What was Mabel Murphy’s?
Only in 1970s Scottsdale could a bar be founded on the business model of “my other restaurant is too popular.”
That’s the true origin of Mabel Murphy’s. Bob Sikora — the impresario whose Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration had servers in costume, antiques on every surface, and waits stretching past the hour mark — opened Mabel Murphy’s in 1972 as the pressure valve: a drinking-and-dancing spot where his overflow crowds could cocktail and flirt until their tables called. The overflow room promptly became a destination itself, which tells you everything about the era’s appetite.
Mabel Murphy’s belonged to the great fern-bar wave — the hanging plants, stained glass, and theatrical good times that defined Scottsdale nightlife in the seventies, when the town was minting a new kind of Sun Belt social scene. There was dancing, there were cocktails by the trayful, and there was American bar fare that nobody drove across town for but everybody ordered.
And then it did something fern bars almost never did: it survived. Long after the disco decade folded, Mabel Murphy’s carried on at Main and Goldwater as a proper neighborhood bar — famously going green and gold as the Valley’s Packers outpost — until the building sold in 2009 and a new gastropub era took the corner. Thirty-seven years is a geological age in Scottsdale nightlife. The overflow room outlasted nearly everything it was built to serve.
How an overflow room became an institution
The genius of Mabel Murphy’s was structural. Bobby McGee’s manufactured demand it couldn’t seat; Sikora simply built a second room to monetize the wait. Guests got their name on the list, walked over, and entered a holding pattern engineered to be more fun than the destination — drinks flowing, music playing, dance floor open. Plenty of parties reportedly stopped caring whether the table ever came through. In an era before pagers and reservation apps, it was hospitality’s most elegant queue-management system: make the line a party.
The room itself ran the full fern-bar playbook. Warm wood and greenery instead of the western kitsch that still dominated Old Town’s daytime identity, cocktails that leaned sweet and social, and a crowd that mixed young Scottsdale professionals with the resort visitors just discovering that this desert town had a night side. Through the seventies it was less a bar than a rite — where you went before, after, or instead of everywhere else.
The second act was humbler and maybe more endearing. As Scottsdale’s scene machinery moved on to newer concepts, Mabel Murphy’s settled into the corner-bar life on Main Street: regulars, game days, familiar bartenders. Its late-period fame as a Green Bay Packers bar — a full house of cheeseheads in the middle of the gallery district on winter Sundays — was the kind of identity no consultant would ever design, which is exactly why it worked. Snowbirds from Wisconsin needed a home field; a 1972 fern bar gave them one.
That long, unglamorous middle age is why people remember it warmly. Scenes fade; bars that become habits get mourned.
Sikora’s Scottsdale, and what the fern bars started
To understand why Mabel Murphy’s existed, you have to understand what Bob Sikora pulled off in Scottsdale. Bobby McGee’s Conglomeration was one of the great theme-restaurant success stories of its era — servers in character costumes, salvaged-antique decor, a formula so potent it spun into a national chain. In early-seventies Scottsdale it was a phenomenon, and phenomena create real-estate opportunities next door. Mabel Murphy’s was Sikora reading his own room: the crowds wanted somewhere to be seen while waiting to be fed.
The larger context is that the 1970s were when Scottsdale nightlife was invented as an industry. The town had spent the fifties and sixties selling daytime — sun, golf, western cosplay along the storefronts near the Rusty Spur Saloon. The fern-bar generation built the night shift: theatrical rooms where singles culture, cocktail culture, and Sun Belt prosperity collided. Mabel Murphy’s and its siblings established a template Old Town has never abandoned — only redecorated. The lineage runs straight from those dance floors through the martini-bar nineties of places like AZ88 and Martini Ranch to today’s DJ-driven taco cantinas. Scottsdale keeps rebuilding the same great night out with new wallpaper.
The ending, fittingly for Old Town, was a handoff rather than a demolition. When the Main-and-Goldwater building sold in 2009, chef Aaron May — then one of the Valley’s busiest restaurateurs — opened Mabel’s on Main in the space, a speakeasy-styled gastropub that borrowed half the old name. The gesture was telling: even a new-generation concept wanted the ghost’s endorsement. Few Scottsdale bars from 1972 got a namesake; most just got a wrecking ball.
The honest assessment: Mabel Murphy’s was never the main event — it was the essential supporting act, first for Bobby McGee’s, then for the whole neighborhood, for nearly four decades. Scottsdale nightlife is a story of headliners, but the bars people actually miss are the ones that were simply always there. This one was, longer than almost any of them.