What it’s actually like
There is nothing to see, which is the point. Stand at Scottsdale and McDowell today and you get SkySong — the ASU innovation campus under a giant white shade sail, mid-rise offices, apartments, a garage. It is clean and busy and completely without memory. You would never guess that for thirty years this corner was where south Scottsdale went to buy school shoes, meet friends and turn nine years old.
Los Arcos Mall opened in 1969 as the city’s first enclosed mall, anchored by Sears and The Broadway, and it arrived at exactly the right moment. The ranch-house grid of south Scottsdale had been built almost all at once in the 1950s and 1960s for families working at the Motorola plant on McDowell Road, and McDowell itself had become the Motor Mile because it was the main road to Phoenix and had the frontage. Those families needed a downtown. Old Town was a tourist strip of Western-wear shops and galleries. Los Arcos was air-conditioned, had parking, and had a Sears. In the 1970s, it was the center of gravity for the whole city.
Then the money moved north, the anchors left, and by the late 1990s the mall was the dead spot at the end of a fading corridor. It closed in 1999 and came down. The corner sat as a hole while the city fought about what to build, and then it became a university campus. That whole arc — regional hub, decline, demolition, rebirth — is a one-parcel history of how Scottsdale grew, and it happened right here.
What it was like inside
Picture the standard regional mall of the era, because that is what it was: a long enclosed concourse between two department stores, terrazzo and planters, a fountain or two, the shoe stores and record shops and card shops of the 1970s, and the cold blast of air-conditioning that made it the neighborhood’s living room from May to September.
Sears did the heavy lifting — appliances, tools, Toughskins — and The Broadway did the dressing up. In between, the tenant that everyone who grew up here still talks about was Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour, the turn-of-the-century-themed sundae palace where birthday kids got free ice cream, drums banged, sirens wailed and The Zoo arrived on a stretcher carried by sprinting servers. A generation of south Scottsdale kids measured childhood in Farrell’s birthdays. Ask anyone over fifty who grew up in the 85257 about Los Arcos and they will not describe the Sears. They will describe the sirens.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The practical question now is how to see the ghost. SkySong has a garage, which makes it the only place in south Scottsdale where you will ever think about parking. Park there, walk out under the shade canopy, and orient yourself: Scottsdale Road runs north-south on the west side of the site, McDowell east-west along the south. The mall’s footprint covered the corner where the campus buildings now stand.
Then do the corridor. Drive McDowell west toward Phoenix and you pass what is left of the Motor Mile, the car-dealership frontage that made this road matter. Drive Scottsdale Road north toward Osborn and you are on the unglamorous strip that now hides some of the best-value kitchens in the city, the neighborhood’s real inheritance from the Los Arcos era. The south Scottsdale guide has the full list. Go in the cool season at dusk, when SkySong’s canopy lights up and it looks, briefly, like the future the city promised in 2005.
The restaurants it fed
The mall’s own dining was the food court and Farrell’s, and Farrell’s is the only one anyone remembers. Its Arizona locations closed in the 1980s as the chain contracted nationally, so the birthday palace vanished first and the mall spent its last decade without its heart.
Around it, the corner fed a whole ecosystem of south Scottsdale institutions. Just west along McDowell, Papago Plaza held the pueblo-style storefronts where Papago Brewing later taught Arizona craft beer from 2001 until the plaza was razed in 2019. Up Scottsdale Road, Avanti ran its black-lacquer supper club for thirty-six years, and Bobby McGee’s served dinner in costume to the same families who shopped at Los Arcos on Saturday. The mall was the anchor of a neighborhood that ate well and cheaply, and that part, at least, survived it.
How it got here
Los Arcos opened at the end of the 1960s, the decade Scottsdale became a charter city, built Bennie Gonzales’ Civic Center, opened the Airpark and grew from about 10,000 people to nearly 68,000. Almost all of that growth was in the south, in the ranch-house grid between Old Town and the Tempe line, and the mall was the commerce keeping score: an enclosed, air-conditioned downtown for neighborhoods that had never had one. Sears and The Broadway were the anchors by most accounts, and for the 1970s it worked exactly as designed.
The decline was structural, not sudden. Through the 1980s Scottsdale annexed its way north toward the McDowells, and the money followed. Fashion Square at Camelback grew into the region’s dominant mall through its 1992-onward expansions; new power centers like the Pavilions opened on the 101 corridor; and the McDowell Road Motor Mile, which had given the corner its traffic, thinned out as dealerships chased the freeway. By the mid-1990s Los Arcos was losing anchors and emptying toward demolition, and the corner that had been the retail heart of the city was the symbol of south Scottsdale’s slide.
What came next is the part of the story the city still argues about. A proposal to replace the mall with a hockey arena — the Coyotes were shopping for a home — became one of the most contentious fights in Scottsdale’s modern history, splitting the neighborhood and the council before it collapsed. The mall closed in 1999, was demolished, and for years the corner was rubble and weeds while the city’s next-generation planning debate played out over what should replace it.
The answer, when it came, was unusual for Scottsdale: not retail, not condos, but a university. In 2005 the city and the ASU Foundation agreed to rebuild the site as SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center, and it opened in 2008 under the tensile shade canopy that gave it its name — the same year the financial crisis hit, as the 2000s history records. SkySong brought thousands of jobs, restarted the McDowell corridor, and set off the apartment-and-office wave that finally gave south Scottsdale its renaissance.
Los Arcos held the south together for thirty years, and when it died, the city had to decide whether the south was worth saving. It decided yes, eventually, and the campus under the sail is what that decision looks like.