What was the American Heritage Wax Museum?
Scottsdale in the early 1960s was building a tourist trade on the West’s Most Western Town slogan: hitching posts on Main Street, the Parada del Sol, and roadside attractions for the families driving in from the resorts. One of them was a wax museum on Stetson Drive, a block from Scottsdale Road, where visitors walked past American history in wax: presidents, pioneers and figures of the West, posed in lit tableaux.
The American Heritage Wax Museum opened about January 1962. Its guidebook claimed it was “the first exhibition of its kind ever permanently established in the western United States.” Historian Joan Fudala, listing the lost places of Scottsdale in 2025, remembers it as the Scottsdale Wax Museum, “an affiliate of Madame Tussaud’s.”
It stayed about a decade. Around 1971 it moved to Phoenix, to East Van Buren Street near Tovrea Castle, and it closed there about 1975. Stetson Drive went on to become Old Town’s bar and restaurant street.
A decade on Stetson Drive
The opening. A collector’s history of American wax museums dates the opening to January 1962; another says around 1961. Either way it was early: Stetson Drive was a new street of shops then, and the museum is the earliest business on it that we can document.
The Beatles. In December 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, the museum received wax figures of the Beatles; a news photo records their arrival at the Phoenix airport, and a collector’s account says the exhibit caused a near riot.
The move. About 1971 the museum left Scottsdale for 5555 E. Van Buren St. in Phoenix, near Tovrea Castle. One collector’s history says it ran there as the Royal London Wax Museum; we haven’t found a second source for that name. It closed about 1975.
The souvenir guide. Its guidebook outlived it: in 2010 the Village Voice wrote up a copy as a piece of midcentury Americana.
The sources, and the gaps
Main sources: Joan Fudala’s “Local Legends” list of lost Scottsdale places (May 2025); the Waxipedia (April 2019) and Houses of Wax Facts collectors’ histories of American wax museums; a 2010 City-Data forum thread of Phoenix recollections; a news-photo caption of the Beatles figures’ December 1964 arrival; and the Village Voice (June 2010) on the souvenir guide.
What’s unsettled:
- The address. 98 W. Stetson Dr. (Waxipedia, Houses of Wax, in Scottsdale’s pre-renumbering addresses) or 7108 E. Stetson Dr. (the forum). We haven’t matched either to a building that stands today.
- The opening. January 1962 (Waxipedia) or about 1961 (Houses of Wax).
- Madame Tussaud’s. Fudala calls it an affiliate; the collectors’ histories don’t mention the connection.
- The Phoenix name and dates. “Royal London Wax Museum” and the 1975 closing rest on one collector’s history and forum memories.
Why it matters
The wax museum belongs with the Kachina Theatre, Rawhide and the Parada as part of the tourist town Scottsdale built in the 1960s, selling Western and American history to visitors who had come for the sun. It is also the first chapter of Stetson Drive, a street that has since been reinvented as nightlife, which the entertainment district entry follows.