What is the Kerr Cultural Center?
It sits about two miles north of Old Town on Scottsdale Road, between resort and retail buildings, and almost nobody driving past knows it’s there. There are two low adobe buildings with red clay tile and an arched gate between them. One of them is the best small concert room in the Valley.
The house and studio belonged to Louise Lincoln Kerr, a violinist, violist and composer who had played in the Cleveland orchestra in 1913. She was the eldest child of the inventor John C. Lincoln. In 1948 she built a one-story, five-room house in the Spanish Colonial style on open desert north of the town. In 1959 she built a music studio beside it. The National Register nomination says she designed and supervised both herself. Mexican artisans made the adobe bricks from the property’s own earth and dried them on site. Tucson artist Charles W. Bolsius, a friend of hers, carved every door, each in a different design.
For roughly twenty years the studio was where serious music happened in Scottsdale. Isaac Stern, Pablo Casals, the Budapest and Juilliard string quartets, and Will and Ariel Durant all came as guests, and the musicians stayed in a row of small cottages on the property called the Shacks. The city’s register report says it was the city’s main music venue until the Scottsdale Center for the Arts opened in 1975. Arizona State University has run it since the early 1980s. Today it’s called ASU Kerr, and the season covers chamber music, jazz, folk, cabaret and storytelling. Kerr gave the property on one condition: that music keep being played there.
How to go
Buy a ticket. That’s the only way in. There are no open-grounds hours or drop-in tours. The house is staff offices, and one of its original windows was changed into the will-call window. The studio is a working stage. The ASU Kerr calendar lists the shows. As of this writing (fall 2026), the October lineup included a cabaret, a Gypsy-jazz ensemble and a jazz trio’s tenth-anniversary concert. The resident partners are steadier. The Phoenix Chamber Music Society, which Kerr co-founded, still plays here, along with the ASU School of Music’s Tuesday Morning Music and Tea and Arizona Opera’s Coffee at Kerr.
Finding it. The address is 6110 N. Scottsdale Road, but the entrance is on Rose Lane, west of Scottsdale Road, just south of McDonald Drive. Park in the lot on the south half of the site. ASU built it in the early 1980s on the ground where the guest cottages stood.
What to look at before the show.
- The studio’s east door. Bottle bottoms laid horizontally in mortar fill the sidelights so light comes through the glass. ASU Kerr counts 544 beer bottles and says the crew who built the place drank them. Kerr’s initials are worked into the star on the door.
- The connecting walls. Two matching adobe walls with tile caps join the house and the studio. Each rises to an arch with a simple iron gate.
- The house. It has a flat roof, red tile coping on the parapet, a corner window at the northeast, and an adobe-walled stair to the roof at the southeast corner. A stepped buttress wall with a pointed-arch opening sits beside it.
- Inside the studio. Exposed adobe, rough-sawn beams, a wood plank ceiling and Italian floor tile made of cement and white marble dust. Two curved stairs with wrought-iron railings lead down to the performance floor under two black iron chandeliers, and there’s a brick fireplace in the corner. ASU Kerr also says a relief in the studio is John Henry Waddell’s small-scale study for his dancing figures Earth and Space outside the Herberger Theater in Phoenix, and the statue of Kerr in the courtyard is his work too.
Know the room. The original 1959 studio is the recessed performance and seating floor below the lobby rail, and it had no fixed seats. The fixed benches came with the 1969 addition on the west side, which turned the room into roughly a square. If you can choose, sit in the old part of the room.
Pair it. The Camelback Corridor resorts and restaurants are a few minutes away. Lincoln Drive, the nearest major cross street, is named for Kerr’s father, who helped build the Camelback Inn.
A house built on purpose for chamber music
Kerr’s own explanation of the place is quoted in the 2009 National Register nomination, from Carolyn Waters Broe’s 2001 ASU study of her music: “If people are going to learn to love music, then they must hear it, and to hear it, there must be a place where it can be played.” She didn’t want a school. She wanted “a place where musicians could meet, study, perform, and perfect.”
Her life before Scottsdale is on her profile. The part that matters for the building is the 1940s. After her husband died in 1939 she spent several years in Los Angeles, played viola in the Pasadena Symphony from 1942 to 1945, and played chamber music late into the night with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. After the war she came back to the Valley and bought land in the open desert north of Scottsdale.
The nomination calls the original property 40-plus acres. ASU Kerr says 47 acres of desert and orange groves. The house went up in 1948. Scottsdale wasn’t incorporated until 1951, so the nomination’s author found no city plans or building permit for it. The studio followed in 1959, the year Kerr’s father died and she inherited part of the Lincoln Electric fortune. It was one big rectangular room with a kitchen and restroom at the north end and seating for up to about 210, according to the city. Six small cottages, the Shacks, gave visiting players somewhere to stay. No construction records for them are known to exist.
The room that ran Scottsdale’s music scene
For the next fifteen years or so the studio did the work a concert hall would have done if the city had one. In 1960 Kerr and Lewis Ruskin founded the Phoenix Chamber Music Society. She gave it land, and selling that land created an endowment of about $1 million that let the society pay for whole seasons from the interest. Its series met in the studio for roughly fifteen years, which is how, in the nomination’s words, “many of the world’s most famous chamber ensembles played in the Kerr Studio.” She helped start the Monday Morning Musicale chapter in 1965, which made the studio its permanent home, and the Phoenix Cello Society in 1969. The city’s report lists half a dozen more groups that called the studio home, from the American Cello Society to Young Audiences.
The nomination also says she sat on the Scottsdale Committee on Fine Arts, gave it land, and helped found the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. When Bennie Gonzales’s center opened on the Civic Center in 1975, the chamber music society moved its series there, and the studio stopped being the city’s main music venue. The nomination’s bibliography includes a Phoenix Gazette story of October 18, 1968, headlined “Scottsdale Civic Center Audience Gives Standing Ovation to Mrs. Kerr.” The story of that center is told in our Scottsdale Arts and Civic Center guides.
In 1969 the studio got its only major addition. Architect J. Frederick Fleenor (the sources also spell it Fredrick, and the city calls him Fred) added a west wing with fixed bench seating for another 100, plus restrooms, a kitchen and new covered porches, built to match the adobe. The city’s report says special care was taken over that. The west porch was enclosed for restrooms and storage in 1988 and 1997. Today the studio covers 5,827 square feet.
How ASU got it
The sources disagree on how the property went to ASU. The city’s register report says it was “given to Arizona State University in accordance with her wishes” when Kerr died on December 10, 1977. ASU Kerr says she donated it “just before her death.” The National Register nomination, written by ASU’s own preservation coordinator, gives the most detail. In the early 1970s Kerr sold the entire property to the Scottsdale Seven Development Corporation. A few years later she asked the company to sell the house and studio to the university, and she made a donation to cover the price. The developer cut the price to what it had originally paid and donated a new roof and access work. ASU took ownership in 1981 and named it the Kerr Cultural Center. Her condition was that it stay a music venue.
The rest of the land went to development. The Shacks were gone by the time ASU took over, except for one building and the foundation of another. The city says they were cleared between Kerr’s death and the building of the Marriott Renaissance resort next door in 1979–80. ASU removed the last of them for its parking lot during a 1981–82 renovation. That work restored the adobe, rewired the buildings, added a new heating and cooling system, and built ramps. More repairs and a new studio roof followed in 1988. The nomination concludes that the exterior was never significantly changed.
Why it matters
When the nomination was written in 2009, the city’s preservation office had identified only 11 adobe buildings more than fifty years old in Scottsdale, several too altered to list, and just five adobe buildings or complexes were on the city register. This is one of them, still intact and still used for the job it was built for. The Little Red Schoolhouse is now a museum about the work it used to do. The Kerr studio is still a room where a string quartet plays to a few hundred people without amplification, inside walls made from the ground under them.