What is Porters Western Saloon?
Everyone in Old Town knows the building with the horse. It’s a plain two-story brick box on Brown Avenue, painted red, with a pinto horse statue standing on the second-floor balcony. From 1929 it was Scottsdale’s first post office building. After the war it became Porter’s Western Wear, and the horse went up. Since June 14, 2019, it has been Porters Western Saloon.
The bar belongs to the family of Grey Halpin, a Scottsdale native whose family also owned The Blue Moose Bar & Grill and the Old Town Gypsy boutique when the bar opened. They had been looking for a bar location in Old Town for about three years when the building came up. “We liked the building and the historic nature,” Halpin told Phoenix New Times when it opened. They cleaned up the horse, which the bar calls the General, and put it back.
Inside, the room is long and narrow: about 40 seats, a long bar down the right side, high-tops on the left. The renovation uncovered the old brick walls, and the owners added cobalt-blue flocked wallpaper and a crystal chandelier. The result is a cocktail bar dressed as a frontier parlor, which suits a building that was turned into a Western stage set in 1949.
The drinks are the point. The specialty list has been named for the building and the street from the start: the Postmaster, the Blacksmith (after Cavalliere’s down the block), the Sonoran Sunset, and the El Diablo, a jalapeño vodka, mango and ginger cocktail topped with cilantro. There’s a short wine list and draft beer that includes Huss Scottsdale Blonde.
When to go, and what’s upstairs
Afternoons are for the bar. Porters opens at noon on weekdays and 11 a.m. on weekends, and stays open until midnight, or 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. A weekday afternoon is when you can get a stool and talk to the bartender. Weekend nights are busier, and the bar takes online reservations for tables.
Watch for the pop-ups. The second floor was apartments and later offices in the post office years. Porters now calls it The Post and uses it as a private room for parties, and twice a year it becomes something else. In December 2025 the bar turned into the North Pole, with an inflatable candy-cane arch in front of the horse, wrapped presents on the walls and more than a dozen holiday cocktails, walk-in only. This fall the upstairs apartment is Porter’s Haunted Saloon, “filled with the skeletons of past regulars,” with a blood-red vodka cocktail served from a blood bag. It runs Thursday through Sunday through November 1, 2026.
Make it a Brown Avenue crawl. Porters sits in the oldest stretch of Old Town. Mexican Imports, in Johnny Rose’s 1923 pool hall, is across the street. The Old Adobe Mission and The Mission are a block south, and the Rusty Spur Saloon, in the 1921 Farmers State Bank, is around the corner on Main Street. Saba’s, the other old Western-wear name, trades up the street at Brown and First Avenue. Our Old Town on foot route covers all of it, and our guide to Old Town nightlife covers the bars further north.
Parking. Use the free public garages and lots around the Civic Center and Brown Avenue and walk. Brown Avenue’s curbside spaces turn over fast on weekend nights.
From mail counter to Western store to saloon
The building’s first life was civic. Scottsdale’s mail was handled at a counter inside stores on Main Street from 1897, beginning with the general store at Brown and Main. In 1928 construction began on the first building in town meant only for the post office, and the city dates it to 1929. Townspeople came in twice a day to check the deliveries from Phoenix, and two rental apartments upstairs were reached by an outside stair. After World War II the town needed a bigger post office and the mail moved out.
Its second life was the 1940s reinvention of downtown as “The West’s Most Western Town.” In 1949 the building was painted red, the two post office doors were bricked in and it became a store, and the city’s Arts Colony history says it “became Porter’s Western Wear in the late 1940s.” The city did the same to its neighbors: the 1921 drugstore became Saba’s, and the 1921 bank became the Rusty Spur. Porter’s stayed for more than sixty years. The saloon’s own history says the store, and the horse above it, were there from 1949 to 2015. The building went onto the Scottsdale Historic Register in 2000, and the city’s report noted it was still “popularly known as the ‘Porters.’”
The third life began in 2019. The Halpins kept the name, the red brick, the horse and the plaque out front that reads “Built in 1929 as Scottsdale’s first full time post office, this structure served as a gathering place for local townsfolk.” Halpin told New Times he wanted it “cozy, homey, upscale but not intimidating,” and added: “It is such a touristy location, but I really want the locals to embrace it.”
That’s harder than it sounds on Brown Avenue, where most storefronts sell turquoise and souvenirs to visitors. But the bar has lasted through the pandemic and into its seventh year, and the holiday pop-ups have made it a seasonal destination for locals. A building that was once where the whole town met to collect the mail is, again, a place people go to see each other.