What it’s actually like
Every growing city builds one of these at its busiest freeway interchange, and Scottsdale’s is at the corner where Scottsdale Road ducks under the Loop 101. Scottsdale 101 is a power center in the pure form: a ring of big boxes around a parking lot the size of a small airport, a multiplex at one end, chain restaurants on the outparcels, and a traffic pattern designed by someone who assumed you would never walk between two stores.
Nobody comes here for the experience, and that is fine. Target and Best Buy are the anchors; PetSmart, Michaels and Ross fill in; the Harkins multiplex handles the evening. It is the retail equivalent of a utility, and north Scottsdale — a place that otherwise shops in lifestyle centers with fountains — uses it constantly and admits it rarely.
The one piece of trivia to know: it is in Phoenix. Scottsdale Road is the city line at this point, the center sits west of it, and the address is on Mayo Boulevard. The Scottsdale name is a marketing decision the same way Kierland Commons two miles south is “in Scottsdale.” The North Scottsdale guide covers the corridor it anchors.
The stores worth the walk
There is no walk; there is a drive between parking rows. Target is the reason most trips exist. Best Buy is the last big electronics floor in this part of the Valley. Michaels and PetSmart serve the two north Scottsdale demographics — people with crafts and people with dogs — that never run out of reasons to shop. Ross is the off-price pass for anyone who drove past Fashion Square without stopping.
The honest local read is that the roster is interchangeable with any freeway power center in America, and that is exactly what it is for. The stores worth a detour are elsewhere on this site; this is the page for the Saturday when you need a printer cartridge, a bag of kibble and a birthday card in one lot.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The lot is enormous and rarely full, but the driveways are the problem. On weekday evenings the Scottsdale Road entrances queue behind the 101 ramps; come and go via Mayo Boulevard on the north side and rejoin Scottsdale Road at the next signal. Weekend mornings before eleven are the calm window. The center is on and off the 101 at Scottsdale Road, which makes it the easiest big-box stop for anyone coming from the Airpark, DC Ranch or the Princess — and the reason the interchange is a mess at rush hour.
Summer is when the format shines, backwards: the whole trip is car to air-conditioned box to car, which is more than the open-air centers down the road can say in July.
Eat while you’re there
The outparcels handle lunch at chain speed. For anything better, this stretch of Scottsdale Road has an embarrassment of options within five minutes: The Capital Grille and the rest of the Promenade row a mile south; Zinc Bistro, North Italia and Mastro’s Ocean Club at Kierland Commons; Dominick’s, Eddie V’s and True Food Kitchen at Scottsdale Quarter. Errands here, dinner there, is the standard north Scottsdale Saturday.
How it got here
For most of Scottsdale’s history the corner of Scottsdale Road and what became the Loop 101 was nothing — desert north of the Airpark, beyond the edge of the city’s water and sewer, the sort of land a developer bought and held. The freeway changed the arithmetic. As the 101 pushed across north Phoenix and Scottsdale through the 1990s, the interchanges along it became the most valuable retail dirt in the Valley, and every one of them sprouted the same thing: a power center, the freeway era’s answer to the enclosed malls of the 1960s.
Scottsdale 101 opened in the early 2000s on the Phoenix side of the line, part of a burst of building on this stretch of Scottsdale Road that also produced Kierland Commons and the Promenade. The three centers divided the corridor’s retail between them with a clarity that has held for two decades: Kierland for the patio dinner, the Promenade for the upscale errand, Scottsdale 101 for everything with a barcode. The Quarter, opened in 2009, added the glossy fourth.
The big-box format has been pronounced dead several times since — by e-commerce, by the recession, by the pandemic — and the roster at Scottsdale 101 has turned over with each verdict as national chains rose and fell. But the anchors held, the freeway did not move, and north Scottsdale kept growing rooftops that needed televisions and dog beds. The center remains what it was built to be: the least glamorous and most used shopping address in the north half of the city, in a city that is not even, strictly, its own.