What it’s actually like
For fifty years, Papago Plaza was the first thing you saw when you entered Scottsdale from the south, and it told you the truth about the neighborhood before you got there. Adobe-look stucco, rounded parapets, deep-set windows, a run of storefronts that looked like a pueblo had been zoned for retail — and, by the time most of us knew it, faded signage, tired paint and a tenant mix that had gotten scruffier and more interesting with every decade the money spent moving north.
It stood at Scottsdale Road and McDowell, the south Scottsdale gateway corner, across the intersection from the ground where Los Arcos Mall rose in 1969 and fell in 1999. Where Los Arcos was the neighborhood’s enclosed, air-conditioned downtown, Papago Plaza was its everyday errand strip — the dry cleaner, the diner, the shop you could not describe to anyone — dressed in the most distinctive commercial architecture on the south side. Nobody would have called it beautiful. Everybody would have recognized it from a block away.
Then, in 2001, a craft-beer taproom moved into one of the storefronts and made the plaza hallowed ground. And in 2019 the whole thing was razed for a mixed-use redevelopment, because that is what happens to unfashionable landmarks on corners that have become fashionable again. The new project took the Papago name. It did not take anything else.
What it was like inside
Picture a mid-century strip center that had never been renovated into anonymity. The pueblo-revival details were real — thick-looking walls, stepped and rounded parapets against the sky, the vigas-and-plaster vocabulary of northern New Mexico applied to a Scottsdale parking lot. In the 1960s that was the regional style everybody wanted, the same impulse that gave civic Scottsdale its white pueblo-modern City Hall. By the 1990s it was a period piece, and by the 2010s it was the last of its kind on the corridor.
The storefronts were a working-neighborhood mix: services, a restaurant or two, small independents paying the kind of rent that only an aging center on the wrong side of town can offer. That was the plaza’s gift to the city. Cheap space in a landmark building is how you get a bar with thirty taps and a bottle cooler that became legend, and it is exactly the kind of space redevelopment erases first.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
There is nothing left to park for. The corner at Scottsdale and McDowell is under construction or newly built, depending on when you read this, and the pueblo strip exists only in photographs and in the memory of anyone who drank at Papago Brewing on a Tuesday.
What you can do is drive the corridor. McDowell Road east and west of Scottsdale Road was the Motor Mile, and the dealership lots that survive tell you what the plaza’s customers drove in. Across the intersection, SkySong’s white shade canopy marks the Los Arcos site and the beginning of the corridor’s comeback in 2008. The apartments and mid-rise offices along McDowell are the visible result, and Papago Plaza’s demolition is the price. The 2010s history page covers the remake; the 2020s page covers the vertical, redevelopment-driven growth that followed. Then go north on Scottsdale Road, where the unglamorous strip centers still hide some of the best-value kitchens in the city — the plaza’s real inheritance.
The restaurants it fed
One tenant made the plaza matter to the whole Valley. Papago Brewing’s taproom opened in 2001 in a Papago Plaza storefront — thirty taps, a bottle cooler that beer people still describe reverently, the Orange Blossom ale, couches, trivia-night energy and zero pretense — years before “craft” was a supermarket aisle. It taught Arizona to drink good beer from a strip-mall barstool, and half the Valley’s beer scene can trace its education to that room. It poured its last in early 2019, not from failure but from real estate, when the plaza came down. Huss Brewing acquired the brand and kept the beers alive.
The craft wave that Papago made possible arrived a decade later and mostly a mile or two north. Fate Brewing and Goldwater Brewing led south Scottsdale’s brewery boom in the 2010s; Craft 64 in Old Town and the beer-café hybrid of Sip Coffee & Beer House surfed the demand the taproom had spent years building. For the rest of the neighborhood’s table, Chula Seafood is the south Scottsdale fish counter people drive past Old Town to reach, and the neighborhood guide has the long list.
How it got here
Papago Plaza was built in the 1960s, the decade Scottsdale went from 10,000 people to nearly 68,000, almost all of them in the ranch-house grid between Old Town and the Tempe line. The families working at the Motorola plant on McDowell Road needed everyday retail close to home, and McDowell at Scottsdale Road was the obvious corner: the main road to Phoenix, the frontage that made it the Motor Mile, the intersection where Los Arcos Mall would open at the end of the decade. The plaza’s pueblo-revival dress was the regional taste of the moment — the same Southwestern-modern impulse that produced Bennie Gonzales’ Civic Center — and it gave a routine strip center a face that people would remember for fifty years.
The 1970s were the corner’s peak, when south Scottsdale was the center of the city’s gravity and Los Arcos across the street was its pride. The decline that followed was slow and shared: the money and the annexations went north, the 1990s emptied Los Arcos toward demolition, the dealerships thinned, and Papago Plaza aged in place at a corner that for a decade looked finished. That aging is what made it interesting. Cheap, characterful space in a landmark building is a magnet for independents, and in 2001 the most consequential of them moved in — a craft-beer taproom in a city whose nightlife ran on velvet rope.
SkySong changed the corner’s fate in 2008. The ASU campus under the shade sail restarted the McDowell corridor, apartments and offices followed through the 2010s, and the unfashionable southern edge became ripe for the remake. A mixed-use redevelopment targeted the plaza’s site — hotel, apartments, retail, the standard modern kit — and in 2019 the pueblo strip came down, taking the taproom with it. The demolition felt personal across the whole Valley’s beer community, and it stands as the cleanest example of the trade south Scottsdale made in its revival: the corridor got its future, and lost the building that had given it a face.