What was Lulu Belle?
Before Scottsdale had a nightlife district, it had one room that mattered. From 1953 through the 1960s, that room wore red velvet.
Lulu Belle opened on Main Street just east of Scottsdale Road in the exact year the town was perfecting its costume — “The West’s Most Western Town,” population a few thousand, hitching posts installed on purpose. But where the rest of downtown played the Western theme straight, Lulu Belle went baroque: Old West saloon meets Gay Nineties parlor meets Mississippi riverboat, a fever dream of velvet, gilt, and swinging doors that had no business coexisting and absolutely did. It was the deluxe version of the fantasy, and it worked instantly.
The menu led with barbecued ribs, and by all accounts they were good. But nobody drove in from the resorts for ribs alone. Lulu Belle was Scottsdale’s original see-and-be-seen room — the place where wintering Hollywood names, resort guests, and tourists clutching postcards converged with locals to watch each other in period costume. In its 1950s-60s prime it was internationally known, a fixture of the tourist circuit and the town’s social proof that little Scottsdale could stage glamour.
The decades after were a long dissolve — changing owners cycled the space through a jazz club, an ice cream parlor, a Mexican cantina — until the name finally faded out in the 1990s. The building later flipped burgers as David’s Hamburgers. The legend stayed in the velvet era, where it belongs.
The formula: fantasy, ribs, and the door
Lulu Belle understood something ahead of its time: theme is hospitality. Scottsdale’s 1950s downtown was already committed to Western dress-up, but most of it was storefront-deep. Lulu Belle built a total environment — the velvet, the chandeliers, the saloon-meets-showboat excess — so that walking in was the entertainment. Tourists got a story to take home; locals got a stage. Sixty years before “immersive” became a marketing word, Main Street had the real thing.
The ribs anchored it in substance. Barbecue was the right call for the room — indulgent, informal, eaten with your hands amid the finery, the exact high-low collision the decor promised. Drinks flowed accordingly. It was never fine dining and never wanted to be; it was a good time, professionally produced, at a moment when Scottsdale’s competition for that title was thin.
And the door was the show. In the 1950s and 60s, the Valley’s winter resort season imported genuine celebrity — film and television names thawing out at the desert resorts — and Scottsdale’s tiny downtown gave them exactly one obvious evening destination. The possibility that anyone might walk in was Lulu Belle’s renewable resource. Regulars learned to sit facing the entrance. Reports of who’d been in last night were downtown currency, traded over coffee alongside Sugar Bowl sundaes a few blocks away.
The later years teach the harder lesson. As ownership changed and the original theatrical conviction drained away, the space chased trends — jazz, ice cream, cantina — and each pivot spent down the legend a little further. A themed room without its impresario is just decor. By the time the 1990s closed the book, the velvet era had been over for a generation.
The room where Scottsdale learned to be seen
Lulu Belle’s deepest significance is that it prototyped the Scottsdale night out. The town of 1953 was a crossroads betting everything on tourism — the Parada del Sol parading its Western brand down the street, galleries sprouting, resorts multiplying on the town’s edges. What the bet needed was proof that visitors would come downtown after dark and spend. Lulu Belle was that proof. For fifteen-odd years it demonstrated that Scottsdale could manufacture scene — that a town of a few thousand could host a room with international name recognition — and every subsequent era of Old Town nightlife has been built on that demonstration.
Its peers tell the story of the era’s ecosystem. The Pink Pony up the street handled baseball and steaks; Lulu Belle handled glamour and spectacle; together with the galleries they made a downtown worth dressing for. When the 1950s and 1960s boom transformed Scottsdale from crossroads to resort city, these rooms were where the transformation went to celebrate itself nightly.
The long dissolve matters historically too. Lulu Belle’s concept-cycling decline through the 1970s and 80s tracked Old Town’s own identity drift, as the Western theme aged from earnest to kitsch and the city’s dining energy scattered toward newer corridors. The space’s eventual afterlife as a hamburger joint is almost too neat a metaphor: the extraordinary, worn down to the ordinary, on the same floorboards.
Honest assessment: strip the nostalgia and Lulu Belle was a themed rib joint with great lighting — and that’s precisely the achievement. It took the raw materials of a small desert town’s marketing slogan and staged them so well that celebrities showed up and the world heard about it. Scottsdale’s entire modern hospitality economy — the resorts, the scene rooms, the see-and-be-seen DNA that now wears designer labels at the Waterfront — descends in a straight line from a velvet saloon on Main Street. The costume changed. The show never closed.