What it’s actually like
The northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street is the front door of the Main Street Arts District, and the building on it — a low, Western-styled block that reads as older than it is — has been The Legacy Gallery since the early 1990s. Before that it was the Wigwam shop, and before that, from a November morning in 1959 until 1965, it was Scottsdale’s F.W. Woolworth, soda fountain and all, built on the site of Earl’s Market. The gallery’s name has nothing to do with any of that, but it fits.
Inside is one of the largest and most established galleries in the district: more than a hundred nationally known representational and impressionist artists across paintings, sculpture, glass and jewelry, hung through a series of rooms that reward a slow lap. The core is Western and figurative work of the kind serious collectors fly in for — this is not the cowboy-print end of Main Street — but the range runs to landscape, still life and contemporary realism, and the staff are as comfortable with a first-time buyer as with a museum trustee.
Brad and Jinger Richardson opened Legacy in 1988 and are second-generation Main Street dealers; Jinger’s parents opened Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery in 1968, the first gallery on the street, and her mother Marilyn Murray helped the couple open this one. The name refers to what buyers do with the paintings: leave them to their families. The gallery has sister spaces in Jackson, Wyoming and Bozeman, Montana, and hosts the Scottsdale Art Auction, one of the largest fine-art auctions in the Southwest.
What to buy
A painting you will leave to someone. That is the name and the premise. The Western and impressionist canvases here are the district’s serious end, priced accordingly, and the staff will talk you through an artist’s market with candor.
Bronze. Sculpture from nationally known figures, from tabletop to monumental, is a Legacy strength and a Main Street tradition.
Glass and jewelry. The smaller end of the inventory, and the way to leave with something from the roster for a fraction of a canvas.
An auction catalog. If the Scottsdale Art Auction is on the calendar, ask; watching serious Western art change hands is a Scottsdale spectacle in itself.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street is the busiest intersection in Old Town and has no parking of its own. The free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a five-minute flat walk east along Main; Brown Avenue’s lots are closer and fuller. The Old Town on foot note maps the grid, and the Main Street Arts District guide covers the galleries that run west from the door.
Thursday evening is the moment. The ArtWalk runs on Main Street and Marshall Way after sunset, the galleries pour wine and stay open late, and Legacy’s corner is where most people start. High season is January through April, when the collectors are in residence and the Scottsdale Art Auction draws its crowd; summer afternoons are when you get the rooms and the staff to yourself. Daytime visits any day of the week are unhurried and welcome, and February’s Parada del Sol parade passes the front door.
Eat while you’re there
The Sugar Bowl is a block north on Scottsdale Road, pink since 1958 and the surviving soda fountain now that Woolworth’s is a gallery. Los Olivos on Second Street has fed the neighborhood since 1947. West along Main, the Rusty Spur Saloon pours in a 1921 bank and Malee’s Thai Bistro is the gallery row’s long-running dinner; Lulu Belle, the closed Main Street landmark of 1954 to the 1990s, is the ghost on the street from the Woolworth years.
How it got here
The corner has been retail since Scottsdale had retail. Earl Shipp’s Earl’s Market, the two-story grocery that stood out in the little downtown from 1935, held the northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street until 1959, when F.W. Woolworth opened a store on the site on November 5 of that year — one of the first national chains in town, with a soda fountain to rival the Sugar Bowl across the way. It lasted six years. When Woolworth’s closed in 1965 the Wigwam, an existing Scottsdale shop, moved into the distinctive Western-styled building and stayed until about 1990 or 1991.
The gallery that took over is a Main Street family story. In 1968 Jinger Richardson’s parents opened Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery, the first gallery on Main Street, at the beginning of the transformation that would make the 1970s and 1980s the decades the street turned from Western storefronts into an arts district. Twenty years later, in 1988, Jinger and her husband Brad Richardson opened The Legacy Gallery, with Jinger’s mother Marilyn Murray helping them do it. They named it for what their buyers do with the paintings, which is leave them to their children. In the early 1990s they moved into the old Woolworth building on the corner, and the gallery has anchored the district’s front door ever since.
It grew into one of the largest galleries in the Southwest, representing more than a hundred nationally known representational and impressionist artists and opening sister galleries in Jackson, Wyoming and Bozeman, Montana, the other capitals of the Western art trade. It also became a training ground: Jason Horejs, who would open Xanadu Gallery down the street in the 2000s, started at Legacy at seventeen in 1991. And it became the home of the Scottsdale Art Auction, one of the largest fine-art auctions in the region, which the gallery hosts and which turns Legacy into the center of the Western art market for a weekend each year.
Four businesses have held this corner since 1935: a grocery, a five-and-dime, a Western shop and an art gallery. That is the history of downtown Scottsdale in one building.