Why he matters
Most of the country knows Barry Goldwater as a senator and a 1964 presidential candidate. Scottsdale’s connection to him runs through two quieter things: a department store and a mountain.
The store came first. Goldwater’s was Arizona’s own, the Phoenix chain descended from his family’s frontier trading posts, and he ran it for about two decades before politics. In 1961 it opened as the anchor of a new open-air shopping center at Camelback and Scottsdale Roads, and its name told the Valley that the little resort town could support real retail. The mountain came four years later, when he backed the campaign that kept Camelback’s summit public.
Where to find his mark today
Goldwater’s at Fashion Square. The store’s history runs from 1961 to 1989. Its anchor position at Scottsdale Fashion Square is Macy’s now.
Camelback’s summit. The Echo Canyon Trail crosses land that became a City of Phoenix park in 1968, after the campaign he helped push through.
The Cholla side. The rebuilt Cholla Trail rests on the same protection; a 2023 push by regulars to rename it for him went nowhere.
The town the store walked into
Scottsdale in 1961 had about 10,000 people and had just voted itself a city charter. Fashion Square opened that same autumn at what was then the edge of town, closer to the resorts on the mountain than to the saloons on Main Street. A new center needed an anchor with a name, and in Arizona retail there was no bigger one than Goldwater’s. The 1960s chapter marks the opening as one of the turning points of a decade in which the town grew almost sevenfold.
The rest of the family is in the city’s story too. His brother Bob Goldwater revived the Phoenix Open through the Thunderbirds in 1939, the tournament now known as the WM Phoenix Open.
The full story
Barry Goldwater was born in Phoenix in 1909, the grandson of Michel “Big Mike” Goldwater, who opened trading posts with his sons in the mining camps of the Arizona Territory in the 1860s. Barry’s father Baron opened the Phoenix store in the 1890s, and by the 1920s Goldwater’s was the capital’s leading department store. Barry took over in the 1930s and ran it with a merchant’s flair, cultivating a reputation for style and for the resort wardrobe the Valley dressed in.
He left the store in 1953 for the U.S. Senate, and the national career that followed, including the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, belongs to the history of the country more than of Scottsdale. The Scottsdale chapter came in the 1960s. In 1961 Goldwater’s opened as the anchor of Scottsdale Fashion Square. In 1962 the family sold the chain to Associated Dry Goods, and it spent the rest of its life under owners in New York and then St. Louis.
In 1965, between terms in the Senate, Goldwater lent his name and his contacts to the long-stalled effort to buy Camelback Mountain above roughly the 1,600-foot line before houses reached the top. That time the money and land assembly came together, and in 1968 the high ground became a City of Phoenix park, managed as the Echo Canyon Recreation Area. It is the reason there is a public trail through one of the most expensive residential areas in Arizona.
Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1969 and served until 1987. May Department Stores retired the Goldwater’s name in 1989, and the Fashion Square store became Robinson’s, then Robinson’s-May, then Macy’s. He died in 1998, having outlived his family’s store by nine years.