Cowboy Town Gets Gussied Up

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. Dec. 14, 2007 — -- In this enclave that bills itself as the West's Most Western Town, the Rusty Spur Saloon on Main Street still packs them in with live bands singing hurtin' songs to an eclectic crowd of aging debutantes in pearls, frat boys in Oxford shirts, golfers with winter tans and even the occasional grizzled cowboy.

The former Farmers State Bank-turned-saloon with its vault-turned-liquor cabinet and faux Western facade is quintessentially Old Scottsdale.

But nearby, a new Scottsdale is taking shape along a gussied-up irrigation canal recast as an exclusive "waterfront" shopping and dining enclave. Here, in the just-opened Canal restaurant in the SouthBridge development, ladies who lunch slide into deep banquets facing an elevated, light-pulsed runway for fashion shows and wall-sized video screens flashing non-stop videos only a fashionista could love. Downstairs, a free-standing martini bar is plunked in the center of a free-form retail space where individual designers market their own high-end clothing and jewelry. In office space above, architects and other creative types ply their trades.

SouthBridge is one piece of $3 billion in development projects now underway in a roughly 2-mile swath of downtown Scottsdale. Besides one-of-a-kind shops and chef-driven restaurants, the projects include a spate of hip hotels along with additions to an already vibrant arts and entertainment district. And new condominium developments are injecting year-round life into a formerly tourist-centric downtown prone to withering in the triple-digit temperatures of summer.

As the busy winter tourist season kicks off, repeat visitors to this tony Phoenix suburb might not recognize the place, given the building binge. The season's major event, the 2008 Super Bowl, will be played Feb. 3 in a 1-year-old, 63,000-seat stadium in nearby suburban Glendale, but Scottsdale will be hoopla headquarters. ESPN and the NFL Network will broadcast from the city, and major game-related events also will be centered there in the week leading up to the game.

Brightest star in Valley of the Sun

But then, Scottsdale has long been the epicenter of the region's tourist scene. In the vastness of the 2,000-square-mile greater Phoenix area, known collectively as the Valley of the Sun, one community bleeds into the next via a tangle of new freeways and older, strip-mall-lined, arrow-straight boulevards. Amid this suburban sprawl, Scottsdale has always maintained a distinct identity, and not just because the Chamber of Commerce promoted it as the West's Most Western Town, either. More accurately, it's the Beverly Hills of Phoenix.

Frank Lloyd Wright brought early cachet to the area when in 1937 he pitched a tent community in the shadows of the McDowell Mountains northeast of town and built what would become Taliesin West, his home and architectural school. A proliferation of high-end resorts sprang up, including the venerable Camelback Inn in 1936. In the 1960s, dozens of small art galleries took root around Fifth Avenue, Main Street, Craftsman Court and Marshall Way, establishing Scottsdale as a commercial Western art hub. A weekly tradition since 1973, the Thursday night art walks are touted as the nation's longest-running. But in recent years, as residential and resort development pushed north away from the city's center, the downtown core suffered.

"There was no reason to come to downtown Scottsdale," says Andrew Chippindall, general manager of the Hotel Valley Ho, one of several recently reinvented local lodgings. "It was just a lot of shops selling Southwestern hot sauce and Indian artifacts. That was probably very successful in the '70s and '80s, but not now. Now, there's a push back into downtown."

With their large display windows and wide, covered walkways, the low-slung shops along Fifth Avenue west of Scottsdale Road, in the city's arts district, are deemed among the best examples of post-World War II suburban development. Mixed in among the art galleries, plenty of stores are still selling perennially discounted turquoise jewelry and other tourist goods, but more eclectic enterprises such as day spas and tea rooms have moved in.

East of Scottsdale Road, another low-rise village of shops makes up Old Town Scottsdale, featuring faux Old West storefronts, along with some of the town's genuinely antique structures, including a 1909 schoolhouse-turned-historical museum. Nearby, an entertainment district of clubs attracts late-night crowds of 40,000 or more on weekends.

Downtown is moving up and up

The rebirth of downtown can be traced to 2003, when city officials commissioned a study that warned that Scottsdale's long-held image as an upscale enclave was dissipating.

Local movers and shakers who'd been squabbling for years about whether tall buildings should be allowed in a traditionally low-rise area put aside their differences and forged ahead with allowances for higher-density development. Planners looked to the Arizona Canal, part of a network of irrigation ditches built on the footprint of ones created centuries ago by the Hohokam Indians, the Valley's first residents.

"The canal was always treated as an alleyway. Businesses turned their backs on it," says John Little, executive director of Scottsdale's downtown development office.

He stands in the parking lot of a down-at-the-heels two-story motel destined for demolition and gazes over a cinderblock wall that cuts off the building from the streetscape. It's a prime example of the outmoded development the city has now rejected. In the distance, two 13-story condominium complexes, part of the new $250 million Scottsdale Waterfront project, rise as twin beacons of the new design sensibility. Other downtown living spaces with price tags ranging from $600,000 to $5 million are expected to bring an additional 6,500 residents to the city's core in the next 16 months, up from 1,500 seven years ago.

But while the Arizona Canal is the center of Scottsdale's redevelopment, "waterfront" is a relative term, particularly in the desert. "They might call it a waterfront, but it's an irrigation ditch," says longtime resident Patricia Myers, author of Scottsdale: Jewel in the Desert. "It dries up a once a year, and you wonder if (residents) realize when it does, they're going to see bikes and dead horses and shopping carts in there. And it's going to stink."

From the Scottsdale Waterfront complex, which houses restaurants and large-scale retailers as well as condos, a pedestrian bridge crosses the canal to the partially completed SouthBridge, a series of retail and office buildings notable for the absence of national chain stores. By next year, the development will include seven restaurants. Developer Fred Unger plans to add three more phases to the project, plus a classic hotel, within the next five years.

"People seek the unusual. There's just so much cookie-cutter stuff," Unger says as he strolls through a plaza where 43 events, from outdoor movies to farmers markets to concerts, will be staged each year. In one of the boutique areas, he pauses to leaf through a rack of diaphanous dresses. "It's fun to have this as we become a more sophisticated cow town."

Indeed, there are no plans to jettison Scottsdale's claim of being the West's Most Western Town.

"Downtown," Little says, "literally will become a place where the old West meets and embraces the new West."