Why he matters
Before 1973 the corridor’s resorts clustered along Lincoln Drive and at the foot of the mountains, set back from the traffic. Bob Karatz built on the intersection itself. His Scottsdale Hilton went up at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive with a freestanding bell tower you could see from both roads, and the crossroads has been navigated by it ever since.
His more lasting idea was next door. Instead of a lobby gift shop, he gave the hotel a small street of its own, the Shops at Hilton Village, where guests could walk to dinner and neighbors had a reason to come in. Scottsdale later built bigger versions of the same idea. His is still open.
Where to find his mark today
Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas. The 1973 resort, renovated in the 2020s, with the bell tower out front.
Hilton Village. The shops and restaurants he built beside the hotel, including the corridor’s go-to grocery, AJ’s Fine Foods.
The crossroads. The corner sits at the eastern end of the Camelback Corridor resort belt.
A thin record
The site’s resort and shopping guides credit Karatz with the Hilton and Hilton Village and say little else about him, and outside sources add only a few details. Scottsdale historian Joan Fudala records the 1973 opening, his love of tennis, the resident pros, and the Casitas homes and Village shops that opened on the east side of Scottsdale Road during the decade. The record does not give his life dates or say how long he owned the resort. By the 1990s it belonged to Merv Griffin.
The 1970s chapter covers the town he built in: a city pushing north past its old limits, with the Indian Bend Wash greenbelt under construction the same year the Hilton opened.
The full story
In the early 1970s, Scottsdale Road at Lincoln Drive was the edge of things. The first generation of resorts, the Camelback Inn of 1936 and the postwar inns below Camelback, lay to the west along Lincoln, and the land to the north and east was still largely open. In 1973 Bob Karatz opened the Scottsdale Hilton on the corner, a compact garden resort anchored by a bell tower that made the intersection a landmark.
The details that survive show what he cared about. Karatz was a keen tennis player, and the resort opened with good courts and resident pros at a time when tennis was one of the resort corridor’s big draws. The opening was a local event: the Coronado High School band played, and that August the new resort hosted the Miss Arizona-World pageant. Paul Shank, whose French Quarter at the Safari Hotel had been the town’s big night out since around 1960, opened Paul Shank’s Wining and Dining at the new hotel.
The hotel did not stand alone for long. The Scottsdale Hilton Casitas, a resort-style neighborhood of homes, and the Shops at Hilton Village opened beside it during the decade; one real-estate account credits the architect Ralph Haver with designing both the hotel and the Casitas. The Village was the unusual part. Most of the Valley was building enclosed malls and strip centers, and a hotel with a walkable street that locals also used was an early version of the pattern the city later repeated at Kierland. The Borgata opened up the road in 1981, and the intersection became the shopping crossroads of the Paradise Valley border.
The resort changed hands after him; Merv Griffin owned it for several years in the 1990s. It still operates under the Hilton flag, and the Village still keeps its corner. Beyond the buildings, the record says little about Karatz, and this page will not fill the gap with guesses. The boomtown era produced flashier hotels, but few of them are still open.