What was the French Quarter?
Before Scottsdale had a nightlife district, it had the Safari — and inside the Safari, it had the French Quarter, where the town went when it wanted to feel like somewhere else entirely.
The Safari Hotel opened in 1956, a crisp modernist resort by architect Al Beadle that landed on Scottsdale Road like a spaceship in a town committed to hitching posts. The opening drew the mayor and Miss Arizona; the years after drew everyone else. Around 1960 an expansion added the French Quarter — restaurateur Paul Shank’s supper club, a New Orleans fantasy of steaks, floor shows and late hours, operating alongside the hotel’s Brown Derby restaurant and coffee shop. One address, three ways to eat, and one very good reason to stay past midnight.
Shank’s cooking was the anchor. John Wayne and Bing Crosby both made their way to his tables, and for a couple of decades the French Quarter was where visiting fame and local money ended up on the same dance floor. Dinner meant a proper supper-club steak; the rest of the night meant whatever the entertainment made of it.
It all ended together. The Safari closed on September 4, 1998, after 42 years, undone by the modern resort generation it had once out-glamoured, and the wrecking crews came in 1999. The French Quarter didn’t get a farewell tour or a relocation — it simply vanished with its hotel, the way the best supper clubs always seem to.
Steak, showroom and the supper-club formula
The French Quarter worked because it understood that midcentury diners didn’t want a meal — they wanted an evening. The supper club was the machine for delivering one: you arrived dressed, you ate a serious steak under low light, and somewhere between the entrée and the second round, the room transformed around you into a nightclub. New Orleans provided the theming — the name, the wrought-iron romance, the permission to stay out late — but the engine was pure mid-century American showroom.
Paul Shank was the difference. Plenty of hotels bolted a dinner club onto the lobby; Shank was a genuine restaurateur whose cooking earned its own reputation, which is why the celebrity trade came for the food and not just the scene. When the biggest movie star in America eats your steak, word carries — and in a town Scottsdale’s size, it carried fast.
The Safari’s genius was concentration. With the Brown Derby, the coffee shop and the French Quarter under one roof, the hotel covered every hour: breakfast counter in the morning, power lunches, supper-club dinners, and a nightclub that ran until the desert got cold. Guests never had to leave, and locals treated it as a public square with a liquor license. For context on what surrounded it, this was the same era when the Pink Pony fed spring-training baseball a few blocks south — Scottsdale Road in the 1960s was a short strip with an outsized share of legendary rooms.
The move regulars mastered: dinner early, entertainment late, and a table position with sight lines to both the stage and the door — because at the French Quarter, watching who walked in was part of the program.
Modernism, glamour and a 1999 demolition
The French Quarter’s story is really the Safari’s, and the Safari’s story is Scottsdale arguing with itself. In the 1950s and 60s, the town’s official identity was “The West’s Most Western Town” — wagon wheels, wood facades, the whole costume. Al Beadle’s Safari was the counter-thesis: clean lines, glass, a resort that looked like the jet age instead of the frontier. That tension defined Scottsdale for decades, and the Safari proved the sophisticated version could win. Its supper club imported New Orleans; its architecture imported the future.
For the 1960s, it worked spectacularly. The French Quarter and its showroom peers made Scottsdale a legitimate stop on the entertainment circuit, and the celebrity sightings — Wayne, Crosby, the parade of names that filled local columns — did for the town’s nightlife reputation what Trader Vic’s at the Valley Ho complex did for its cocktail credentials. This was Scottsdale learning it could sell glamour as convincingly as it sold the West, a lesson the city never unlearned.
The long decline was structural. By the 1980s and 90s, the resort business had moved to sprawling new properties with golf, spas and convention wings, and a 1950s hotel — however stylish — couldn’t compete on amenities. The Safari hung on for 42 years, longer than most of its generation, before closing in September 1998. The 1999 demolition stung twice: Scottsdale lost its original nightlife landmark and one of Beadle’s signature buildings in the same year, a preservation failure the city’s midcentury-modern advocates still cite.
What survived is influence. Every Scottsdale hotel that treats its restaurant and bar as the main event — and today, most of them do — is running the Safari’s playbook. The supper club died; the idea that the party belongs inside the hotel never did. The French Quarter just did it first, with better steaks and Duke Wayne at a corner table.