What it’s actually like
Walk into the Macy’s at Scottsdale Fashion Square and you are standing, more or less, where Scottsdale’s mall began. In 1961 this corner of Camelback and Scottsdale Roads was a new open-air shopping center with one department store to its name, and the name was Goldwater’s — Arizona’s own, the Phoenix chain descended from a family of frontier merchants, run for two decades by a man who had just left it for the United States Senate.
Goldwater’s was what a hometown department store used to be: the place a city’s families bought school clothes, wedding china, a good suit and a Christmas gift with a box worth keeping. Its arrival at Fashion Square told the Valley that the new center was serious, and for twenty-eight years the store anchored the mall through its first enclosures and expansions. Then in 1989 its out-of-state owners retired the name, and Arizona’s own department store became Robinson’s, then Robinson’s-May, then Macy’s, while the mall around it grew into the Southwest’s luxury flagship.
Nothing of the 1961 store is recognizable now. What survives is the corner it chose and the memory, among Scottsdale’s postwar generation, of what it meant that Goldwater’s had come to town.
What it sold
Everything a full-line department store sold, with an Arizona accent. The fashion floors leaned toward the resort wardrobe that Phoenix and Scottsdale dressed in — the chain had cultivated a reputation for style under Barry Goldwater’s management in the 1930s and 1940s — and the home departments furnished the ranch houses going up across the 1960s city. The Southwestern touch was real: Goldwater’s had been selling Native silver and regional goods since the mining-camp days, and the Scottsdale store sat two miles from the Fifth Avenue trade that made them.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The Fashion Square anchor position at Camelback and Scottsdale Roads, on the mall’s original footprint. Through the 1990s expansions the store was rebuilt and enlarged, and the Macy’s that occupies the position today inherited the space through the Robinson’s and Robinson’s-May years rather than the building. The Old Town guide covers the district; the Fashion Square guide covers the mall that grew around the store.
The mall it fed
Fashion Square’s own restaurants are the modern story — Nobu, Ocean 44, Toca Madera and the rest of the luxury row — and none of them existed while Goldwater’s did. The rooms that overlapped with the store’s era are a short walk away: the Sugar Bowl, pink since 1958, is where a Goldwater’s shopping trip ended for a generation of Scottsdale children, and Los Olivos on 2nd Street has been feeding downtown since 1947. Across the road, Camelview Plaza was the mall’s lost 1970s neighbor and is now part of the same footprint.
How it got here
The Goldwater story is the Arizona story in retail form. Michel Goldwater, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who had come west by way of California, opened trading posts with his sons in the mining camps of the Arizona Territory in the 1860s, following the strikes from the Colorado River to Prescott. His son Baron opened the Phoenix store in the 1890s, and by the 1920s Goldwater’s was the capital’s leading department store — the place the territory-turned-state bought its respectability. Baron’s son Barry took over in the 1930s, ran the business with a merchant’s flair for two decades, and left it in 1953 for the Senate and, eventually, a presidential nomination.
Scottsdale in 1961 was a town of about ten thousand people that had just voted itself a city charter and was building a downtown on the western-village theme. Fashion Square, opening that year at Camelback and Scottsdale Roads as an open-air center, needed an anchor that told the Valley the little resort town could support real retail, and Goldwater’s — the most prestigious name in Arizona shopping — was that anchor. The 1960s history marks the opening as one of the decade’s turning points, and the store made it one.
The family sold the chain to Associated Dry Goods in 1962, a year after the Scottsdale store opened, and the rest of Goldwater’s life was lived under owners in New York and then St. Louis. May Department Stores bought Associated in 1986 and, in 1989, did what national chains did to regional names: it folded Goldwater’s into its Robinson’s division. The Fashion Square store changed its sign, changed it again to Robinson’s-May in 1993, and again to Macy’s in 2006, while the mall around it — expanding from the 1990s onward into the Southwest’s dominant luxury center — outgrew any need for a hometown anchor.
Arizona-owned department-store retail ended with that 1989 sign change, quietly, in the mall Goldwater’s had opened. The senator outlived his family’s store by nine years.