What it’s actually like
Drive Pinnacle Peak Road east from Scottsdale Road today and the corner at Pima is surrounded: golf communities, gated entries, the shopping centers that serve them. In 1985 there was nothing there but a fortress. The Citadel rose out of open desert as a cluster of thick adobe-colored walls, towers and courtyards designed by Vern Swaback, the Taliesin apprentice who became the north’s house architect, and it announced that the far edge of the city was about to become its most expensive address.
Inside the walls was a boutique village in the Borgata mold: galleries, jewelers, Southwestern boutiques, a courtyard with a waterfall, and — the real point — restaurants with the best view in the city. 8700 at the Citadel, named for its own address, was the big-ticket dining room of the late 1980s; Michael’s at the Citadel took the same space in 1998 and ran for a decade as north Scottsdale’s special-occasion room. An inn arrived in 1991, and for a while the Citadel was a complete evening at the edge of the desert.
The buildings still stand, with offices and tenants, but the village is gone. The neighborhoods it pioneered — Pinnacle Peak and Troon, DC Ranch — built their own centers, and the fortress that had been the only address in the north became one address among many.
What it was like inside
You came through the walls into shade and the sound of water. Swaback’s design did what his teacher’s did: heavy where it met the desert, open where it met the sky, with courtyards stepping down toward the waterfall and the storefronts turned inward. The galleries and boutiques were the Paradise Valley kind — one beautiful thing at a time, Southwestern art and jewelry for the winter residents in the golf communities just starting to break ground along the road.
At dusk the restaurants took over. The windows at 8700 framed the whole Valley lighting up below Pinnacle Peak, and the courtyard at Michael’s, with its waterfall, was the most-proposed-in room in the north for ten years. What you did not see, most days, was a shopper. Like every fantasy village Scottsdale built in the 1980s, the Citadel was lovely, remote and half-empty until the dinner reservations arrived.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The corner of Pinnacle Peak Road and Pima Road, at 8700 E Pinnacle Peak, on the south side of the road with the peak itself rising to the northeast. From Old Town it was — and is — a thirty-minute drive; from the Loop 101 at Pima, ten minutes north. The adobe buildings are still on the corner and still recognizably Swaback’s, occupied by offices and a changing set of tenants; the destination retail and the dining rooms are gone.
The far north’s shopping moved a few miles in every direction: Market Street at DC Ranch south down Pima, the Pinnacle Peak and Troon centers along Pinnacle Peak Road, and El Pedregal — the Citadel’s contemporary and fellow ghost — at the Boulders farther north.
The restaurants it fed
Two rooms, one address, two decades of celebrations. 8700 at the Citadel opened with the complex in the late 1980s and served special-occasion New American cooking to the sweep of city lights through the mid-1990s. Michael’s at the Citadel followed in 1998 — chef Michael DeMaria’s elegant room with the waterfall courtyard and the chef’s-table cooking classes — and ran until 2008, when the recession and the neighborhood’s new competition closed it.
The surviving dining tradition of the far north is older and rougher: Pinnacle Peak Patio and its mesquite smoke from 1957, Reata Pass and Greasewood Flat at the old stage stop. For the polished dinner the Citadel used to own, Fleming’s at DC Ranch and the Market Street row are the modern heirs.
How it got here
In the early 1980s Scottsdale annexed its northern desert in great gulps, and the land around Pinnacle Peak went from cattle country and dude ranches to the most speculative real estate in the state. Someone had to build first. The Citadel’s developers did, in 1985, on a corner that was still essentially empty — a fortress of boutiques, galleries and restaurants meant to prove that the far north could support luxury before the far north had residents.
They hired the right architect. Vern Swaback had apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West and stayed in Scottsdale to build a practice on Wright’s organic principles; his Citadel was heavy, earth-colored and courtyard-turned, a building that looked as if the desert had grown it. The style became the north’s signature, and the Citadel was its first public expression on a commercial scale.
For a decade the gamble looked brilliant. 8700 gave the corner a dining room people drove thirty minutes to reach; the Inn at the Citadel, added in 1991, gave them a bed; and the golf communities breaking ground all around — Troon, Troon North, Pinnacle Peak Country Club — delivered the winter residents the boutiques had been built for. Michael’s arrival in 1998 confirmed the address’s fine-dining destiny and carried it through the boom of the 2000s.
What ended it was success. The neighborhoods the Citadel had pioneered grew large enough to build their own centers, Market Street at DC Ranch opened down the hill, and a remote fortress of one-of-a-kind boutiques could not compete with a main street that was five minutes from everyone’s gate. Michael’s closed in 2008; the galleries thinned; the buildings turned to offices. The Citadel had done its job, which was to be first, and being first is a role with a natural end.