What it’s actually like
Fifth Avenue bends west from Scottsdale Road, and about halfway along the bend there is a gap in the storefronts that most people register as an alley. It is not an alley. It is Craftsman Court, a single block of 1955 storefronts facing each other across a shaded lane, with deep overhangs, low rooflines, patios tucked into the corners and the kind of mid-century proportions that the rest of downtown Scottsdale spent fifty years demolishing.
The court was built for makers. In 1950 the Arizona Craft Center burned, and the silversmiths, potters and weavers who had worked there scattered into whatever cheap space downtown offered. Five years later the newly incorporated town built them a home: lanes of small studios where a craftsman could work in the back and sell in the front. That DNA is still legible — the units are small, the frontages are honest, and nothing about the place was designed to be driven past at forty miles an hour.
What it is today is a dining courtyard with boutiques attached. FnB has held the anchor unit since 2009, and a restaurant that important changes the gravity of a block. The lane fills at dinner and empties by ten; in the daytime it is the quietest, shadiest walk in Old Town, and the Fifth Avenue guide covers the busier street it hangs off.
The stores worth the walk
The boutiques and studios turn over on the normal Fifth Avenue cycle — jewelry, gifts, a gallery or two, the occasional working studio that keeps faith with 1955 — so any specific list is dated the week it is written. The rule is simple: walk the full lane, look in every window, and go into the courtyards, because the smallest and best shops in this district are always in the courts rather than on the street.
The honest local read is that you come to Craftsman Court to eat and stay to look at the architecture. Walk it once in daylight for the arcades and the overhangs, which are the best surviving example of what downtown looked like when it was new, and once at dusk when the patio lights come on and the court does what it was built to do.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
There is no parking in the court to speak of. The reliable move for the whole district is the Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard — free most of the time, about seven flat minutes to Fifth — or the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal. The Old Town on foot note maps the loop. Ride-share drop-offs work best at Fifth and Marshall Way by the Bronze Horse Fountain; naming the court itself confuses half the drivers in the city.
Timing follows the restaurants. In the cool season the court is a dinner destination from about five o’clock and a pleasant shaded browse before that. In summer it is a morning-and-evening place: coffee at Berdena’s before the heat, dinner after dark, nothing worth doing in between. The Thursday ArtWalk on Marshall Way, a block east, spills people onto Fifth around sunset and makes a table harder to get.
Eat while you’re there
FnB is the reason the block matters. Charleen Badman and Pavle Milic’s room serves weekly menus built from Arizona farms with an all-Arizona wine list, and it holds a James Beard Award and a Michelin Bib Gourmand — the most decorated restaurant in the state, in a 1955 artisans’ lane. Berdena’s, the closet-sized coffee bar around the corner, is the morning version of the same neighborhood. On Fifth proper, Citizen Public House is the gastropub with the famous chopped salad and Cartel Roasting Co. holds the far end of the street.
The ghost at the corner is Trader Vic’s, which poured mai tais at Fifth and Craftsman Court from 1962 to 1990 for anyone with a date to impress. The block has always eaten well.
How it got here
Scottsdale incorporated in 1951 with about two thousand residents and a decision to sell itself as a western resort village, and the 1950s were the decade it built the stage set. Fifth Avenue was laid out as a curving shopping street for tourists and winter residents. Craftsman Court was the part of that plan with a conscience.
The story starts with a fire. The Arizona Craft Center, a cooperative workshop-showroom founded in 1947, gathered the silversmiths, leather workers, potters and weavers who gave the tiny town its arts economy. In 1950 the building burned. The artisans did not leave; they scattered into cheap storefronts along Fifth Avenue and Main Street, and the town that wanted to sell the Southwest suddenly had the people who made it living downtown. In 1955 Craftsman Court was built for them — purpose-built lanes for craftspeople, a block where things were made rather than merely sold. That is the identity Fifth Avenue still trades on, and it started in this cul-de-sac.
The glamour came in the 1960s. Trader Vic’s opened at the corner in 1962, when the Hotel Valley Ho was hiding Hollywood a few blocks away, and for twenty-eight years the court was where Scottsdale drank rum out of a skull under a thatched roof. When Vic’s closed in 1990 the court went quiet for the better part of two decades — pleasant, shaded, a boutique row with a fading dining scene — while redevelopment flattened block after block of mid-century downtown around it.
Then in 2009 FnB opened in the court, and a restaurant became the reason to preserve a block. The lanes built for makers in 1955 turned out to be the ideal scale for a chef-owned room, and the court’s second act as the address for the most important cooking in Arizona is, in the end, the same act as its first: small units, real craft, a place where the work is done by the person who greets you at the door.