grand names and one small mountain, all reached by official trails in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve's flat northern desert. They aren't in the federal place-name records, almost nothing online explains them, and the Scottsdale versions get buried under Sedona's far more famous Cathedral Rock. This is what the city map, the Conservancy's hike listings and its old newsletters actually say, and how to see all four in a morning or two.
North Scottsdale / northern desert
Brown's Ranch Trailhead
The northern Preserve's main gate and the connoisseur's trailhead: rolling crushed-granite trails through absurdly dense saguaro forest, almost no elevation, and the rusted leftovers of the E.O. Brown family's 44,000-acre cattle operation. Restrooms, water, shade, horse parking and an accessible half-mile nature loop — the most usable big trailhead in the Preserve after Gateway.
North Scottsdale / northern desert
Cactus Park
Scottsdale's serious-swimming headquarters: the Cactus Aquatic & Fitness Center's Olympic-size 50-meter pool and diving boards, a year-round fitness center, and 17 acres of grass, courts and playground at Cactus Road near Scottsdale Road.
Central Scottsdale / Cactus corridor
Camelback Mountain: Cholla Trail
The east-side route up Camelback: a mile of easy ridge walking, then a half mile that turns into hands-on boulder work to the same 2,704-foot summit. It closed for more than two years after a rockfall injury and reopened in September 2022 with a relocated trailhead on Invergordon Road — and it is still the saner way up the mountain from Scottsdale.
Camelback corridor / Paradise Valley border (Phoenix)
Camelback Mountain: Echo Canyon Trail
The Valley's signature summit hike: 1.14 miles and roughly 1,400 feet of gain to a 2,704-foot top, with handrails bolted into the steep sections because the trail stops being a trail. It is technically in Phoenix on the Paradise Valley line, but every Scottsdale hotel concierge sends you here, and the parking lot is full by breakfast.
Camelback corridor / Paradise Valley border (Phoenix)
Camelback Park
The former Villa Monterey Golf Course, retired in 2004 and reborn as pure passive parkland: a small lake, walking paths and wide-open former fairways along the Greenbelt — no playgrounds, no fields, no agenda. Scottsdale's best park for doing absolutely nothing.
Central Scottsdale / Greenbelt (Villa Monterey)
Carefree Desert Gardens & Sundial
A free, four-acre desert garden in downtown Carefree, built around one of the largest sundials in the Western Hemisphere: a 90-foot copper-clad dial from 1959 whose gnomon was designed as a solar water heater. Walk the self-guided paths among hundreds of desert plants, then get lunch on Easy Street.
Carefree (town center)
Cattle Track Arts Compound
An engineer named George Ellis homesteaded ten acres beside the Arizona Canal in 1937 and built a house out of salvaged pipeline staves. Ninety years later it is still there, still owned by the family, and still full of working artists — a Depression-era arts colony that Scottsdale somehow forgot to bulldoze.
Central Scottsdale / Cattle Track (McDonald & 74th)
Chaparral Park
Scottsdale's flagship community park: a 10-acre stocked lake, the city's most beloved dog park, an inclusive playground, a xeriscape garden, and 100 acres of Greenbelt grass — all where a flood-prone wash used to be.
Central Scottsdale / Greenbelt
Charles Miller House
A small wood-frame Craftsman bungalow built about 1913 by Charles Miller, a farmer, power-company founder and school-land donor, on 80 acres he bought from Winfield Scott's family at Scottsdale and Indian School roads. It was moved in 1955 to save it from the redevelopment of that corner, moved again in 2000–01 to save it from a rezoning, and restored by the owner. Since 2010 it has stood on the Scottsdale Historic Register on First Street, west of Goldwater Boulevard.
Old Town
Chesnutt Park
Chesnutt Park (often searched as Chestnut Park) is five acres at 4565 N. Granite Reef Rd. with a button-operated splash pad, two lighted tennis courts, a playground, two ramadas with grills and restrooms. Free, sunrise to 10:30 p.m. — the best small-park amenity stack in this corner of the 85251.
South Scottsdale / Granite Reef corridor
Cholla Park
A tidy Via Linda neighborhood park that quietly became one of Scottsdale's busiest pickleball addresses: eight lighted, free, first-come courts, plus a ballfield, sand volleyball, playground and four ramadas for everyone who came with the players.
Shea corridor / Via Linda
Civic Center Library
Scottsdale's main library, designed by Bennie Gonzales as City Hall's twin and opened on November 26, 1968. It began at 37,000 square feet and has grown to 103,000. Three of the best pieces of public art in the city are built into it, and it holds the Scottsdale Heritage Connection, where most questions about the old town end up. Free and air-conditioned, and the best indoor hour on the Civic Center.
Old Town
Comanche Park
An 11-acre McCormick Ranch park in the Paseo Village neighborhood with two lighted tennis courts, a lighted basketball court, a full outdoor fitness circuit, and a remodeled playground — all threaded into the Ranch's Camelback Walk path system.
McCormick Ranch / Paseo Village
Cosanti (Paolo Soleri's studio)
A Taliesin apprentice named Paolo Soleri moved onto a few desert acres in 1956 and spent the rest of his life casting concrete over piles of dirt. The result is an Arizona Historic Site hiding behind a hedge on Doubletree Ranch Road — free to wander, still a working foundry, and the strangest beautiful place in the Valley.
Paradise Valley (Scottsdale border) / Camelback corridor
Crosscut Canal Path
A 4.5-mile paved path down the bank of the New Crosscut Canal, running the Scottsdale–Phoenix line from the Arizona Canal at 64th Street through Papago Park to Mill Avenue in Tempe. It is the connector that turns Scottsdale's canal miles into a genuine regional network — and it happens to follow a century-old piece of Salt River Project engineering.
South Scottsdale / 64th Street border (Phoenix line)
DC Ranch Park
A pocket-sized city park inside the DC Ranch community — ramadas, picnic tables and green space at 91st Street and Trailside View, carrying the name of the century-old cattle ranch that once ran this whole flank of the McDowells.
DC Ranch, North Scottsdale
Dixie Mine (McDowell Mountain Regional Park)
A small copper prospect on the east side of the McDowells, just across the line from Scottsdale's Preserve in Maricopa County's McDowell Mountain Regional Park. It's been called the Red Mountain, the Dixie, the Uncle John and the Seth Parker. It never amounted to much as a mine; federal records show 21 claims, a short tunnel and an Interior Department finding that the claims were void. It turned out to matter as a home for bats, including the pale Townsend's big-eared bat, for which researchers call it an extremely important site. Walk the trail, look from a distance, and don't go in.
McDowell Mountain Regional Park, just east of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve
Drinkwater Peak
A 3,910-foot bump on the ridge just west of McDowell Peak, officially named in 2007–08 for Herb Drinkwater, Scottsdale's mayor from 1980 to 1996. Almost nobody in town knows it exists. No trail goes to the top and Preserve rules keep you on the trails, so this is a summit you look at from Bell Pass or the Windgate Pass Trail. That's fine, because it looks right back at the city he spent sixteen years running.
The McDowell Mountains / Gateway area
East End (McDowell Mountains high point)
The top of the range and of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve: about 4,060 feet up, above the Tom's Thumb Trailhead, the mountain whose northeast face fell off half a million years ago and became the Marcus Landslide. The city's map has an East End Trail, but it doesn't go to the summit. It drops 1,000 feet down the mountain's west flank into the interior basin. The best legal views of the high point are from the Tom's Thumb Trail and from The Lookout, a short spur nearby.
The McDowell Mountains / northern desert
Eldorado Park
Scottsdale's first community park (1967) and the working prototype for the entire Greenbelt: 60 acres of stocked lakes, a year-round heated aquatic center, the legendary Wedge skatepark, ballfields and old shade trees in the middle of south Scottsdale.
South Scottsdale / Greenbelt
Elephant Mountain Trail (Spur Cross Ranch)
The dark, humped mountain on the west side of Spur Cross Ranch, and the only trail in the conservation area Maricopa County rates extremely difficult. The Elephant Mountain Trail itself is 2.0 miles with 638 feet of elevation change, but you reach it by walking in on the Spur Cross Trail, and the official trail stops at a saddle below the 3,926-foot summit. Count on roughly 6.5 to 10 miles round trip and 1,500 to 2,500 feet of climbing, depending on how far you go.
Cave Creek / Spur Cross
First U.S. Post Office Building (Porter's building)
A plain two-story red-brick box on Brown Avenue that was Scottsdale's first federal building. From 1897 the town's mail had been handled in a series of Main Street stores. This was the first building put up for the post office alone, begun in 1928 and dated 1929. It served until after World War II. In 1949 it was painted red, its doors were bricked in, and it became Porter's Western Wear, one of the first conversions in the remaking of downtown into a Western stage set. It's on the city's Historic Register, and most people walk past without knowing what it was.
Old Town
Florence Ely Nelson Desert Park
Florence Ely Nelson Desert Park, at 8950 E. Pinnacle Peak Rd., has one of the only public splash pads in far-north Scottsdale, plus a playground, a basketball court, shaded ramadas and restrooms, set in intact Sonoran Desert. Free, sunrise to 10:30 p.m.
Pinnacle Peak corridor, North Scottsdale
Fountain Hills Desert Botanical Garden
Not the big Desert Botanical Garden in Papago Park, and not a formal garden at all. This is an 8-acre patch of natural desert on Fountain Hills Boulevard, founded in 1975 as a wildlife preserve and garden, with a short, easy trail through granite boulders, labeled Sonoran plants and the remains of a 1941 ranch dam. It's free and takes under an hour.
Fountain Hills / McDowell Mountains
Fountain Hills McDowell Mountain Preserve
Fountain Hills' own slice of the McDowells: 824 acres of steep, rocky slope on the northwest edge of town, bought with bonds, a sales tax and a hard-fought developer settlement. It has about 12 miles of short, steep trail, two trailheads, and links into Scottsdale's preserve and Maricopa County's regional park.
Fountain Hills / McDowell Mountains
Fountain Park & the Fountain Hills Fountain
A 64-acre town park built around a 29-acre lake and the single most audacious piece of real-estate marketing in Arizona history: a fountain that fires water up to 560 feet, once the tallest on earth. It's fifteen minutes east of Scottsdale on Shea, it goes off on the hour, and it is still the best free show in the east Valley.
Fountain Hills (15 minutes east on Shea)
Fraesfield Trailhead
A small, award-winning trailhead on an open plateau off Rio Verde Drive, built to disappear into a 360-degree view. Flat rolling trails, serious horse-trailer parking, no drinking water and almost nobody there — the quiet alternative to Brown's Ranch, ten minutes east.
Rio Verde Foothills border / northern desert
Frank Lloyd Wright Spire
A 125-foot turquoise steel-and-glass spire standing in a north Scottsdale shopping center parking lot — and the only piece of Frank Lloyd Wright's rejected 1957 design for an Arizona state capitol ever built. It went up in 2004, was lit for the first time that April, and glows blue over the Airpark every night since.
Scottsdale Airpark
Gateway Loop Trail
The loop most people mean when they say they hiked the McDowells: about 4.5 miles and 650 to 700 feet of gain from the Gateway Trailhead. It follows the Saguaro Trail out, climbs to the Gateway Saddle, and drops back across the bajada. It is moderate rather than easy, completely exposed, and the junction for the Windgate Pass and Bell Pass trails.
The McDowell Mountains / Gateway area
Gateway Trailhead & Gateway Loop
The McDowell Sonoran Preserve's flagship trailhead: a LEED Platinum rammed-earth facility opened in 2009, a big lot, real restrooms, and the 4.4-mile Gateway Loop that has become Scottsdale's default hike. Everything else in the southern Preserve — Bell Pass, Windgate Pass, Thompson Peak — starts here.
DC Ranch / McDowell Mountain Ranch, North Scottsdale
George "Doc" Cavalliere Park
A 34-acre sustainability showpiece near Troon, opened in 2012 and built from native stone, Corten steel and 100% native plants — named for the blacksmith's son who helped run early Scottsdale. The first SITES-certified sustainable landscape in Arizona.
Pinnacle Peak / Troon area, North Scottsdale
Glass & Garden Community Church (drive-in church)
A round concrete church dedicated in May 1966, built so people could worship from their cars. Speakers on posts in the east parking lot carried the sermon, a floor-to-ceiling glass wall let drivers watch it, and a railing runs through the glass so the pastor could step outside to the cars. The city calls it the only drive-in church known in Scottsdale and possibly in Arizona. It went on the Scottsdale Historic Register in 2013.
Central Scottsdale
Go John Trail (Cave Creek Regional Park)
The signature loop at Maricopa County's Cave Creek Regional Park: 5.8 miles around the mountain at the north end of the park, through dense saguaro and old mining country. The county lists 411 feet of elevation change and rates it moderate-difficult; GPS tracks record more like 850 to 1,250 feet of total climbing. Two to three hours, no water on the trail, and a $10 vehicle fee.
Cave Creek / Cave Creek Regional Park
Granite Mountain Trailhead
The Preserve's far-northeast outpost, twenty minutes of desert road past everything else: an award-winning trailhead building that hides the view until it wants to show you, and the 5.6-mile Granite Mountain Loop circling one of the northern desert's best boulder piles. Restrooms and shade, no water, and a fraction of the crowd.
The northern desert / North Scottsdale
Granite Reef Diversion Dam
A low concrete weir across the Salt River, finished by the U.S. Reclamation Service in 1908, that diverts nearly everything the river carries into the Arizona Canal on the north bank and the South Canal on the south. It doesn't hold back a lake. It's the valve. The Arizona Canal water that turned Scottsdale from creosote into farms has started here for more than a century.
Salt River / Mesa edge (outside Scottsdale)
Grayhawk Park
Thirteen acres of lighted fields and courts planted in the middle of the Grayhawk community — baseball, soccer, tennis, basketball and sand volleyball, wedged between two schools and run by the city, free to everyone.
North Scottsdale / Grayhawk
Horizon Park
Horizon Park, 15444 N. 100th St. east of the 101, is 24 acres with an off-leash dog park, ten free pickleball courts, four lighted softball fields, sand volleyball, two playgrounds and the Horizon Community Center, which runs classes for every age and is open 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays.
North-central Scottsdale / Frank Lloyd Wright corridor
Huhugam Ki Museum
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community's own museum, open since 1987 — Akimel O'odham basketry, Piipaash pottery, and the history of the people who dug the first canals in this valley, told by the people themselves. It is free, it is fifteen minutes from Old Town, and almost no visitor to Scottsdale ever finds it.
Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community / Talking Stick
Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt
Scottsdale's masterpiece: an 11-mile chain of parks, lakes and golf courses built inside a floodway. The Greenbelt is flood control you can bike, fish, and picnic on — and the reason south Scottsdale is green instead of concrete.
The spine of south & central Scottsdale
Indian School Park & Tennis Center
A public tennis center that plays like a private club — 13 lighted courts on the Greenbelt at Hayden & Indian School — wrapped in a park with a lake, ballfields, and the city's best collection of old-school lawn games: bocce, shuffleboard, horseshoes and cornhole.
Central Scottsdale / Greenbelt
Ironwood Park
A four-acre pocket park at 94th Street and Union Hills serving the Ironwood Village neighborhood — playground, shaded ramada, a basketball court, a tennis court and restrooms. Small on purpose, and all the better for it.
North Scottsdale / Ironwood Village
Jane Rau Interpretive Trail
A short, barrier-free interpretive loop at the Brown's Ranch Trailhead, dedicated in March 2014 and named for Jane Rau, a co-founder of the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy. It winds through boulders and saguaros on stabilized decomposed granite. Right now you can't easily get to it: the city closed Brown's Ranch Trailhead on July 13, 2026 for a $1.17 million rebuild, and the reopening is expected this fall.
North Scottsdale / northern desert
Johnny Rose's Pool Hall (now Mexican Imports)
Before it was Mexican Imports, the white glazed-brick building at Main Street and Brown Avenue was Johnny Rose's pool hall. Rose built it in 1923 for billiards, pool and silent movies, after a decade of running everything from a barbershop to a vaudeville stage on the same spot. In those years he was fined for running a 'menace to the community,' arrested for gambling, and leased the hall by day as a classroom for Mexican children. He sold out to the Song family in 1929 and left town.
Old Town
Kimsey Building (Triangle Building)
A two-story glass-fronted office building under one wide, low triangular gable, designed by Ralph Haver in 1961 for the developer of Villa Monterey. The city rented half of it in April 1963 for one year and ended up running Scottsdale's government from it until the Civic Center opened in 1968. It went on the Historic Register in 2021, and it is now being folded into PEG Companies' AC Hotel and apartment project on the old Kimsey family land.
Old Town
Lafayette Park
A tiny green rectangle on Lafayette Boulevard with grass, mature trees, a picnic table and essentially nothing else — the Scottsdale park system at its absolute minimum, and honestly kind of great for it.
West 85251 / Camelback corridor
Loloma School (Scottsdale Grammar School No. 2)
The town's second grammar school: a one-story Spanish Colonial Revival building by Lescher & Mahoney, paid for by a 1928 bond that passed 105 to 9 and finished that September for $35,069. It was Scottsdale Grammar School No. 2, then Loloma Elementary, then a vocational skills center, then a cable TV company's building. Since the early 1990s it has been the Scottsdale Artists' School. It also sits on one side of the town's school color line, which most accounts of the building leave out.
Old Town
Lost Dog Wash Trailhead
The Preserve's southern entrance off Via Linda: an award-winning rammed-earth trailhead with composting restrooms, an amphitheater and a web of gentle trails — Lost Dog Wash, Ringtail, Old Jeep and the Taliesin Overlook, which looks down on Frank Lloyd Wright's winter camp. The family-friendly McDowells, and the after-work standard for east Shea.
East Shea / McDowell foothills
MacDonald's Ranch
The last working guest ranch on Scottsdale Road: a Richardson family horse operation that opened its gate to the public on Easter Sunday 1970 as Old MacDonald's Farm and still sends wranglers out into the desert below Pinnacle Peak every morning. One-hour trail rides, full-moon rides, hayrides and cookouts, and every October a pumpkin patch among the saguaros.
North Scottsdale / Pinnacle Peak
Marcus Landslide Trail
A flat, wide, interpretive walk out of the Tom's Thumb Trailhead to the jumbled remains of a mountainside that collapsed about half a million years ago — the second-largest known landslide in Arizona. Signs along the way explain the geology, which is the rare case where reading the signs genuinely improves the hike.
The McDowell Mountains / northern desert
Maricopa Trail (North Scottsdale section)
Maricopa County's regional trail, more than 315 miles around the Valley, crosses the northeast corner of Scottsdale's McDowell Sonoran Preserve. On the county's current map it comes south out of the Tonto National Forest to Granite Mountain Trailhead, follows the Black Hill Trail 2.3 miles to Fraesfield Trailhead, then runs about 4.6 miles south, mostly on the Gooseneck Trail, into McDowell Mountain Regional Park. It's flat, open, multi-use desert trail, and on most days you'll have it largely to yourself.
North Scottsdale / northern desert
McCormick Ranch Lakes & Paths
The 1970s master plan that central Scottsdale still walks on: more than 25 miles of connected paths threading seven man-made lakes, two golf courses and a dozen villages on the old McCormick Arabian ranch. The paths are free and public, the lakes are private for fishing — and together they explain why nobody here drives to the mailbox.
McCormick Ranch
McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park
Scottsdale's most beloved park, full stop: a rideable 5/12-scale steam railroad looping 30 acres of grass, a 1950 carousel, a Pullman car that carried four presidents, and a model-train museum — all born from a millionaire's gift and one man's backyard railroad.
McCormick Ranch / Indian Bend
McDowell Mountain Ranch Park & Aquatic Center
North Scottsdale's everything park at Thompson Peak Parkway and McDowell Mountain Ranch Road: a city aquatic center with a lazy river, a tube slide and a 13-lane lap pool, a concrete skatepark, five sports fields along 102nd Way, and the Arabian Library next door, all under the McDowell Mountains.
McDowell Mountain Ranch / North Scottsdale
McDowell Mountain Regional Park
A Maricopa County park of 21,099 acres on the back side of the McDowells, reached through Fountain Hills rather than Scottsdale — and the flip side of the Preserve in almost every way: you pay to get in, you can camp, and the mountain bike racing happens on a purpose-built track. The Pemberton Trail's 15.3-mile loop is the best long desert ride in the east Valley.
Fountain Hills border / McDowell Mountains (Maricopa County)
McDowell Sonoran Preserve
The largest urban preserve in America: 30,500 acres of mountain and saguaro forest that Scottsdale voters taxed themselves — twice — to buy back from the bulldozers. Not a park. A preserve. The difference is the whole point.
The McDowell Mountains & northern desert
Mescal Park
An unprogrammed green space off 68th Place near Shea, where the city's entire amenity list is one word — paths. Open turf, a loop trail, shade, a small hill to climb, and none of the equipment. The dog-walkers' and slow-lappers' favorite kind of park.
Shea corridor / west Scottsdale panhandle
Mountain View Park
A 30-acre park on Mountain View Road with three soccer fields, lighted tennis and basketball courts, sand volleyball, a 12-station exercise course, a paved perimeter loop and a playground — the sports-heavy anchor of McCormick Ranch's north side.
McCormick Ranch (north side)
Mustang Library
Scottsdale's first branch library opened at Shea Boulevard and 90th Street on June 13, 1987, and at the time was the largest branch library in Arizona. It has the city's first public art commission, a carved-brick mural of galloping mustangs. Twenty bronze finches read books along the path from the bus stop. It's also where, on November 17, 1990, a dozen residents started the effort that became the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
Shea Corridor
Nature Area
A tiny, nameless-feeling pocket of naturalized open space on Hayden Road near the Greenbelt — a ramada, restrooms, shade, dirt paths and birdsong. The city literally just calls it 'Nature Area,' and honestly, that's the whole review.
Central Scottsdale / Greenbelt
Northsight Park
Nineteen acres of green wedged between the Scottsdale Airpark's office blocks and the Loop 101 — lighted tennis, basketball and sand volleyball, a playground, big open fields, and enough birdlife that it's a stop on the Arizona Birding Trail.
North Scottsdale / Airpark–Northsight
Osborn Park
A three-acre picnic-and-playground park on Osborn Road just east of Old Town — big grass, a playground, a fitness course, and a location that makes it the quiet escape valve for the busiest square mile in Scottsdale.
Old Town east / 85251
Paiute Park
Eight acres of park wrapped around the Paiute Neighborhood Center — a former elementary school reborn as south Scottsdale's community hub — with a splash pad, lighted courts and fields, and more real neighborhood life per square foot than anywhere else in the city.
South Scottsdale / Paiute
Papago Park & Hole-in-the-Rock
The red sandstone buttes you see from every eastbound flight into Sky Harbor, wrapped in roughly 1,500 acres of flat desert park with fishing lagoons, a pyramid tomb, the Desert Botanical Garden and the Phoenix Zoo inside it. Technically Phoenix and Tempe, but it sits right under south Scottsdale and it's the easiest short hike in the Valley.
South Scottsdale border / Papago (Phoenix–Tempe)
Papago Park/City Boundary Project (Tree of Life)
A two-acre stone earthwork at the northern entrance of Papago Park, commissioned jointly by Phoenix and Scottsdale in 1992 to mark the line between them. Artist Jody Pinto and landscape architect Steve Martino built a 240-foot main wall that catches rain and feeds seven dry-stacked stone terraces seeded with native plants, branching like a tree, with stone markers set on alignments that point at the summer solstice and, by the artist's account, at Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, the Casa Grande ruins and Piestewa Peak. It won design awards the year it opened and has almost no presence online.
Papago Park (Phoenix), on the Scottsdale line
Papago Rotary Park
Papago Rotary Park is a one-acre pocket park at 7316 E. Garfield St. in south Scottsdale: a playground, a half basketball court, a grass volleyball court and a ramada, built out in 1994 by the Papago Rotary Club. Free, curbside parking only, and not the Papago Park with the buttes.
South Scottsdale (85257)
Paradise Gold Mine (Gateway area)
The old diggings and tailings visible to the south from the Gateway Loop are what's left of the Paradise Gold Mining Company. It was organized in 1916, sold stock to the public at 25 cents a share on the strength of two claimed gold veins, and recorded no gold production at all. In 1923 the state moved to revoke its charter and a deputy sheriff couldn't find its officers, though some were listed in the Phoenix city directory the whole time. It's the Preserve's best mining story, and you see it from the trail. Shafts and adits are dangerous, and the site is protected.
The McDowell Mountains / Gateway area
Pemberton (P-Bar) Ranch Ruins
What's left of the ranch Henry Pemberton started on the east side of the McDowells around 1917, which became the P-Bar and ran cattle across more than 25,000 acres under Delsie Barkdoll in the 1930s and 1940s. Maricopa County says the remnants sit about a mile and a half out the Pemberton Trail from the park's trailhead staging area. It's a modest walk to a modest ruin. Don't expect a museum. The ranch's story is better than what survives of it, and the records disagree about half of it.
McDowell Mountain Regional Park / Fountain Hills side
Penske Racing Museum
Roger Penske keeps a rotating slice of the most successful team in American racing — Indianapolis 500 winners, a Daytona 500 winner, a wall of trophies — in a two-story glass building between his Ferrari and Land Rover stores on Chauncey Lane. It is free, it is open seven days, and almost nobody in Scottsdale knows it is there.
North Scottsdale / Airpark west edge (Phoenix)
Pima & Dynamite Trailhead
The last major trailhead the Preserve built, dedicated in November 2021 at the corner of Pima and Dynamite — and the one aimed squarely at mountain bikers. Big paved lot with extra-long spaces for bike racks, a covered amphitheater, restrooms and water, and more than a hundred miles of rolling singletrack running north and east from the gate.
North Scottsdale / northern desert
Pima Park
A seven-acre south Scottsdale park at Thomas Road and 86th Street with three lighted basketball courts, a shaded playground, five ramadas, sand volleyball, and a push-button mister pad — the last city park before the 101 and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.
South Scottsdale
Pima Plaza and the Westernaire Shops
In 1952 nine local businessmen planned both sides of one downtown block as a single “dignified Western” shopping square. They set the buildings back for covered walks and courtyards, put hitching posts out for riders, and turned the middle of First Avenue into a plaza of parking between one-way lanes. The Town Council fought the parking plan for months before approving it. Ray Parrish's Westernaire Shops took their name from a schoolchildren's contest, and Ralph Haver's Feltman Building is the redwood row that still stands. It was Scottsdale's first planned shopping block, and almost nobody visiting it knows that.
Old Town
Pinnacle Peak Park
A 150-acre city park wrapped around north Scottsdale's signature granite spire. The 1.75-mile trail is the best short hike in the city — and the fact that you can walk it at all is the result of a seven-year fight after development locked the public out of its own mountain.
Pinnacle Peak
Quartz Trailhead & Quartz Trail
A neighborhood lot in McDowell Mountain Ranch with no water, no restrooms and almost no crowd, opening onto the Quartz Trail — 4.9 gentle miles across the bajada between the Gateway network and Lost Dog Wash, named for the white outcrops that glitter on the slopes above it. The connoisseur's entry to the southern Preserve.
McDowell Mountain Ranch / North Scottsdale
Reach 11 Recreation Area
A 1,500-acre ribbon of desert about seven miles long and barely half a mile wide, running along the north side of the CAP canal between Cave Creek Road and Scottsdale Road. Eighteen miles of flat, groomed, seven-foot-wide trail through native mesquite bosque — technically Phoenix, but functionally the walking and running loop for everyone living around the Airpark and Desert Ridge.
North Scottsdale / Airpark west edge (Phoenix)
Reata Sports Complex
Reata's five lighted fields are numbered 17 to 21: four in a tilted block split by a diagonal walkway (20 and 21 north of it, 19 and 18 south), and Field 17 on its own to the east, with the restroom and office building between them. Park in the north lot off McDowell Mountain Ranch Road or the east lot off Thompson Peak Parkway. The field map is right below.
McDowell Mountain Ranch / WestWorld
Ringtail Trailhead
A parking-only access point on 128th Street, north of Cactus Road, that puts you directly on the Ringtail Trail in the southern McDowell Sonoran Preserve. No restrooms, no water, no ramada, just a short walk to the same trail network as Lost Dog Wash, with fewer cars.
East Shea / McDowell foothills
Rio Montaña Park
Seven acres of grass, ramadas and lighted courts at the literal end of east Scottsdale — the last green thing before the McDowell foothills take over, and the family-friendly base camp for the 132nd Street trail access.
East Shea / McDowell foothills
Rotary Park
Rotary Park, at 7960 E. Doubletree Ranch Rd. where McCormick Ranch meets Gainey Ranch, is a small picnic park with a playground under mature shade, ramadas, open grass, restrooms and the Rotary Club's Unity Plaza. No sports fields, no crowds, free, sunrise to 10:30 p.m.
McCormick Ranch / Gainey Ranch border
Scenic Trail (McDowell Mountain Regional Park)
The best short loop in McDowell Mountain Regional Park: about four miles from the Pemberton Trailhead, out across open desert, up onto the ridge of the low Lousley Hills and back along the Pemberton Trail. Only a few hundred feet of climbing, but the ridge gives some of the widest views in the park, from the McDowells to Four Peaks.
Fountain Hills / McDowell Mountains (Maricopa County)
Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts
Scottsdale's main theater since October 23, 1975: a Bennie Gonzales building on the Civic Center with the 853-seat Virginia G. Piper Theater and the 137-seat Stage 2. It books touring musicians, comedy, dance and family shows, and it has just finished its 50th season. Locals call it 'the Center,' and most of them have a story about a show they saw there.
Old Town
Scottsdale Civic Center
Old Town's civic lawn and sculpture garden: Bennie Gonzales's white-walled City Hall and library (1968), Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture, fountains, rose gardens and a new amphitheater — all rebuilt in a renovation completed in 2023. The most photographed free acreage in Scottsdale.
Old Town
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA)
A small museum of contemporary art, architecture and design on the Civic Center's Second Street edge, opened in February 1999 inside a former movie theater that architect Will Bruder rebuilt. It has five galleries, a permanent collection that leans toward the Southwest, and James Turrell's Knight Rise skyspace in the courtyard. Go on a Thursday, when you pay what you wish.
Old Town
Scottsdale Ranch Park & Tennis Center
East Scottsdale's racquet-sports headquarters: an 18-court lighted tennis center plus racquetball, squash, six sand volleyball courts, ballfield, basketball and playgrounds — the public commons of the 1980s Scottsdale Ranch lake community.
Scottsdale Ranch / Shea corridor
Scottsdale Sports Complex
The Sports Complex has ten fields, numbered 1 to 10: lighted 1–4 in a square south of Princess Drive, lighted 5 and 6 along Hayden Road, and unlighted 7–10 north of Princess. Park in the center lot off Bell Road, the east lot off 82nd Street or the lots north of Princess. Fields 11–21 are at Bell94 and Reata, not here. The field map is right below.
North Scottsdale / Princess & WestWorld corridor
Scottsdale Stadium
The city-owned ballpark at Osborn Road and Drinkwater Boulevard where the San Francisco Giants have trained every spring since 1984. HOK Sport, the Camden Yards firm, designed the current brick-and-green-steel park, which opened March 12, 1992 with about 12,000 seats. A roughly $50 million renovation in 2019–20 rebuilt the clubhouse, concourses and entry. It's the only Cactus League park inside a walkable downtown.
Old Town
Scottsdale Stadium Left Field Day Park
Scottsdale's strangest and newest park: the left field berm of Scottsdale Stadium, open to the public as a free day park on non-event days. Bring lunch, sit on spring training's most famous lawn, and stare into an empty big-league ballpark.
Old Town
Scottsdale Xeriscape Garden
Scottsdale Water's demonstration garden: about six acres of desert-adapted planting — more than 7,000 plants across some 200 species — laid over a buried drinking-water reservoir at Chaparral Park. It is free, self-guided, signed like a textbook, and the most useful hour a Valley homeowner can spend.
Central Scottsdale / Chaparral Park
Shoshone Park
A three-acre pocket park on Via de Dorado in McCormick Ranch's Paseo Village: playground, lighted full basketball court, ramada shade and turf — the small, walkable half of a two-park pair with Comanche Park up the street.
McCormick Ranch / Paseo Village
Soleri Bridge & Plaza
A 130-foot pedestrian bridge over the Arizona Canal that is also a working solar calendar: twin 64-foot pylons set on true north, six inches apart, throwing a blade of light across the deck that tracks the year. Dedicated on December 11, 2010, it is the only bridge Paolo Soleri saw built in a sixty-year career of designing them.
Old Town / Waterfront
Sonoran Hills Park
Sonoran Hills Park, at 7625 E. Williams Dr. in the 85255, has a softball field, tennis and basketball courts, two playgrounds (one for toddlers), ramadas, restrooms and a walking loop with views of Pinnacle Peak. Free, sunrise to 10:30 p.m.
Sonoran Hills / North Scottsdale
St. Maria Goretti Catholic Church
A white concrete church on Granite Reef Road whose roof is a set of curved vaults springing from the ground. The city compares it to two intersecting saddles with a dome on top. Wendell Rossman's office designed it and John Parsons engineered it, and it is the most purely sculptural building on Scottsdale's own midcentury driving tour. It isn't on the Historic Register, and nobody agrees on when it was built: 1961, 1967 and 1972 all appear in print.
Central Scottsdale
Stagebrush Theatre (Greasepaint Youtheatre)
A 209-seat, city-owned playhouse on Second Street that the Scottsdale Community Players opened on October 7, 1968, and where Greasepaint Youtheatre, founded in 1984, has been training kids and staging musicals ever since. It's small, it's local, and a lot of the Valley's working theater people did their first show on this stage.
Old Town
Stonegate Equestrian Park
The city's public horse facility: 23 acres off 120th Street with two riding arenas, a round pen, a nature trail, plus a playground and ramadas — free, first-come, and one of the last places 'The West's Most Western Town' still means it literally.
Stonegate / Shea corridor
Stoneman's Military Road (1870)
In 1870 the Army cut a shorter wagon road from Camp McDowell on the Verde northwest toward Prescott. It crossed what is now McDowell Mountain Regional Park and the north end of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. It carried soldiers, supplies and couriers for twenty years, then faded when the fort closed. Today the county calls it a ghost trail. One twist: a 2011 study found that the stretch at Brown's Ranch long recorded as Stoneman's road was actually E.O. Brown's ranch road. Nobody has finished mapping the real one.
North Scottsdale / Brown's Ranch / McDowell Mountain Regional Park
Sunrise Trailhead & Sunrise Peak
A neighborhood trailhead at the far east end of Via Linda, on the Fountain Hills line, and the most direct trail to a real McDowell summit: about 2 miles and 1,100 feet to 3,069-foot Sunrise Peak. The name is an instruction. Locals are on top at first light and back at the car before the day heats up.
East Shea / Fountain Hills border
Taliesin West
Frank Lloyd Wright bought a mesa of creosote and rock below the McDowells in December 1937 and started building the following January — out of the ground itself, with canvas for a roof. Taliesin West is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the most important building in Arizona, and the single credential that let Scottsdale call itself an arts town.
North Scottsdale / Frank Lloyd Wright corridor
The Little Red Schoolhouse (Scottsdale Historical Museum)
A two-classroom red brick schoolhouse built in 1909 on a $4,526 contract that went on to be Scottsdale's city hall, justice court, library and chamber of commerce before becoming the Scottsdale Historical Museum in 1991. Free, small, and the fastest honest education in local history you can get.
Old Town
The Old Adobe Mission (Our Lady of Perpetual Help)
Old Town's oldest standing church, and the most under-visited great building in Scottsdale: a white adobe mission raised through the Depression by the town's Mexican-American families, who hand-made roughly 14,000 bricks at fifty pounds apiece. It is free, it is a block off Scottsdale Road, and almost nobody walking Main Street knows it is there.
Old Town
The Path Most Traveled (Loop 101 freeway art)
Probably the most-seen artwork in Arizona and the least explained. Denver artist Carolyn Braaksma, architect Andrea Forman and landscape architect Jeffrey Engelmann turned the Pima Freeway's sound walls, retention walls and bridge piers into a run of about 90 desert images in stained concrete: prickly pears up to 40 feet tall, lizards 67 feet long, saguaro-rib rustication and Maricopa-inspired patterns in pink, lavender and sage green. Scottsdale proposed it and paid for it. Enormous numbers of drivers pass it every day; almost none of them could tell you who made it.
Loop 101 corridor, north and east Scottsdale
Thomas Road Bike Stop
One acre, four ramadas, a restroom and about ten parking spots where the Greenbelt path crosses Thomas Road — not so much a park as a pit stop, and the most honest piece of cycling infrastructure in the city.
South Scottsdale / Indian Bend Wash
Thompson Peak (summit via Bell Pass)
The 3,984-foot, antenna-topped summit that stands over McDowell Mountain Ranch and names the parkway — reached from the Gateway Trailhead by way of Bell Pass and a paved service road so steep it feels like a dare. About 12 miles and 3,500-plus feet round trip, and one of the hardest walks inside the city limits. Not the neighborhood park of the same name.
The McDowell Mountains / McDowell Mountain Ranch
Thompson Peak Park
A sports-forward neighborhood park on the Thompson Peak Parkway arc: four softball fields, lighted basketball, three lighted pickleball courts and a playground, serving Grayhawk and the parkway neighborhoods with the McDowells standing watch to the east.
Grayhawk / Thompson Peak Parkway corridor
Thunderbird Park
The most amenity-dense ten acres in north Scottsdale: three reservable baseball fields, three reservable soccer fields, two lighted tennis courts, lighted basketball and sand volleyball, a playground and a ramada — a full community park's kit compressed onto a neighborhood-park footprint.
North Scottsdale / Thunderbird–Raintree corridor
Titus House (Frank Titus House)
A one-story red-brick farmhouse from 1892 with a full veranda, a steep hipped roof and a full basement. The bricks were fired from clay dug on the property, and it was designed by James Miller Creighton, the best-known architect in territorial Arizona. When it went on the National Register in 1982, it was the oldest house in Scottsdale and the city's only surviving nineteenth-century building. It's still a private home on Hayden Road south of McDowell. When it was listed, it had subdivisions on three sides and Motorola's electronics plant across the street.
South Scottsdale
Tom's Thumb Trailhead & Trail
The hardest thing Scottsdale asks of an ordinary hiker: about two miles and roughly 1,200 feet of switchbacks from the trailhead on 128th Street to a 140-foot granite spire on the McDowell ridgeline. It is also the Preserve's climbing capital, and the reason the parking lot has a reputation.
The McDowell Mountains / North Scottsdale
Valley Field Riding and Polo Club
A Pueblo Revival adobe clubhouse on a walled patch of original desert off 64th Street, built in 1937 for a riding and polo club whose members were a who's who of Phoenix's old money. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009. It is private, mostly hidden behind walls, and widely misdated: the clubhouse is from 1937, not 1924.
South Scottsdale / Papago Buttes
Valley National Bank branch (now Chase), 7345 E. McDowell
A working bank branch at 74th Street and McDowell Road, designed by Cartmell & Rossman for Valley National Bank in 1962. Its broad overhanging roof is held up by diagonal concrete struts, and the roof itself is a slightly folded concrete plane that the city compares to a big shade canopy. The city put it on its own mid-century driving tour. Almost nothing else about it is online.
South Scottsdale
Vista del Camino Park
The Greenbelt's southern anchor: 71 acres of lakes stocked for fishing, three softball fields, disc golf, a shaded dog park and a splash pad — plus a community center that doubles as Scottsdale's quiet safety net, running the food bank and rent assistance for the whole city.
South Scottsdale / Greenbelt
Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West
The city-owned, nonprofit-run museum of Western art and history at the top of Marshall Way, open since January 2015 and a Smithsonian Affiliate since its first year. In March 2026 it opened the Louis Sands IV Center, a $12 million, two-story wing that took the building to 55,000 square feet. Locals call it the Museum of the West, and it is the one museum in Old Town that earns a whole afternoon.
Old Town
WestWorld of Scottsdale
The city-owned equestrian center and event grounds off Pima Road and the Loop 101 where Scottsdale stages its signature weekends — Barrett-Jackson, the Arabian Horse Show, Bike Week, the rodeo, the Fourth of July — on a covered arena, a climate-controlled hall the size of an airport terminal, hundreds of horse stalls, an RV park and Field West, the grass polo field that doubles as tournament space for field sports.
Princess & WestWorld
WestWorld Trailhead (Preserve access area)
The city's equestrian staging area for the southern McDowell Sonoran Preserve, on the WestWorld grounds off 98th Street. It has horse-trailer parking, a water trough, a shade ramada, restrooms and public arenas. The WestWorld Trail runs from here under Thompson Peak Parkway and southeast across open desert to the Quartz and Taliesin Trails.
North Scottsdale / Princess & WestWorld
Windgate Pass–Bell Pass Loop
The classic hard loop of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve: about 9.5 miles and 2,000 feet of climbing from the Gateway Trailhead, over Bell Pass at roughly 3,200 feet and Windgate Pass at about 3,030, with Thompson Peak looming over the whole thing. Five hours, no shade, no water, and the best views in Scottsdale that don't require a rope.
The McDowell Mountains, above DC Ranch
Zuni Park
A four-acre pocket park on Via del Elemental near Indian Bend Road with exactly two amenities — a remodeled playground and a basketball court — plus the thing no amenity list captures: grassy hills, in a city that grades everything flat.
McCormick Ranch (southwest corner)
American Heritage Wax Museum (closed)
In the early 1960s, when Scottsdale was selling itself as the West's Most Western Town, a wax museum on Stetson Drive gave tourists American history in tableaux: presidents, pioneers and Western figures, modeled in wax and lit like a stage. The American Heritage Wax Museum opened about January 1962 and billed itself as the first permanent wax exhibition in the western United States; Joan Fudala remembers it as the Scottsdale Wax Museum, an affiliate of Madame Tussaud's. It left Scottsdale about 1971 for East Van Buren Street in Phoenix, near Tovrea Castle, and closed there about 1975.
Old Town
Buffalo Museum of America (closed)
For a while around the turn of the century, a strip mall at Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard held one of the odder museums in Arizona: the Buffalo Museum of America, with stuffed bison, animatronic bison families, a wax Jesse James, one of Buffalo Bill's hunting rifles and the prop buffalo from Dances With Wolves. Phoenix New Times called it the Valley's best unknown tourist attraction in 2003. Gary Martinson, a homebuilder and bison collector, had bought the collection in the late 1990s, and in October 2007 he reopened it, with a rescued trove of Flagg family Western art, as the Bison Museum on the top floor of his company's office near the Airpark. It has since closed, and the collection has moved around northern Arizona.
Shea Corridor
Camp Papago Park (WWII POW camp)
For three years the United States held roughly 3,100 German prisoners of war on the edge of Papago Park, fifteen minutes from what is now Old Town Scottsdale. On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five of them crawled out through a 178-foot tunnel in the largest Axis POW escape ever staged on American soil. The ground is now an Arizona National Guard base; the story survives on two historical markers.
South Scottsdale border / Papago (Phoenix)
Cinema Portofino (closed)
The Cinema Portofino billed itself as the 'World's Most Intimate Theatre — All Rocking Chair Loges': a 100-seat art house on the north side of Main Street, in the patio building where Scottsdale's first shops had clustered in 1947. Louis Leithold ran a coffee house there from 1958 and opened the cinema on October 21, 1960 with Peter Sellers. From 1963 it belonged to Louis K. Sher's Art Theatre Guild, whose Jayne Mansfield bookings upset the Junior Woman's Club, and by the 1970s it was showing X-rated films. It closed in September 1985.
Old Town
CrackerJax Family Fun & Sports Park
CrackerJax Family Fun & Sports Park on Scottsdale Road is closed: it shut in 2023 after thirty years of go-karts, mini golf, bumper boats and batting cages, and the 28 acres are becoming The Parque, a roughly $1 billion development. What it was, and where to go instead.
North Scottsdale / Airpark
El Camino Theatre (demolished)
On March 1, 1972, ABC Intermountain Theatres opened a single-screen, 800-seat movie house on Scottsdale Road half a mile north of McDowell, with Twiggy in The Boy Friend. It was the big-screen theater of south Scottsdale, the part of town where most Scottsdale people still lived, and it passed to Plitt in 1975 and Cineplex Odeon in 1985. Blade Runner opened there in 1982. When it closed nobody wrote down, but by 2020 the building was empty and fenced after a stint as an auction house. It was torn down that year, and the Formation apartments now stand at its address.
South Scottsdale
Fleischer Museum (closed)
In 1990 Mort and Donna Fleischer opened a free museum of California Impressionist painting in the Perimeter Center headquarters of his company, Franchise Finance Corporation of America. It was, by most accounts, the first museum in the country devoted to the California school: Guy Rose, Franz Bischoff, Edgar Payne, William Wendt and their circle, from a collection the couple had started in 1983. It added Russian and Soviet Impressionists, ran Sunday lectures and concerts, and lent its walls to the new Irvine Museum's first traveling show. It closed in November 2002, the year after GE Capital agreed to buy FFCA. The paintings were never sold; they hang in the Fleischers' private gallery.
North Scottsdale / Airpark
Harkins Camelview 5 (demolished)
On June 17, 1973, Harkins Theatres opened a twin cinema on Highland Avenue, a block west of Scottsdale Road. It was the last theater Red Harkins built before he died the next year. Known as the Camelview, a name it shared with the enclosed mall built beside it in 1977, and expanded to five screens in 1990, it became the Valley's art house: foreign films, independents, Oscar contenders that played nowhere else for weeks. It closed on December 10, 2015, when Fashion Square's expansion took the lot, and Harkins opened a 14-screen Camelview across the street a week later. The old building came down in November 2016. Its neon 'mushroom' sculptures were saved.
Old Town
Heard Museum North (closed)
In January 1996 Phoenix's Heard Museum opened a branch in north Scottsdale, in one gallery at El Pedregal, the courtyard marketplace at the Boulders. It showed Hopi katsina dolls, Navajo blankets, Allan Houser and T.C. Cannon, two exhibitions a year, for the winter residents and resort guests of the far north. In June 2007 it moved a mile south to a $2.9 million building of its own at the Summit shopping center, with two galleries, a bigger shop and a café. The crowds didn't follow. In January 2014 the Heard announced it would not renew the lease, the galleries closed on April 1, and the branch was gone by the end of May.
North Scottsdale / Carefree line
iPic Scottsdale Quarter (closed)
On December 10, 2010, iPic Entertainment of Boca Raton opened eight small luxury auditoriums upstairs at the new Scottsdale Quarter: reserved recliners with pillows and blankets, free valet and popcorn, cocktails brought to your seat, a tequila lounge called Salt and, from New Year's Day, the Tanzy restaurant next door. It was one of the first theaters to open under the iPic name. In April 2018 iPic rebuilt it with its new Premium Plus pods and push-button waiter service. Then the chain went bankrupt, and on January 30, 2020, the Scottsdale theater and Tanzy closed. Landmark Theatres reopened the space as an eight-screen cinema in December 2021.
North Scottsdale / Airpark
Jokake School for Girls (closed)
In the early 1930s the Jokake Inn's owners pushed their daughter Barbara and her husband George Ashforth, a Yale man who had met her as a guest at the inn, to 'get going and do something.' What they did was open a girls' boarding school in a low arcaded adobe building beside the inn. The Jokake School for Girls shared the inn's pool and stables, gave every girl her own horse, fielded a drill team and danced with the Judson boys, and grew into an accredited preparatory school. It closed during World War II after George Ashforth was drafted. Nothing of it survives; The Phoenician covers the site.
Camelback corridor
Judson School (closed)
George Judson opened a boarding school for boys in the desert north of Camelback in 1928 with seven or eight pupils, horses and a tennis court. Henry Wick, a Yale man who joined the faculty in 1938, bought it in 1945 and ran it with his family for fifty-five years. Under the Wicks it added English as a second language, students from as many as thirty countries, girls (from 1956) and an equestrian program that was its claim to fame. Judson closed in 2000, the last of the Camelback ranch schools, and its 55-acre campus on Mockingbird Lane was cleared for a gated subdivision that still carries its name.
Paradise Valley (Mummy Mountain)
Kachina Theatre (demolished)
The Kachina opened on November 10, 1960 on Scottsdale Road with Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8: a single screen, about 600 seats, designed by Ray Parrish for Harry Nace's theater chain. From 1963 it was the Valley's Cinerama house, with How the West Was Won for 39 weeks and 2001: A Space Odyssey for 25, and in 1983 it had Return of the Jedi in 70mm. Phoenix New Times calls it a favorite of the young Steven Spielberg, and it turns up in the background of The Fabelmans. It closed and was demolished in 1989 for the Scottsdale Galleria; Galleria Corporate Center stands there now.
Old Town
Los Arcos Methodist Church (demolished)
A white, twelve-sided church with arches all the way around and a roof of thin-shell concrete, finished in the fall of 1966 just east of the Los Arcos Mall site, under the motto “Church in the Marketplace.” Cartmell & Rossman designed it and John K. Parsons engineered it, the same team behind St. Maria Goretti. The city's own historic context called it “a stunning example” of the new church architecture of the 1960s. It was demolished in 2012 for housing, and it is the most striking building on the list of what Scottsdale lost.
South Scottsdale
Paradise Park (Arabian show grounds)
For thirty years Scottsdale's Arabian Horse Show had a home of its own before WestWorld. Anne McCormick built Paradise Park on the north end of her McCormick Ranch, a walled arena with four palm trees planted in the ring, and the show ran there from 1957, apart from two years on Kemper Marley's land, until the developer Kaiser-Aetna served notice on the last day of the 1978 show. The Arabian Horse Association dug up the three surviving palms, trucked them to 90 leased acres on Bell Road, and ran Paradise Park II there until 1988. Both sites are houses now; the McCormick Ranch streets named Arabian, Appaloosa and Mustang mark the first.
McCormick Ranch
Rawhide Western Town
For 34 years, an 1880s cowboy town stood on Scottsdale Road — gunfights at high noon, stagecoach rides, a mesquite-smoke steakhouse — until the dirt under Main Street got too valuable. Rawhide closed on Halloween 2005 and rebuilt itself on Gila River land near Chandler, where it still slings steaks today.
North Scottsdale / Pinnacle Peak
Round-Up Drive-In (closed)
On November 4, 1955, Scottsdale's mayor opened a drive-in movie theater on Thomas Road. Malcolm White, who had built the town's first indoor movie house on Main Street, called it the Round-Up and gave it a neon sign of a cowboy on a bucking horse, his lasso looping the name. Harry Nace's chain bought him out the next year, expanded it to 972 cars in 1964, and put up the giant neon cowboy pointing at the screen that south Scottsdale kids remember. It ran until February 1980; The Sycamore apartments went up on the lot in 1985.
South Scottsdale
Scottsdale 6 Drive-In (demolished)
On February 9, 1977, a six-screen drive-in opened on 29 acres of leased Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land at McKellips and Hayden roads, just south of Scottsdale's city line: room for 1,800 cars, sound over the car radio, and six double features on opening night, from Carrie to Freaky Friday. The Syufy family's drive-in company, later called West Wind, ran it for 34 years, long after the Round-Up and the Valley's other drive-ins were gone. It closed in late August 2011 when its lease ran out, leaving Arizona with two drive-ins. The screens came down in 2014, and the land has been vacant since.
South Scottsdale / Salt River
Scottsdale Ginning Company cotton gin (demolished)
In 1920, at the top of the Pima cotton boom, E.O. Brown and partners opened Scottsdale's first cotton gin on the south side of Second Street at Brown Avenue. The Scottsdale Ginning Company baled the long-staple cotton that brought the town its Mexican-American families and its first real Main Street, and it ran into the early 1950s, after the town had begun selling itself as 'The West's Most Western Town.' Its galvanized-steel buildings outlived the ginning by forty years as an auto-body shop, a trolley barn, a farmers' market and, from 1992 to 1997, the Works nightclub. The last of them came down in the 1990s, and HonorHealth's Osborn campus covers the block.
Old Town
Scottsdale High School (lost campus)
For 37 years Scottsdale had exactly one high school: the Beavers' campus on Indian School Road at about 74th Street, on a site Charles Miller offered and the voters chose in 1922. It was also the town's meeting hall, church, pageant stage and first college classroom. After sixty years the school board closed it on a 3–2 vote in 1983, the land was leased for development, and the buildings came down between 1987 and 1992, Old Main last. What's left is a bronze plaque on a hotel wall and two white pillars at Drinkwater Boulevard.
Old Town
Sonora Village Theater (closed)
On May 10, 1996, United Artists opened a ten-screen multiplex at Sonora Village, the shopping center on Hayden Road at Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, as the Airpark's houses and offices filled in around it. It was north Scottsdale's neighborhood movie house for three operators: UA and then Regal until 2010, when bigger stadium-seat theaters drew its crowds away; Studio Movie Grill, with dinner at your seat, from 2011 until the pandemic closed it in March 2020; and Touchstar's Sonora Village Luxury Cinemas from December 2021 to early 2024. The city then approved turning the building into a Floor & Decor, which had opened by early 2026.
North Scottsdale / Airpark
Tee-Bar-Tee / Kiva Theatre (closed)
On June 18, 1948, Malcolm White, who ran Whitey's bar on the corner and would be the town's first mayor, opened Scottsdale's first real movie house on Main Street and named it the Tee-Bar-Tee, after a cattle brand. Renamed the Kiva in 1955, it became an art house in the early 1960s under Louis K. Sher's Art Theatre Guild, which moved its headquarters to Scottsdale and fought obscenity cases from here, then spent two decades as an adult theater the city wanted gone. It closed in the early 1990s and was gutted for shops. The facade, and by some accounts the marquee and ticket booth, are still on Main Street.
Old Town
The Adobe House (demolished)
George and Alza Blount built an adobe house just south of today's Civic Center Plaza in the mid-1890s, and in 1896 Alza taught Scottsdale's first school classes in its front room. Over the next seventy years the house was a cheese factory, the home of playwright Roy George, a guest ranch called the Adobe House, and then the town's community center, where volunteers opened Scottsdale's first library in 1955, the Stagebrush Theatre got its start, and the new Parks Department kept its first office. It was gone by 1970, burned according to the city and razed according to the town's best-known historian, and its site is under the library's parking garage.
Old Town
Thunderbird Field II (WWII training field)
In 1942 the Army turned a stretch of desert north of Scottsdale into a primary flight school. Thunderbird Field II was activated on June 22, put more than 5,500 cadets through Stearman biplanes, closed in 1944 — and left behind the runway that became Scottsdale Airport and the Airpark around it.
North Scottsdale / Airpark
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“Lost Scottsdale” entries cover parks, playlands and landmarks that shaped the city but no longer exist. They’re kept here as local history.