What is the Center?
It’s the white building on the Second Street side of the Civic Center, with SMoCA next door. Locals call it the Center, as in “we’ve got tickets at the Center.” It opened on October 23, 1975 as the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, with a Roger Miller concert, and it’s now the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts.
The architect was Bennie Gonzales, who planned the whole Civic Center in 1966 and designed City Hall and the Civic Center Library. The arts building was the last piece. Inside, the main room is the Virginia G. Piper Theater, with 853 seats. The second room, Stage 2, has 137. Outside, the Center also programs the Civic Center’s amphitheater, which holds about 1,800.
The city owns the building. Since 1988 it has been run by Scottsdale Arts, the nonprofit that also runs SMoCA, the city’s public art program and Canal Convergence, and that keeps its headquarters here. The bookings are mostly touring acts: acoustic and jazz musicians, singer-songwriters, comedians, dance companies and family shows. The 2025–26 season was the Center’s 50th. Our lexicon entry explains who’s who on the campus.
How to go
Buy the ticket first. The building is open during the day, Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m., and closed Mondays. But the reason to come is a show, and those are mostly at night. The box office is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., at 480-499-8587. The fall 2026 calendar includes An Evening with Punch Brothers on October 10, the Queen tribute Killer Queen on October 14 and Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock LIVE on November 28.
Park in the garage. Scottsdale Arts points visitors to the free Civic Center Garage and the surrounding public lots. On show nights the curb spaces on Second Street go first. The garage is a two-minute walk.
Know the room. The Piper Theater is a mid-sized hall. The 2009 renovation re-raked the seating to improve sightlines and access and added seating boxes along the side walls, which the theater consultants say gave the room “a much more intimate atmosphere.” Stage 2 is the small second room, for shows that would get lost in the big one.
Use the hour before. On a Thursday, SMoCA next door is open until 7 p.m. and is pay what you wish. Walk through, then sit in James Turrell’s Knight Rise in its courtyard as the light goes. The Civic Center lawns, the LOVE sculpture and the Little Red Schoolhouse are steps away, and Old Town’s restaurants are a few blocks west. In November the Center’s organization also runs Canal Convergence at the Waterfront, a fifteen-minute walk north.
The arts half of the Civic Center
In the mid-1960s a citizens’ task force told Scottsdale it needed a performing arts center and museums. A 1966 bond paid for the Civic Center that Gonzales planned. City Hall and the library opened in 1968, and the arts building had to wait for the money of the early 1970s. When it opened in 1975, it was a theater, a small cinema and gallery space under one roof, run by the city with a volunteer group, the Scottsdale Arts Center Association, raising money and booking acts.
Before the Center, serious music in Scottsdale meant Louise Lincoln Kerr’s adobe studio on Scottsdale Road. The city’s register report on the Kerr Cultural Center says the studio was the city’s main music venue until 1975, and the Phoenix Chamber Music Society moved its series to the new building that year. The Center’s early decades brought jazz and popular music to a small suburb: Arizona PBS names Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Wynton Marsalis among the musicians who played here in its first twenty years. Local companies used it too. In 1995 Greasepaint Youtheatre moved its award-winning Peter Pan here from the 209-seat Stagebrush Theatre and played to an audience of about 700, which the company remembered as its biggest year.
From city department to Scottsdale Arts
In 1987 the city chartered the Scottsdale Cultural Council to run its arts facilities, and in 1988 the council took over the Center. The council converted the cinema next door into SMoCA, which opened in 1999, and the Center became mainly a place for performance. The organization took the name Scottsdale Arts in 2016. The organization guide covers the contract, the city’s management fee and the 2024 audit.
The building has been rebuilt from the inside once. A study begun in 2006 led to a $14 million upgrade completed in 2009. John Douglas Architect designed it and McKay Conant Hoover handled the acoustics. Theater consultants Fisher Dachs describe re-raking the hall for sightlines and accessibility, adding side boxes and enclosing new control and followspot booths. In 2023 Scottsdale Arts received more than $11.5 million from the estate of Michael and Ellen Ziegler, the largest gift in its history, for capital projects. A rendering released with the news showed a proposed Ziegler Theater on the campus. We have not confirmed whether it has been built.
Fifty years on
The 50th-anniversary season in 2025–26 opened with Alison Krauss & Union Station and ran alongside an exhibition, A Pivotal Point in Time: Art in Scottsdale in the 1970s. The Center was built for a young suburb that wanted to be taken seriously, and it still works at that scale. It isn’t a big touring house, and it doesn’t try to be. With 853 seats the performers can see the audience, and that is the reason to choose a show here over the same act in a bigger Phoenix hall.