What it’s actually like
Stand on the Soleri Bridge and look south. The north bank is the Waterfront: glossy, tall, mid-2000s. The south bank is a lower, warmer line of patios and awnings stepping down to the water — Southbridge, the block of Stetson Drive between Scottsdale Road and Marshall Way where Old Town eats by the canal without the towers.
It reads as one development, and it mostly is: a late-2000s mixed-use scheme that wrapped shops and residences around a restaurant row that already existed. That order matters. The restaurants came first, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Stetson was a back street behind Fifth Avenue and a chef named Peter Kasperski decided it was the place to open the most eccentric restaurant in the state. Southbridge was built around that energy rather than creating it, which is why the block has a texture most new districts lack.
The canal promenade is the point. A paved walk runs along the water below the patios, the bridges connect it to the Waterfront and the Canal Convergence installations in November, and in the cool season the whole south bank is one long outdoor dining room. The Fifth Avenue & Downtown guide covers the district around it.
The stores worth the walk
Southbridge is a dining district with retail attached, and the retail turns over the way canal-front boutiques do — salons, a gallery, a home-goods shop, the occasional pop-up in a space between restaurant leases. Any list is stale the week it is written. Walk Stetson from Scottsdale Road to Marshall Way, then take the promenade back along the water; the whole block is five minutes each way and the water side is where the interesting frontage is.
The honest read: nobody drives to Southbridge for a store. They come for a table on the canal, the walk across the bridge, and the fact that on the south bank, unlike the north, the buildings are still the height of the trees.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Stetson Drive has almost no parking of its own. The reliable moves are the Waterfront garage across the canal, then a two-minute walk over the bridge, or the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side, then a block north. Ride-share pickups work at the Scottsdale Road end of Stetson; the Marshall Way end is a maze of one-way turns at dinner time.
Seasonally this is a cool-weather block. October through April the canal-bank patios are the reason to come; in summer the row goes indoors and quiet until well after dark. Thursday nights the Marshall Way ArtWalk ends a block away and Stetson fills around eight. November’s Canal Convergence turns the promenade into an art fair and the tables into a scarce resource — book.
Eat while you’re there
The row today: Marcellino Ristorante, where Marcellino Verzino makes the pasta by hand every day with the chef at the stove, has held 7114 E Stetson since 2009 and is the block’s grand old room. Barrio Queen, the Old Town outpost of the Valley’s most ambitious Mexican kitchen, has the biggest patio on the water. The Ends is the newest tenant on the row.
The history is the draw for locals of a certain vintage. Cowboy Ciao ran at 7133 E Stetson from 1997 to 2018, Kazimierz World Wine Bar hid behind it with an unmarked door, Sea Saw was chef Nobuo Fukuda’s omakase counter from 2002 to 2009, and Digestif came and went in a year. More recently Merkin Vineyards and The Drunk Munk held units on the block. Across the water, the Waterfront adds Olive & Ivy and the rest of the north-bank row; the Fifth Avenue side adds FnB in Craftsman Court.
How it got here
The Arizona Canal was an irrigation ditch with a chain-link fence for a century, and Stetson Drive was the service street behind Fifth Avenue that backed onto it. What changed was a restaurateur with no interest in a good address. Peter Kasperski opened Cowboy Ciao at 7133 E Stetson in 1997 — a maximalist Southwestern-Italian room with a Stetson chopped salad that would be imitated on half the menus in the city — and then, instead of moving somewhere nicer, he kept building on the same block. Kazimierz, a world wine bar you entered through an unmarked door, followed. Sea Saw, chef Nobuo Fukuda’s counter, opened in 2002 and won a James Beard Award for the Southwest. By the mid-2000s a back street had the most inventive cluster of dining rooms in Arizona.
The developer who noticed was Fred Unger, best known for restoring the Hermosa Inn. As the Waterfront rose on the north bank, Unger assembled the south-bank block and built Southbridge around the restaurants: residences over shops, a promenade along the water, the restaurant row left in place at its heart. It opened in the late 2000s into the teeth of the recession, and its survival owed a great deal to the fact that people were already coming to Stetson for dinner before it existed.
The original era ended in 2018, when Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz closed after two decades. Then came the fight that put Southbridge in the news for reasons other than food. Unger had died in 2016; his son Carter proposed Southbridge Two, a redevelopment of several blocks between the canal and Fifth Avenue with buildings up to roughly 150 feet — a scale Old Town had never seen. The council approved it in December 2019 by a split vote. Old Town residents and business owners gathered the signatures for a referendum within weeks, and in early 2020 the developer asked the council to rescind its approval rather than lose at the ballot. It was the moment Scottsdale decided, in effect, that downtown would stay low, and the argument echoed straight through the 2020s politics that followed.
So the block is what it was: a low row of patios on the canal, a hand-rolled pasta at Marcellino, a bridge with lights on it, and the towers still on the other side of the water.