Shopping in Scottsdale, decoded by a local

Fifth Avenue Shops

Fifth Avenue is the curving boutique street west of Scottsdale Road that has been Old Town's 'shopping street' since the early 1950s — Southwestern jewelry, western wear, galleries and gift shops along shaded courtyards, with Craftsman Court, a single mid-century lane off the curve, holding the best restaurants in the city. It never got redeveloped, which is the whole charm.

Bronze Horse Fountain · Craftsman Court · FnB · Citizen Public House · Berdena's · Cartel Roasting Co.

Kierland Commons

Kierland Commons is the open-air 'main street' at Scottsdale Road and Greenway-Hayden Loop that taught the Valley a shopping center could feel like a neighborhood — tree-lined streets, angled parking, and a restaurant row that became north Scottsdale's de facto downtown. It carries a Scottsdale address and sits entirely inside Phoenix.

Crate & Barrel · Anthropologie · Tommy Bahama · North Italia · Zinc Bistro · Mastro's Ocean Club

Scottsdale Fashion Square

Scottsdale Fashion Square is roughly two million square feet at Scottsdale and Camelback — the largest mall in the Southwest, the only one in Arizona where Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom share a roof, and the place P.F. Chang's was invented. It is also, in July, the best air-conditioned walk in the city, which locals value more than the handbags.

Neiman Marcus · Nordstrom · Dillard's · Macy's · Harkins Camelview · Nobu

Los Arcos Mall

Los Arcos Mall opened in 1969 at Scottsdale and McDowell Roads as the city's first enclosed mall, anchored by Sears and The Broadway, and for a generation it was the retail heart of south Scottsdale — the birthday-at-Farrell's, back-to-school, air-conditioned downtown for the ranch-house grid around it. It lost its anchors and its customers through the 1990s, closed in 1999, and after a contentious arena fight the rubble became SkySong, ASU's innovation center, in 2008.

Sears · The Broadway

The Borgata of Scottsdale

The Borgata opened in 1981 on Scottsdale Road near Lincoln Drive as a replica of the Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano — brick towers, crenellations, cobbled courtyards — wrapped around boutiques, a farmers market and the celebration restaurants of a generation. It was beloved, endlessly photographed and chronically underperforming as retail, cycled through owners and reinvention schemes, and faded out as a shopping village in the 2010s before the towers found a second act as a dining destination.

Mancuso's · Cafe Terra Cotta · Frankie's Patio Cafe

Hilton Village

The Shops at Hilton Village is the low-key, upscale open-air center attached to the Hilton resort at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive — AJ's Fine Foods, a Venetian trattoria that has not changed since 1997, and a bench of unflashy locals' spots at the corridor's busiest crossroads. It was one of the city's first experiments in giving a hotel its own walkable street, decades before Kierland made the idea fashionable.

AJ's Fine Foods · Veneto Trattoria

Main Street & Marshall Way Arts District

The blocks of Main Street west of Scottsdale Road and Marshall Way north toward the canal hold Scottsdale's gallery concentration — Western bronze and landscape painting on Main, contemporary work on Marshall — and every Thursday night since 1975 they open their doors for the oldest continuously running ArtWalk in the country. Galleries come and go; the ritual does not.

Scottsdale's Museum of the West · Thursday ArtWalk · Virtù Honest Craft · Sel

Market Street at DC Ranch

Market Street is the village center of DC Ranch — a few blocks of stone-and-stucco storefronts, a gourmet grocer, patios and a prime steakhouse laid out like a small-town main street at the foot of the McDowell Mountains. It opened in 2003 to give a master-planned community a heart, and it is the best example in Scottsdale of a shopping center that actually works as a neighborhood.

AJ's Fine Foods · Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar · Grimaldi's Pizzeria · Armitage Wine Lounge

Scottsdale Promenade

Scottsdale Promenade is the big-box-and-restaurant hybrid at Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, a mile north of Kierland — Nordstrom Rack, Trader Joe's, a ring of chain restaurants and The Capital Grille, serving the Airpark's office parks by day and north Scottsdale's errand runs by night. Nobody plans a vacation around it; everybody who lives up here is in it once a week.

Nordstrom Rack · Trader Joe's · The Capital Grille

Scottsdale Quarter

Scottsdale Quarter is the mixed-use retail, office and residential district that opened in 2009 directly across Scottsdale Road from Kierland Commons — bigger, newer and louder than its neighbor, with a garage that never fills, a theater, a rooftop pool on a steakhouse and the original True Food Kitchen. Together the two centers are one district, and this is the half that is actually in Scottsdale.

Apple · RH · Pottery Barn · West Elm · iPic Theaters · True Food Kitchen

Scottsdale Waterfront

The Scottsdale Waterfront is the mid-2000s development that turned an 1885 irrigation canal into an address — condo towers, canal-side restaurant patios and the Soleri Bridge along Camelback Road, directly across from Fashion Square. It is Old Town's polished end, and for ten November nights during Canal Convergence it is the best free show in Arizona.

Olive & Ivy · P.F. Chang's flagship · Maple & Ash · Culinary Dropout · Soleri Bridge

The Pavilions at Talking Stick

The Pavilions is where Scottsdale buys a television, a drill and a bag of dog food, then stays for the Saturday-night car show. It opened in 1989 as Scottsdale Pavilions on Salt River Pima-Maricopa land, one of the largest power centers in the country at the time and one of the first major shopping centers built on tribal land anywhere.

Target · The Home Depot · Best Buy · PetSmart · Ross Dress for Less

The Shops at Gainey Village

The Shops at Gainey Village is the upscale open-air center at Scottsdale Road and Doubletree Ranch Road, at the gates of Gainey Ranch — a strip of boutiques, salons and a big health club wrapped around one of the most heavily trafficked restaurant rows in the city. People who could not find the community's gates still say they are 'going to Gainey' on a Sunday morning, and this is what they mean.

Village Health Club & Spa · Hash Kitchen · Pomo Pizzeria Napoletana

Camelview Plaza

Camelview Plaza was the 1970s open-air shopping center on the west side of Scottsdale Road at Camelback, directly across from Scottsdale Fashion Square, best remembered for the Harkins Camelview theater that showed the Valley its foreign and independent films. Fashion Square's late-1990s expansion absorbed the site, bridged Camelback Road to connect the two, and left the Camelview name alive only on a movie marquee.

Harkins Camelview

Papago Plaza

Papago Plaza was the pueblo-style shopping center at Scottsdale Road and McDowell Road — a 1960s strip of adobe-look stucco, rounded parapets and faded signage that stood as south Scottsdale's gateway landmark for half a century and, from 2001, housed the Papago Brewing taproom that taught the Valley to drink craft beer. It was razed in 2019 for a mixed-use redevelopment that took the plaza's name and none of its soul.

Scottsdale Galleria

The Scottsdale Galleria opened in 1991 on Scottsdale Road in downtown as an upscale enclosed mall with a dramatic multi-story atrium, and it failed within about two years, closing in 1993. The building sat mostly empty for the rest of the decade before being converted into offices as the Galleria Corporate Centre — Scottsdale's most expensive retail lesson, and the one that proved downtown wanted galleries and bars, not a mall.

Cavalliere's Blacksmith Shop

George Cavalliere set up his forge in the Scottsdale townsite in 1910, built the adobe shop on Brown Avenue in 1920, and his family has run it ever since — Scottsdale's oldest continuously operating business, now making ornamental ironwork instead of horseshoes. It is the one building in Old Town that was authentically Western before anyone thought to sell the idea.

Custom ornamental ironwork — a gate, a railing, a fire screen — made by the family that shod the town's horses

Saba's Western Wear

The Saba family opened a dry-goods store on Main Street in 1921 and never left downtown, growing into the Valley's best-known Western-wear name with its flagship still in the heart of Old Town. It is the rare Scottsdale institution that predates the cowboy theming it now sells.

A pair of properly fitted boots, sized by someone who has done it for decades

The Poisoned Pen

Barbara Peters opened a mystery bookstore on Goldwater Boulevard in 1989 and turned it into one of the most famous independent bookshops in America, known for an author-event calendar that reads like a bestseller list and shelves of signed first editions. It is the one Old Town store that people fly in for.

A signed first edition from an author who stood in this room a week ago

AJ's Fine Foods

The Bashas' family's upscale Arizona grocer, and the Hilton Village store at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive is the flagship of the resort corridor — prepared foods, a real wine cellar, a bakery, a flower shop and the aisles locals use to stock a casita or a Paradise Valley dinner party. It is the grocery store as a resort amenity.

The prepared-foods counter and a bottle from the wine cellar for a casita dinner you didn't cook

Antique Trove

A big multi-dealer antiques mall on Scottsdale Road south of Old Town that has been a weekend habit for Valley collectors for decades, with booth after booth of mid-century furniture, Western and Native collectibles, vintage jewelry and the accumulated attic of the Sunbelt. It is where the contents of Scottsdale's older houses go when their owners move on, and where the next generation buys them back.

Mid-century Arizona — a Frankoma platter, a cowboy-motif lamp, a Valley souvenir from the resort era

Bischoff's Shades of the West

The largest Southwestern store in Old Town, sprawling across the Main Street and Brown Avenue corner with Native American jewelry, pottery, kachinas, Western décor and everything a visitor imagines when they hear the word Scottsdale. Its more serious sibling, Bischoff's Gallery, sits nearby for the collector end of the same trade.

A piece of Native American silver or a kachina you'll still be explaining to guests in twenty years

Gilbert Ortega Galleries

The Ortega family's Native American jewelry and art stores have been a fixture of Old Town's Western blocks for decades, at times occupying several storefronts at once, and the name is shorthand for turquoise-and-silver Scottsdale. It is the place visitors go to buy the real thing at a scale no small trading post can match.

A signed Navajo, Zuni or Hopi bracelet with the maker's hallmark inside the cuff

Guidon Books

A specialist bookshop devoted to Western Americana and the Civil War that has been a Scottsdale fixture since 1964, moving between Old Town addresses but never changing its subject. If it happened west of the Mississippi or between 1861 and 1865, Guidon probably has a book on it.

An out-of-print Arizona history you have been hunting for years

Mexican Imports

A Brown Avenue import shop from the mid-1950s that still sells Talavera, punched tin, blown glass and folk art out of one of Old Town's original Western storefronts, making it one of the oldest continuously operating stores in the district. It is what every 'Mexican imports' store in America is imitating, and it got here first.

Hand-painted Talavera — a platter, a set of tiles, or the sink you didn't know you wanted

Porter's Western Wear

A Phoenix saddlery name from the early twentieth century whose Scottsdale store has outfitted the Parada del Sol crowd for decades from the Western blocks of Old Town. Where Saba's is the hometown name, Porter's is the Valley's old saddle-shop lineage transplanted to Main Street.

A working-grade felt hat and the boots to go under it

Sphinx Date Co. Palm & Pantry

Scottsdale's date company began as the Sphinx Date Ranch in 1951 and lives on as a pantry shop on Scottsdale Road selling Arizona dates, date shakes and a tightly edited shelf of local food. It is the most Arizona thing you can put in a suitcase, and one of the last direct links to the town's farm-town past.

A box of Arizona-grown Medjools and a date shake for the walk out

Hi-Health

Founded in Scottsdale in 1972, Hi-Health grew into Arizona's own vitamin and supplement chain, a strip-mall fixture in every Valley neighborhood with a staff that actually knew the products, before closing all of its stores in 2020. It is one of the quieter losses on the list of homegrown Arizona brands.

The house-brand vitamins and the clerk who remembered what you took