What is the Scottsdale Parkview Hotel?
The Scottsdale Parkview Hotel is an independent hotel of about 130 rooms on McDowell Road in south Scottsdale. It’s a low-rise, Southwestern-style stucco building from around 1980. If you lived here or visited between the mid-2000s and 2024, you probably knew it as the 3 Palms, marketed after a 2006–2007 remodel as a contemporary boutique hotel. San Diego investors bought it in 2023, and in late 2024 the palms came down and the Parkview name went up.
The new name is honest. The hotel sits beside the southern end of the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, the 11-mile chain of parks, lakes and paths that is Scottsdale’s best piece of civic design. Vista del Camino Park stretches south along the wash, and Eldorado Park is just to the north across McDowell. Few hotels in the city put you closer to that much free green space.
The property has an outdoor pool and spa, a rooftop sundeck, a fitness center and some rooms with kitchenettes. It isn’t a resort, despite the label it carried briefly in 2024, and it isn’t a polished chain property either. The building is decades old, and guest reviews over the years have been mixed. You choose it for the price, the parks, and a location about two miles from Old Town, on the road to Tempe, ASU and the airport.
If you want a pool scene and a spa, stay up the road. If you want a cheap bed next to a running path, this is a real option.
How to do the Parkview right
Make the Greenbelt your amenity. The paved path along the wash runs north from here through Eldorado Park and on toward Chaparral Park and McCormick Ranch on underpasses beneath the major roads, so you can ride for miles without a stoplight. After a storm, the underpasses flood first. A sunrise run or a rented-bike ride up the wash is the best free thing to do in Scottsdale, and here it starts nearly at the door.
Read recent reviews and ask questions. This is an older building that changed hands in 2023 and names in 2024. Ask which rooms have been updated, request one facing away from McDowell Road, and confirm any parking and pet policies directly with the hotel at (480) 941-1202.
Eat like a local. Duke’s Sports Bar, a family-run spot at Miller and McDowell since 1998, has a big dog-friendly patio backing onto the Vista del Camino disc golf course. Night Owl is on Hayden just north of McDowell, and the underground Salt Cellar on Hayden has been serving seafood since 1971. A mile south on Roosevelt Street, Chula Seafood and Chaconne Patisserie are worth the short drive.
Use the event calendar. The 2023 buyers bought it partly for its location. Barrett-Jackson at WestWorld, the WM Phoenix Open and spring training at Scottsdale Stadium, Salt River Fields and Tempe Diablo are all within an easy drive. Those are also the weeks when rates spike, so book early.
A hotel named for a floodway
The park the Parkview looks out on wasn’t always a park. The Indian Bend Wash is a natural drainage that runs through the middle of Scottsdale, and for decades it flooded the low-lying neighborhoods along it. The Yaqui families who had settled south of McDowell Road after the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association closed its canal-worker camps lived right in the floodplain. Starting in the mid-1960s, instead of the concrete channel the Army Corps of Engineers proposed, Scottsdale chose to turn the wash into a ribbon of parks and golf courses that could flood safely. Eldorado Park opened in 1967 as the prototype. The city’s urban-renewal project cleared homes out of the wash between McDowell Road and Roosevelt Street and built new housing nearby, plus the park and community center that became Vista del Camino. The full Greenbelt was finished in stages through the mid-1980s.
The hotel went up around 1980, at the southern end of that chain. Sources disagree on 1978 or 1980. McDowell Road was then south Scottsdale’s commercial spine, with the Motor Mile of dealerships to the west and Los Arcos Mall at Scottsdale Road. The hotel was a low-rise, Southwestern stucco building on about three and a half acres, easy to drive to and close to everything.
As the city’s center of gravity moved north through the 1980s and ’90s, south Scottsdale’s hotels had to compete on price or reinvent themselves. This one was remodeled in 2006–2007 and marketed as 3 Palms Scottsdale, a contemporary boutique hotel with a rooftop sundeck. That was right as SkySong was being planned on the dead Los Arcos site a mile west. The name shortened to 3 Palms Hotel in 2019.
In October 2023 a pair of San Diego buyers paid about $23 million for the 130-room property, using two merged 1031 exchanges. The brokers credited its federal Opportunity Zone designation, a tax incentive for investment in designated areas, and its proximity to the city’s big events. A year later the 3 Palms name was gone. After a few weeks as Scottsdale Parkview Resort, it settled on Scottsdale Parkview Hotel.
The new name points to a real asset. Fifty years after Scottsdale chose a park over a concrete ditch, the floodway is the selling point on this stretch of McDowell Road.