What it’s actually like
The Scottsdale Waterfront looks like it was conjured from nothing on a canal bank, and that is the wrong way to read it. The ground it stands on, the south side of Camelback Road east of Scottsdale Road, was a shopping center for thirty-five years. Camelback Mall opened in 1963, two years after Fashion Square across the road, as the unglamorous neighbor: a strip with a grocery store, a row of shops and a big parking lot, the kind of center every 1960s intersection got. What made it more than that was the movie house. The Camelback Cinema I-II-III opened on May 2, 1965, and for a generation it was where central Scottsdale went to the pictures.
The center’s second life is the one people under sixty remember. In 1992 the nightlife impresario Les Corieri partnered with developer Mark Drinkwater, son of the mayor, to open Jetz, a high-energy restaurant-bar, in the aging strip, and in 1993 they added Stixx, a pool hall, next door. For a few years in the mid-1990s they were two of the hottest clubs in Arizona, and the Camelback Mall parking lot on a Saturday night was the center of Scottsdale’s social universe, in a way that the polished Entertainment District a few blocks south has never quite matched.
It could not last, and nobody expected it to. By the mid-1990s developers were eyeing the site for the Waterfront, the canal-side mixed-use district that Scottsdale had been imagining for years. Harkins, the cinema’s last operator, closed the Camelback Cinema on February 28, 1998, and the center was razed in the late 1990s. The towers went up in the 2000s. Nothing of the mall survives, not a wall, not a sign, not a parking curb.
What it was like inside
A strip center of its era: a grocery store at one end, small shops in a row under a continuous canopy, the three-screen cinema as the anchor and the draw, all of it facing a parking lot that faced Camelback Road. The cinema was the reason to come; the grocery was the reason to keep coming. By the 1990s the shops had aged into the sort of tenants a center gets when its owners are waiting for a buyer, and the clubs took over the energy, loud and crowded and open late, which is the version of Camelback Mall that most of the city remembers.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The site is the Scottsdale Waterfront, the district between Camelback Road and the Arizona Canal east of Scottsdale Road, with its shops, restaurants, offices and condominium towers. The Soleri Bridge and Plaza and the Arizona Canal path mark the southern edge of what was the mall’s parking lot; the Canal Convergence festival fills the same ground with light each year. Across the road is Fashion Square, whose expansion in the 1990s absorbed Camelview Plaza, the other lost center of the intersection. The Old Town guide covers the district south of the canal, and the Waterfront’s garages are the parking.
The successors worth a visit
The Waterfront’s own restaurants are the direct successors, occupying the ground where the cinema and the clubs stood; Olive & Ivy on the canal is the one with the view. For the neighborhood’s surviving 1960s counter, the Sugar Bowl, pink since 1958, is a short walk down Scottsdale Road, and it was serving sundaes to the Camelback Cinema’s matinee crowd for the theater’s entire run. For the nightlife lineage, the Entertainment District a few blocks south is where Jetz and Stixx’s crowd migrated after 1998, louder and bigger and with none of the pool tables. For the Drinkwater family’s other business, Drinkwater’s Liquor & Cheese at Scottsdale Road and Shea is the store where Mark Drinkwater worked before he became a developer.
How it got here
The intersection of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads became the city’s retail crossroads in 1961, when Fashion Square opened as an open-air center with Goldwater’s as its anchor. Every corner of a crossroads like that gets developed, and in 1963 the south side of Camelback east of Scottsdale Road got Camelback Mall: a grocery store, a row of shops and a parking lot, the neighborhood-center counterpart to the fashion mall across the street. The 1960s filled the surrounding blocks with the ranch houses whose families would shop there.
The cinema made it a destination. The Camelback Cinema I-II-III opened on May 2, 1965 under Associated Independent Theatres, three screens at a time when that was a multiplex, and for the next three decades it was the movie house for central Scottsdale, passing eventually to Harkins, the Valley chain that ran it at the end. The grocery fed the neighborhood, the shops turned over, and the center did what neighborhood centers do, which is to be useful without being memorable, for about twenty-five years.
Then the 1990s arrived and the aging strip found a new use. Les Corieri, the nightlife impresario, saw the parking lot and the cheap space and the location across from the mall, and in 1992 he partnered with Mark Drinkwater, son of Mayor Herb Drinkwater and a developer in his own right, to open Jetz, a high-energy restaurant-bar. Stixx, a pool hall, followed next door in 1993. Together they were called two of the hottest clubs in Arizona, and for a few years the Camelback Mall, of all places, was where the Valley went out. It was also, in retrospect, the rehearsal for the Entertainment District that Scottsdale would build a decade later a few blocks south.
The site was too valuable to stay a strip. By the mid-1990s developers were assembling plans for the Scottsdale Waterfront, a canal-side district of shops, restaurants, offices and residential towers that would give the city the urban waterfront it had never had, and Camelback Mall sat on exactly the land they needed. Harkins closed the cinema on February 28, 1998. The center was razed in the late 1990s, the Waterfront rose through the 2000s, and a place that had been a grocery, a movie house and the hottest bar in the state became a memory with a very good address.