What was the Safari Hotel?
If Camelback Inn taught Scottsdale to relax, the Safari Hotel taught it to stay up late. Ground broke in March 1956 and the doors opened that November 16 — developer Ernie Uhlmann’s bet that the sleepy cowboy town was ready for a city kind of glamour: crisp modernist architecture (the design associated with Phoenix master Al Beadle), a pool built for photographers, and — the revolution — lounges with real entertainment, every night.
It worked instantly. The Safari became the Valley’s social machine: an expansion by 1959 brought it to 188 rooms with a 700-seat banquet hall that hosted every gala, prom and convention in town; the French Quarter restaurant set the local fine-dining standard for a generation; and the entertainment calendar pulled the midcentury celebrity trade — the Sinatra orbit, TV cowboys, lounge legends — whose sightings built Scottsdale’s nightlife mythology from scratch. Along with its boom-season twin the Valley Ho, it made 1956 the year Scottsdale went modern.
The fall was long and ordinary: newer resorts took the glamour, the buildings aged unrenovated, and the Safari slid downmarket through the ’80s and ’90s until closing September 4, 1998 for a $143 million Marriott project that — in the era’s cruelest joke — was never built. Demolition came in 1999; the empty “Safari hole” scarred the corner for years. Today the Safari Drive condos hold its ground, and Caesars Republic’s tower glows two blocks west in the glamour district it pioneered.
Why the Safari mattered
It invented Scottsdale nightlife. Before the Safari, the town’s evenings belonged to resort dining rooms and cowboy bars. The Safari imported the Palm Springs-Vegas lounge formula — entertainment as the draw, the hotel as the stage — and created the after-dark economy that Old Town’s entertainment district (and its modern flag, the W) industrialized decades later.
It anchored the town’s social infrastructure. For twenty years the 700-seat banquet hall was Scottsdale’s civic ballroom — weddings, charity galas, service-club lunches, proms. Ask any Valley native over seventy where their parents celebrated something, and the Safari leads the answers.
Its restaurant outshone most hotels. The French Quarter belongs on any list of the Valley’s great lost dining rooms — New Orleans plush in the desert, birthdays-and-anniversaries central, with a bar pedigree the town’s cocktail scene still descends from.
Its demolition radicalized the preservationists. Losing the Safari in 1999 — a signature Beadle-associated modernist, traded for a project that never happened — became the cautionary tale that powered the movement which saved the Valley Ho two years later. In Scottsdale preservation history, the Safari is the martyr.
The pilgrimage: Scottsdale Road at Highland at dusk (Safari Drive’s street sign marks the ground where the neon stood), then a counter seat at the Sugar Bowl — the 1958 survivor from the Safari’s world.
Neon, decline, and the hole that taught a lesson
The Safari’s 1956 opening belongs to a precise inflection: the year Scottsdale’s tourism switched engines. The prewar model — seasonal inns selling desert quietude to eastern wealth — was aging out; the postwar model — automobile tourists, air-conditioned year-round operation, television-fed celebrity culture — needed different hardware. Uhlmann’s Safari and the Foehls’ Valley Ho, opening months apart on the same road, were that hardware: urban-format hotels selling scene rather than solitude. The Safari took the flashier lane, and its lounges — the Kon-Tiki era’s full apparatus of showrooms and house bands — gave a town of 10,000 people a nightlife that drew from the whole metro.
The celebrity mythology, for once, undersells reality. The 1950s–60s Valley was genuinely thick with Hollywood — spring training, dude-ranch honeymoons, Mountain Shadows golf weekends — and the Safari’s lounges were the after-hours common room where visiting stars, local society and the gossip columns intersected. Every Scottsdale bar that has since claimed a Sinatra sighting is drafting on the Safari’s actual ledger.
The decline mechanism deserves clear eyes because it recurs across this archive: the Safari didn’t fail from scandal but from capital starvation. Lounge culture faded, the resort market moved to golf-and-casita giants, and successive owners milked rather than renewed the aging plant — the same script as the Ramada-era Valley Ho, minus the rescue. By the 1990s the Safari was a budget stop wearing a landmark’s bones, and the 1998 closure-for-redevelopment looked, on paper, like mercy.
The aftermath became civic legend. The promised $143 million Marriott evaporated in the entitlement economy’s churn, leaving a demolished landmark and a vacant lot — the “Safari hole” — at the town’s marquee corner for years. The sequence (destroy first, develop maybe) handed Scottsdale’s nascent preservation movement its foundational argument, cited in every subsequent fight from the Valley Ho’s 2001 save through the Mountain Shadows wars. When the corner finally filled — Safari Drive’s condos, then the Fashion Square luxury wave, capped by Caesars Republic’s 2024 tower — the district had come full circle to the Safari’s original thesis: glamour lodging at Scottsdale and Camelback. It took sixty-eight years and one long-empty hole to get back to 1956.