What it’s actually like
Every city has a mall. Scottsdale has Fashion Square, which is a different category of thing: roughly two million square feet at the corner of Scottsdale Road and Camelback, four department stores, a luxury wing that reads like a Rodeo Drive with a roof, and a restaurant row that has quietly become the highest-check dining address in Arizona. It is the largest mall in the Southwest.
The layout is three eras stacked together. The core is the enclosed mall of the 1980s and ’90s, bright and multilevel, running from Dillard’s and Macy’s on the Scottsdale Road side west toward Neiman Marcus and the Harkins Camelview. South across Camelback Road, reached by the enclosed sky bridge over the traffic, is the Nordstrom wing, built on the site of the old Camelview Plaza that the 1990s expansion swallowed. And along Goldwater Boulevard on the west edge is the luxury wing, the newest piece, where the fashion houses share a corridor with Nobu, Ocean 44 and Toca Madera.
In summer especially, Fashion Square is the city’s largest air-conditioned sidewalk, and the number of Scottsdale residents who “just walk through” on a July afternoon would embarrass them if anyone counted.
The stores worth the walk
The Neiman Marcus end is the reason out-of-towners fly in with empty suitcases; it and Nordstrom are the only pairing of their kind in the state. Nordstrom is the workhorse anchor — the one locals actually shop, with the shoe department that doubles as a social hall. Dillard’s and Macy’s hold down the Scottsdale Road side for people who want a department store rather than a flagship.
The luxury wing is the tour. Even if you are not buying, walk Goldwater from the Neiman’s end to the Nobu end once, ideally in the early evening when the restaurant patios light up and the valet line starts. The Harkins Camelview, the arthouse that moved into the mall from its old home across the way in the mid-2010s, is the best movie theater in the metro for anything that is not a superhero.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Parking is typically free and mostly in garages. The Nordstrom garage south of Camelback is the one to learn: the sky bridge carries you over the road into the main mall, and from there the Harkins and the luxury wing are reachable without going outside. The Goldwater Boulevard side is dinner territory — valet stands, restaurant traffic, the Caesars Republic hotel next door — and the surface spots there vanish after 5 p.m. on weekends.
Timing follows the tourist calendar. January through April, the mall runs at full occupancy and weekend afternoons are a slog; go on a weekday morning. Summer is the opposite: empty aisles, deep clearance racks and a climate that makes the mall the most pleasant place within ten miles.
The mall sits on the north side of Camelback at Scottsdale Road; the Waterfront is directly across the street, the historic Old Town blocks are ten minutes south, and Hotel Valley Ho, The Scott, the W and Caesars Republic are all within a stroll. Staying in Old Town? You do not need a car for any of this.
Eat while you’re there
This is where Fashion Square stopped being a mall. The luxury wing stacks Nobu (miso black cod, the whole global-luxury circuit landing in Scottsdale), Ocean 44 (the Mastro family’s seafood benchmark since 2018) and Toca Madera (Los Angeles nightlife-dining with tomahawks torched tableside) within a few hundred feet of each other. Next door in the Caesars tower, Luna by Giada added a celebrity chef to the block in 2024. Through the early 2020s, that Goldwater corner was arguably the densest concentration of high-check dining in Arizona, and it has not slowed.
For the history, cross Camelback: the original P.F. Chang’s opened inside this mall on July 20, 1993, and the flagship now sits across the street at the Waterfront. The alumni list runs long — Francine, Zinque, the original Kona Grill and Modern Steak all had runs here — because these rents punish anything that cannot print money.
How it got here
Fashion Square opened in 1961, the same autumn Scottsdale voters approved the home-rule charter that turned a resort village into a real city. It was an open-air center then, a row of shops around a courtyard with Goldwater’s — the department store of the Goldwater family, Barry included — as the anchor that gave it legitimacy. The location was a bet on the future: Camelback and Scottsdale Road was the edge of town, closer to the resorts on the mountain than to the saloons on Main Street. The 1960s history shows the town’s center of gravity starting to slide north.
For its first two decades the mall was one of several; Los Arcos, down at McDowell, was the enclosed-mall pride of a south Scottsdale that still had most of the population. Camelview Plaza went up next door with its own department store and the arthouse cinema whose name survives on today’s Harkins. Fashion Square grew in stages, but it was not yet the obvious winner.
The 1990s decided it. The site’s own record puts the start of the major expansion early in the decade, and by its end the mall had swallowed Camelview Plaza, added Nordstrom and pulled every luxury tenant in the state under one roof. The 1990s tell the other half: Los Arcos lost its anchors and its customers to the expanding Fashion Square and the new power centers, closed in 1999 and became rubble. One mall’s rise was the other’s obituary.
The 2010s added the piece that changed the mall’s character. The luxury wing along Goldwater was built to lure the world’s restaurant brands, and it worked — Nobu planted the flag, Ocean 44 followed in December 2018, Toca Madera brought the vibe-dining wave, and a glass Caesars hotel rose at Goldwater and Highland in March 2024. Sixty-plus years after Goldwater’s opened onto a courtyard of desert shoppers, the corner is a downtown-within-a-downtown.