What were Jetz and Stixx?
Before there was an Entertainment District there was a strip mall with a movie theater, and the hottest rooms in Arizona were in it.
Jetz opened in 1992 in Camelback Mall, the 1963 center on the south side of Camelback Road east of Scottsdale Road, across from Fashion Square. Its owners were Les Corieri, who had been turning Valley bars into nightclubs since 1985, and Mark Drinkwater, a developer and the son of Mayor Herb Drinkwater. Corieri’s own description is the best one: Jetz was open for lunch, but it was more of a high-energy restaurant and bar. In 1993 the partners added Stixx next door, a pool hall that was, again in Corieri’s words, more of a nightclub with really nice pool tables.
For a few years in the middle of the 1990s the two rooms were the center of Scottsdale after dark. DJ Z-Trip, who played Fridays, called them two of the hottest clubs in Arizona. Drinkwater remembered them as a who’s who, with Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley in regularly, and Z-Trip adds Tiger Woods to the list. The VIP section at Stixx was a rope around a pool table.
They ended because the ground under them was worth more than they were. Developers wanted the mall for the Scottsdale Waterfront, the partners fought them in court and lost the location, and in 1996 they bought a block of empty offices on Indian Plaza instead. The club they built there, Axis, opened in August 1997 and started the district. Nobody ever announced the exact night Jetz and Stixx closed; the mall was razed by the end of the decade, and the Waterfront’s towers stand on the spot.
Two rooms in a dying strip mall
Jetz was the restaurant that was not really a restaurant. It served lunch, which gave it a daytime license and a daytime crowd, and then turned into a loud, packed bar at night. That double life, a kitchen by day and a dance floor after dark, is the formula the Corieris later used at Axis and that half of Old Town runs on today. The decor is not well recorded; what is recorded is the volume and the crowd.
Stixx was the club with the pool tables. It opened next door a year later, and the pool hall framing was mostly a way to get people in the door. The DJs ran the room: Z-Trip on Fridays, Aaron Scofield on Thursdays and Saturdays. Z-Trip’s memory of the era is of Barkley and Tiger Woods walking in and the DJs simply playing for them. The rope around the pool table was the only velvet rope in the place.
It was not quiet, and the city noticed. In December 1995 Phoenix New Times described Jetz as a fashionable Scottsdale watering hole that had drawn 119 visits from Scottsdale police in 18 months, prompted by, among other things, 13 assaults, two sexual assaults and three aggravated assaults, with liquor-department files describing patrons hitting each other over the head with bottles. The piece was about what it called the city’s war on hip-hop, and Jetz was one of the venues in the crosshairs. Read it as context for everything that came after: the Corieris have said the city was hard to deal with about opening clubs in the 1990s, and this is why.
What you would have found around it. A three-screen cinema, a grocery store, and a parking lot that on a Saturday night was the busiest place in town. For the rest of the Camelback Road story, including the theater, see our Camelback Mall guide; for what the Corieris did next, the Axis-Radius guide picks up in 1996.
From Camelback Mall to Indian Plaza
The Corieri line runs straight through these two rooms. Les Corieri bought a Tempe bar called Clancey’s in 1985 and made it a nightclub, then ran Trocadero’s and Ten Downing Street, where Drinkwater was already his partner. Jetz and Stixx, Drinkwater said later, really kicked the two of them off and took them to the next level. They were the first Corieri rooms with a national-name crowd, and the first in Scottsdale.
The Waterfront ended them. The idea of a canal-side district on the south side of Camelback Road had been around for years, and by the mid-1990s developers were treating Camelback Mall as part of it. Corieri said plainly that Jetz and Stixx were pushed out for the project, and that he and Drinkwater fought the developers in court. Losing that fight turned out to be the best thing that happened to them. The land they bought on Indian Plaza in 1996, for about $300,000 by Drinkwater’s memory, was a block of vacant offices and plywood where, as he put it, there was nothing back then. Axis opened there in August 1997, Radius next door in November 1998, and Sanctuary, SIX and Suede followed within four years. The Waterfront itself took another decade to build.
One loose end in the record is the address. The site’s own Camelback Mall guide, and Corieri’s account, put the clubs east of Scottsdale Road on the Waterfront site. A Phoenix New Times listing gives Jetz as 7077 E Camelback Road, and the paper’s 2023 retrospective says a Nordstrom now stands there, which would place it on the Fashion Square side of the intersection. We have not found a source that settles the footprint, so take the Waterfront as the answer the owners give and the Nordstrom wing as the one a 1990s phone book might.
Honest assessment: Jetz and Stixx matter for what they caused, not what they were. They were loud, crowded, briefly famous rooms in a strip mall that everyone knew was coming down, and they are remembered mostly by the people who worked in them. But every velvet rope on Saddlebag Trail descends from the rope around that pool table, and the Old Town nightlife map, from Axis-Radius to Maya, starts here. They belong near the top of the list of every bar and club in Scottsdale for that reason alone.