What was Myst?
Old Town has a block where nightclubs go to be reincarnated, and Myst was its middle life.
The building opened in August 1999 as Sanctuary, the most theatrical club the Entertainment District had yet seen. Its owners, Shawn Yari and Richard Kohan, had run Empire in Phoenix in the mid-1990s, and they spent like it: a French Moroccan and Casablanca-style exterior, a 200-year-old wooden entryway from a monastery in India, and 14,000 square feet inside divided into seven areas, with a dance floor on raised platforms, theme rooms, a “Divine Lounge” and a VIP section. Phoenix New Times described the buzz before it opened as amazingly intense.
A few years later Les and Diane Corieri, whose Axis-Radius had started the block’s club scene two years before Sanctuary arrived, bought it. In early 2004 they reopened it as Myst, at 7340 E Shoeman Lane: the Greek pillars and the hedonistic décor went, lime-green couches and flat screens came in, and VIP skyboxes went up over the dance floor. “A club always needs change,” Diane Corieri said.
Across Indian Plaza the Corieris also ran Suede, a small, plush ultra-lounge they opened in 2001. The two shared a block and, in the end, a fate. On May 15, 2012, both closed to be demolished for a pool-and-nightclub project, which opened in April 2013 as Maya. Maya is still there.
Two rooms on one block
Sanctuary was a set. Its whole pitch was arrival: the monastery door, the Moroccan facade, and then seven different rooms to wander through on the way to the floor. It belonged to the late-1990s idea that a nightclub should be an expensive place to get lost in. It opened the year after Radius, a few doors away, and the two pulled the same crowd up and down the block.
Myst was a remodel for the bottle era. The Corieris kept the bones and changed the point of view. The skyboxes put the VIP tables above the dance floor, so that buying a table bought you the view, and the lime-green and flat-screen look was 2004 down to the paint. Dress code enforced, cover charge variable, and, as Diane Corieri put it, the Scottsdale attitude intact.
Suede was the other half of the night. At 3,500 square feet it was a fraction of Myst’s size, with padded walls, cherry wood and two bars lit with teardrop lights and neon ice strips. It had a serious sound system and a run of resident DJs, J. Alan, MCB, Freddy “Circle” Krems and Kevin Brown among them, plus an annual Ghost Ball block party. It lasted more than a decade, through two recessions, which in that district is a long life.
What it was not was quiet. Nobody went to either for a conversation over dinner. For that, Old Town had Mabel’s on Main from 2009 and the older bars on Stetson like Martini Ranch.
The block that keeps being rebuilt
The story of this block is the story of how Scottsdale nightlife turns over. Sanctuary arrived in 1999 because Axis-Radius had proved that people would drive to Indian Plaza; the Corieris bought it, which is one way to deal with a competitor; and when the format aged, they knocked it down rather than redecorating again.
The replacement came out of a larger plan. A “Scottsdale Beach Club,” a nightlife-oriented pool complex, had first been proposed near Stetson Drive and Wells Fargo Avenue. In April 2012 the City Council gave final approval to build it instead on the block between Indian Plaza and Shoeman Lane, which meant Myst and Suede. Evening Entertainment Group announced both would close on May 15, and they were demolished that year. The club that opened on the site in April 2013 was Maya, a Vegas-style day club with a pool and an indoor nightclub, and the Corieris’ company owned part of it. It filled at once, and two months later the Corieris closed Axis-Radius across the street.
There is a neat circle in the record. Maya’s later history runs through the Yari family’s Spellbound Entertainment Group and then Riot Hospitality Group, which reopened it after a full remodel in 2025 beside the new REMI. hotel. Shawn Yari, who opened Sanctuary on this block in 1999, appears again in that later chapter. In Scottsdale the people stay; it is the buildings that get torn down.
Honest assessment: Myst was a good club and never a great one; its fame was borrowed partly from Sanctuary before it and Maya after it. What it represents is the middle years of the Entertainment District, the 2000s, when the Old Town nightlife map was a row of big indoor clubs with velvet ropes. That map is gone. The day club that replaced it is the new one.