What it’s actually like
Scottsdale has no water. Scottsdale has a Waterfront. Locals have spent twenty years making that joke and twenty years eating dinner there anyway, which tells you who won.
The Waterfront is the strip of towers, shops and restaurant patios along the Arizona Canal at Camelback Road, between Scottsdale Road and the Marshall Way bridge, directly across Camelback from Fashion Square. The canal is an 1885 irrigation ditch. In the mid-2000s a developer looked at it and saw a riverwalk, and the result is the most polished few blocks in Old Town: glass condo towers that were the city’s first true high-rises, a landscaped canal bank with a wide path, and a row of restaurants whose patios face west down the water.
It is the grown-up end of downtown. The bar district along Saddlebag Trail is a ten-minute walk east and might as well be another city. Here the evening crowd is dinner-and-a-stroll — couples, families with strollers, cyclists rolling in off the canal path — and at sunset, when the light comes down the water and lands on the towers, the whole “waterfront” conceit briefly stops being funny.
The stores worth the walk
Be honest with yourself: the retail is not why you are here. The Waterfront’s shops are a modest lineup of national brands and a few services tucked under the towers, and they turn over. What the district actually sells is the walk. Start at the Scottsdale Road end, follow the canal bank west past the patios, cross the Soleri Bridge — Paolo Soleri’s pedestrian span and solar calendar, opened in 2010 — and you land at the top of Marshall Way, where the gallery district begins. That fifteen-minute loop is worth more than any store on it.
If you want serious shopping, Fashion Square is across Camelback with two million square feet of it, and the boutiques of Fifth Avenue are a few blocks south. The Waterfront is the connective tissue, and it is the nicest tissue in town.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
There is a public garage at the Waterfront that is typically free, and a strip of street parking along Camelback that fills by 6 p.m. on cool-season nights. The Fashion Square garages across the road are the natural overflow. If you are staying in Old Town, walk; the Hotel Valley Ho, The Scott and the W are all within ten minutes on flat sidewalks, and the Old Town on foot note covers the route.
The best arrival is by bike. Cyclists coming off the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt can follow the canal path west and roll onto the Waterfront without touching a road.
Timing: high season, roughly January through April, keeps the whole strip humming and the patios booked. Summer flips it to evening-only sanity; the canal bank is dead at noon and lovely at 8 p.m. And November is its own season — Canal Convergence puts large-scale light art on and above the water for ten free nights, draws well over 100,000 people, and turns a dinner reservation here into the easiest great evening in the city.
Eat while you’re there
Olive & Ivy was in the vanguard of the argument that the Waterfront was actually waterfront, and nearly two decades on its canal-side patio remains the proof — Mediterranean plates, a marketplace counter and the best sunset table on the strip. The original P.F. Chang’s, born across the street at Fashion Square in 1993, now runs its flagship here at 7135 E Camelback with a patio over the canal. Culinary Dropout, Sam Fox’s gastropub with yard games and live music, is reliably one of the Waterfront’s busiest rooms and the default group hang for a generation of Scottsdale diners. And Maple & Ash, which took the old Wildfish corner at Camelback and Scottsdale Roads in August 2019, is the glamour steakhouse that completed the Waterfront’s transformation into a marquee dining address.
Across Camelback, Nobu and the Fashion Square luxury wing are a two-minute walk if the night calls for it.
How it got here
The Arizona Canal was dug in 1885, a private irrigation project that watered the alfalfa and citrus of a valley with almost nobody in it. Winfield Scott filed on his land beside it a few years later, and for the next 120 years the canal was exactly what it looked like: a straight, fenced, utilitarian ditch running along Camelback Road past the back of a shopping center. Nobody in 1993, watching P.F. Chang’s open at Fashion Square, thought of the water across the street as an amenity.
The 2000s changed that. It was the decade Scottsdale went vertical — canal-front condo towers, a resurrected Valley Ho, a nightlife district with velvet ropes — and the Waterfront was the signature project. The developers’ argument was simple and, at the time, faintly ridiculous: reframe the canal as a pedestrian riverwalk, put the city’s first true high-rises on its bank, and line the water with restaurants. Olive & Ivy and its neighbors made the case one patio at a time, and by the time the 2008 crash turned off the music the district was built and open.
The recovery decade gave it a soul. The Soleri Bridge and Plaza opened in 2010 — a pedestrian bridge and solar calendar by Paolo Soleri, the Arcosanti visionary who worked from Cosanti just up the road in Paradise Valley — and gave the canal a genuine civic space at the foot of Marshall Way. Canal Convergence took that stage and grew, through the 2010s, into the city’s signature public-art event. Then the restaurants kept escalating: the P.F. Chang’s flagship crossed the street, Maple & Ash arrived in 2019, and the Fashion Square luxury wing rose across Camelback. What had been a shopping-center margin with a ditch behind it became the polished end of downtown. The ditch is still a ditch. It just has better lighting now.