What it’s actually like
Every tourist district needs an honest souvenir shop, and on First Avenue it’s Southwestern Reflections. The store at 7221, at the Scottsdale Road end of the block’s south side, sells exactly what the name promises. There are Arizona T-shirts and sweatshirts in adult, ladies’ and kids’ sizes, plus books, totes, candy and Southwestern foods, ornaments, home decor and magnets. Nobody here will try to sell you a four-figure cuff.
What makes it worth a page is who runs it and where it is. It’s one of two Old Town stores belonging to a second-generation, family-owned local business that has been in historic Old Town since 1987. The other is Scottsdale Southwest on Brown Avenue. The family sells online as Send Greetings From Arizona, and both shop addresses are printed at the top of the site. In a district where souvenir counters come and go with the leases, a local family still at it after almost forty years is the exception.
The building is better than anything on its shelves. 7221 is the west end of the Feltman Building, the gabled redwood row that Ralph Haver designed for developer Raleigh Feltman as part of the 1952 Pima Plaza shopping block. The city’s mid-century driving tour dates it to 1953. Modern Phoenix called it “a temple of redwood.” Most of the people buying magnets inside have no idea.
What to buy
An Arizona T-shirt. The bulk of the stock, in every size from youth to adult, and priced like souvenirs, not boutique tees.
Candy and Southwestern foods. The edible souvenirs travel better than a cactus and are what an office back home actually wants.
An ornament or a magnet. The cheapest proof you were here, and the store carries plenty.
A book. The shop carries books, and an Arizona title is a better gift than most of what’s on the jewelry blocks for someone who would rather read about the desert than wear it.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
First Avenue between Scottsdale Road and Brown Avenue has little street parking, and what there is fills by evening. Use the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard, about five minutes away on foot. The Old Town on foot note maps a loop through the Old Town core that passes the door.
Make it the last stop. The block is a short, dense walk: Pendleton and Grey Wolf Gallery further along the same side, Silver Star Jewelry at the Brown Avenue end, and American Leather Company across the street. Shop those first and come back here for the gifts you were always going to buy.
Two stores, one family. If the First Avenue shop doesn’t have your size, try Scottsdale Southwest around the corner on Brown Avenue, or the family’s online store.
High season runs January through April. The Saturday Old Town Farmers Market and February’s Parada del Sol bring the biggest crowds to these streets. In summer, shop in the morning.
Eat while you’re there
Hula’s Modern Tiki is just west at 7213 for mai tais and coconut prawns, Cien Agaves across the street does scratch-made tacos and a deep agave list, and Pattie’s First Avenue Lounge is the dive. The Sugar Bowl on Scottsdale Road at the end of the block has been the pink sundae stop since 1958.
How it got here
The story of this storefront starts with a parking fight. In 1952, a year after Scottsdale incorporated, Bill Weirich, Paul and Raleigh Feltman and O’Malley Investment Company began developing the south side of First Avenue between Scottsdale Road and Brown Avenue. The owners across the street joined them, and the nine men planned the block as one “dignified Western” shopping square. There was no zoning ordinance or building code yet, so they wrote their own rules. Buildings were set back for covered walks and courtyards, hitching posts were put out for riders, and four rows of parking ran down the middle of the street between one-way lanes. The Town Council fought that last idea for months before giving in. The name, Pima Plaza, was older still. Around 1918, Akimel O’odham farmers from the Salt River community had tied their wagons on this stretch. Our Pima Plaza and the Westernaire Shops page tells the whole story.
Raleigh Feltman’s contribution was the building Southwestern Reflections now occupies. He hired Ralph Haver, then early in the career that made him the most prolific architect of postwar Scottsdale. Haver gave the building low front-facing gables, deep overhangs on a post-and-beam frame and walls of glass, and he dressed the modern frame in board-and-batten and shake-shingle walkways so it would sit comfortably in “The West’s Most Western Town.” The city’s historic context says the result “became a prestigious location for local businesses and shops.” The city’s driving tour gives the address as 7221–7237 East First Avenue and the date as 1953. Our Ralph Haver note covers the dating dispute and the rest of his Scottsdale work.
The shop’s own history is shorter and less documented. The family dates its business in historic Old Town to 1987, a decade when, as the 1980s history records, downtown was trading cowboy kitsch for galleries. A souvenir shop could still do well on the walk between the hotels and the Western storefronts, and this one did. The family’s business now spans two stores and an online shop, and a second generation runs it. We don’t know which of the two stores came first, or when the family took the First Avenue space, and the family hasn’t published those details.
What the block has become is clearer. First Avenue’s evenings now belong to restaurants and bars. The Haver building still holds small local shops, which is what Feltman and his partners built it for in 1952.