The Central Avenue Corridor is a significant stretch of north–south Central Avenue in
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix ( ; nv, Hoozdo; es, Fénix or , yuf-x-wal, Banyà:nyuwá) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities and towns in Arizona#List of cities and towns, most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona, with 1 ...
. Roughly bounded by
Camelback Road
Many arterial roads in the Phoenix metropolitan area have the same name in multiple cities or towns. Some roads change names or route numbers across town borders, resulting in occasional confusion. For example, the road known as Apache Boulevard ...
to its north, and McDowell Road to its south, this is one of Phoenix's most vital and heavily trafficked stretches of roads. It is also one of the region's largest centers of employment, with nearly 60,000 people being employed within a three-mile (5 km) radius of this swath of Central Avenue. Major employers here include major banks and financial institutions, hi-tech companies, and several significant law firms and government agencies.
This corridor bisects a larger area known as
Midtown, Phoenix—the collection of neighborhoods north of downtown, and south of the North-Central and Sunnyslope areas. Block numbers or addresses for Central Avenue landmarks are indicated in parentheses where available.
Central Avenue Corridor today
Located halfway between the major
arterial roads
7th Street and
7th Avenue, Central Avenue is the east–west dividing line for Phoenix as well as other
Maricopa County cities that do not have their own addressing system.
Central Avenue crosses every economic stratum in Phoenix, rather abruptly in places. Downtown Phoenix land values are on par with other major cities. North of Midtown and Uptown Phoenix, the large, old homes in the tony North Central neighborhoods hark back to lower North Central Avenue's past. On the other side of the canal from North Central, at Central Avenue's dead-end, is the
Sunnyslope District, founded in 1907.
[Phoenix – News – Sunnyslopetopia]
/ref> South of downtown, approaching South Mountain, the South Central area contains some of the most blighted neighborhoods in the city.
Central Avenue represents almost every architectural use and style found in Phoenix. Dilapidated and thriving strip centers, small old brick warehouses, industrial and commercial properties, single family homes and estates, and many of the city's high-rises all have Central Avenue addresses. On Central or in the immediate vicinity lie officially recognized and protected historic neighborhoods and a variety of cultural, performance, and sporting venues.
History
Pre–World War II
Central Avenue was originally named Center Street upon Phoenix's founding with the surrounding north–south roads named after Indian tribes. The original Churchill Addition of 1877, covering a small area north of Van Buren Street
Van Buren Street is a street in Chicago, in whose grid system it is 400 South. Named for President Martin Van Buren, it is adjacent to Jackson Boulevard named for Van Buren's associate Andrew Jackson.
The Van Buren Street Bridge carries it acro ...
to what is presently Roosevelt Street
Roosevelt Street was a street located in the Two Bridges district of Lower Manhattan, which existed from the British colonial period up until the early 1950s, running from Pearl Street at Park Row (Chatham Street) southeast to South Street. ...
, was the first recorded plat
In the United States, a plat ( or ) (plan) is a cadastral map, drawn to scale, showing the divisions of a piece of land. United States General Land Office surveyors drafted township plats of Public Lands Surveys to show the distance and bear ...
showing Central Avenue with its present name. Despite this, there is evidence of it being called Center Street into the 1930s. A replat of Phoenix's original townsite in 1895 was the first to officially show numbered streets and avenues starting from the east and west sides of Central.
Phoenix's first school was built on Center Street and Monroe in 1874 as a one-room adobe
Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...
. A new four-room schoolhouse replaced it in 1879 as the fourth brick
A brick is a type of block used to build walls, pavements and other elements in masonry construction. Properly, the term ''brick'' denotes a block composed of dried clay, but is now also used informally to denote other chemically cured cons ...
building in the city, and the school was expanded again in 1893. By 1919, the school had deteriorated considerably and was condemned and sold. The luxurious Hotel San Carlos
The Hotel San Carlos branch in Phoenix, Arizona, also known as San Carlos Hotel, is both an operating hotel and tourist site. It has been associated with ghost sightings. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1983 a ...
, the first downtown hotel to feature air conditioning
Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C or AC, is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior environment (sometimes referred to as 'comfort cooling') and in some cases also strictly controlling ...
and elevator
An elevator or lift is a wire rope, cable-assisted, hydraulic cylinder-assisted, or roller-track assisted machine that vertically transports people or freight between floors, levels, or deck (building), decks of a building, watercraft, ...
s, opened on that spot in 1928 after a long delay. The Phoenix Indian School was established in 1891 giving Indian School Road
Many arterial roads in the Phoenix metropolitan area have the same name in multiple cities or towns. Some roads change names or route numbers across town borders, resulting in occasional confusion. For example, the road known as Apache Boulevard ...
(4100 N) its namesake. Near North Mountain, architect William Robert Norton subdivided the first parts of Sunnyslope in 1911 amidst a "squatters' community of asthmatics and tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, in ...
patients" whose makeshift dwellings were illegal in the city proper.
By 1917, a mile-long bridge was open over the immense Salt River ultimately connecting downtown with South Mountain, then known as Salt River Mountain. The Westward Ho was constructed in 1927 and would remain the city's tallest building until 1960. Brophy College Preparatory (4701 N) opened for the first time in 1928 amidst agricultural fields. The Heard Museum
The Heard Museum is a private, not-for-profit museum in Phoenix, Arizona, United States, dedicated to the advancement of American Indian art. It presents the stories of American Indian people from a first-person perspective, as well as exhibitio ...
(2301 N) opened in 1929 with little fanfare but would grow to be a highly respected institution of Native American culture and history.
1950s
As Phoenix sprawled north, developers found plenty of available land on Central Avenue and began capitalizing on the cachet of the youthful city's signature boulevard. Local steakhouse legend Durant's (2611 N) opened in 1950 and has changed little other than that patrons today enter the restaurant through the back off the parking lot as celebrities and other socialites once did back then. Park Central Mall
Park Central Mall was the first shopping mall in Phoenix, Arizona. It is located in Encanto Village, on Central Avenue and Osborn Road.
Today it exists as a mixed-use, business park primarily occupied by regional administrative offices for non ...
(3110 N) replaced a dairy farm in the middle part of the decade, signaling the beginning of downtown
''Downtown'' is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business distric ...
's long decline as retail stores and malls opened away from the city center. America's second McDonald's
McDonald's Corporation is an American Multinational corporation, multinational fast food chain store, chain, founded in 1940 as a restaurant operated by Richard and Maurice McDonald, in San Bernardino, California, United States. They rechri ...
restaurant was built near Indian School Road in 1953. It was the first McDonald's franchise, the first to feature the Golden Arches, and served as a model for Ray Kroc's Illinois store. These early commercial developments foreshadowed the trend towards autocentrism on Central Avenue and indeed the rest of the city. The first major high-rise built on Central Avenue outside of downtown was the Phoenix Towers (2201 N), erected in 1957. The Phoenix Art Museum
The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest museum for visual art in the southwest United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the museum is . It displays international exhibitions alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 18,000 works of ...
moved to Central Avenue in 1959. Phoenix fully annexed Sunnyslope, at Central's north terminus, that year. Central Avenue to its southern terminus, South Mountain, where minorities had been historically redlined, was annexed a year later.
1960s
The 1960s brought a wave of high-rise development in Phoenix to Central Avenue that the city had hardly seen in its modern history. In 1960 the Phoenix Corporate Center
The Phoenix Corporate Tower (formerly known as First Federal Savings Building) is a 26-story high-rise office building in Phoenix, Arizona. It was built in 1965 and designed in the International Style. The tower was built two miles north of Down ...
opened, which at became the tallest building in Arizona. The first phase of the Rozenweig Center, known today as Phoenix City Square
Phoenix City Square, formerly Kent Plaza and the Rosenzweig Center, is a mixed use high rise complex covering 15 acres at 3800-4000 N. Central Ave. in Phoenix, Arizona. The project was developed by the Del Webb Corporation in 1962. The complex fea ...
, was completed in 1964. Architect Wenceslaus Sarmiento Wenceslao Alfonso Sarmiento (September 28, 1922 – 24 November 2013), also known as W.A. Sarmiento, was a Peruvian-born American modernist architect.
Sarmiento studied in various locations in South America, for eighteen months in the off ...
's largest project, the landmark Phoenix Financial Center
The Phoenix Financial Center consists of a high-rise office building and two adjacent rotunda buildings located along Central Avenue in the Midtown district of Phoenix, Arizona, United States. They were built in 1963 by the Financial Corporati ...
(3443 N, better known by locals as the "Punch-card Building" in recognition of its unique southeastern facade) was also first finished in 1964 for banker and developer David Murdoch. Eight floors were added four years later. In addition to a number of other office towers, most of Phoenix's residential high-rises, such as the Landmark on Central (4750 N, then known as Camelback Towers), Executive Towers (207 W. Clarendon) and the Regency On Central (ROC) (2323 N, then known as Regency Apartments), were built during this decade.
1970s
In 1971, Phoenix cemented the precedent of previous ad hoc zoning decisions with the adoption of the Central Phoenix Plan, which envisioned unlimited building heights along Central Avenue. The new plan, however, did not sustain long-term development of the Central Corridor. Only a few office towers were constructed along North Central during this decade and none approached the scope of projects constructed during the previous decade. Instead, downtown resurged in popularity during the 1970s, witnessing a flurry of construction activity not seen again until the urban real estate boom of the 2000s. In 1979, Phoenix adopted the Phoenix Concept 2000 plan which split the city into urban villages—each with its own village core where greater height and density is permitted, further shaping the free-market development culture. Phoenix officially turned from its roots as a city built around its two main drags to a city of many nodes later connected by freeways
A controlled-access highway is a type of highway that has been designed for high-speed vehicular traffic, with all traffic flow—ingress and egress—regulated. Common English terms are freeway, motorway and expressway. Other similar terms i ...
. The cluster of high-rises north of Thomas Road became part of the Encanto
''Encanto'' is a 2021 American computer-animated musical fantasy comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. The 60th film produced by the studio, it was directed by Jared Bus ...
village core.
1980s
Development on North Central Avenue began anew in the 1980s as part of that decade's real estate boom
A real-estate bubble or property bubble (or housing bubble for residential markets) is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real-estate markets, and typically follow a land boom. A land boom is the rapid increase ...
with a second wave of office towers. One Camelback was built in 1985 at the intersection of Central and one of Phoenix's other signature streets, Camelback Road
Many arterial roads in the Phoenix metropolitan area have the same name in multiple cities or towns. Some roads change names or route numbers across town borders, resulting in occasional confusion. For example, the road known as Apache Boulevard ...
. It is likely the last structure to be built that tall that far north, thus capping the build-out potential of the Central Avenue skyline almost five miles (8 km) from the origin downtown. The Phoenix Indian School was closed in 1988 and remained vacant for years. The city's third-tallest building at , Qwest Tower, opened in Phoenix Plaza
Phoenix Plaza is a mixed use office complex located in midtown Phoenix, Arizona. It was built between 1988 and 1990 at a cost of US$158 million. There is of office space plus 225 hotel rooms. Phoenix Plaza has three hi-rise office buildings, a lar ...
in 1989 on Thomas Road (2900 N).
1990s
Phoenix adopted the Arts District plan in 1992 in an attempt to interconnect lower Midtown's cultural amenities in a walkable area, but the private development that the plan anticipated never arrived, though Burton Barr Central Library
The Burton Barr Central Library is the central library of Phoenix, Arizona. It is the flagship location and administrative headquarters for the Phoenix Public Library. It was named in honor of Burton Barr, the Republican Majority Leader in the ...
(1221 N) opened in 1995. The savings-and-loan boom that birthed new towers for Midtown Phoenix plagued it throughout the economic doldrums of the 1990s. The city's fifth-tallest at , the Viad Tower (1850 N) opened in 1991 as the Dial Tower, isolated between the Downtown and Midtown skylines and the last new tower constructed in Midtown Phoenix. Floorplan
In architecture and building engineering, a floor plan is a technical drawing to Scale (ratio), scale, showing a view from above, of the relationships between rooms, spaces, traffic patterns, and other physical features at one level of a struct ...
s of office towers built in previous decades had become functionally obsolete and contributed heavily toward Midtown's high vacancy rates. Despite the recession, the swank Biltmore area surrounding 24th Street and Camelback Road began to eclipse the Central Corridor as the Phoenix metropolitan area
The Phoenix Metropolitan Area – also the Valley of the Sun, the Salt River Valley, or Metro Phoenix (known by most locals simply as “the Valley”) – is the largest metropolitan area in the Southwestern United States, centered on the city ...
's premiere office destination with mid- and low-rise developments such as the Camelback Esplanade Camelback may refer to:
* riding atop a camel
* Camelback, a variation of shotgun house with a second floor in the rear of the house.
* Camelback (roller coaster element), a hump-shaped hill element found on roller coasters
* CamelBackCapitalizatio ...
. The 1990s were unkind to Central Phoenix's oldest section, and a renewed interest in the central city developed, focused on new residences instead of offices.
2000s
After numerous failed initiatives, Phoenix voters approved the Transit 2000 Regional Transportation Plan which dedicates a percentage of funds raised through a 4/10-cent (four cents on ten dollars) sales tax
A sales tax is a tax paid to a governing body for the sales of certain goods and services. Usually laws allow the seller to collect funds for the tax from the consumer at the point of purchase. When a tax on goods or services is paid to a govern ...
to build the METRO Light Rail line. The initial phase, which opened for service in late December 2008, runs from Christown Spectrum Mall
Christown Spectrum is the oldest operating mall in Phoenix, Arizona and was the third shopping mall built in the city. It is located at 1703 W. Bethany Home Road in Phoenix, Arizona. The name Christown Spectrum is derived from Chris-Town Mall an ...
, to Camelback, down Central, and then down Washington Street en route to Tempe and Mesa. On Central Avenue, there are seven stops in Midtow
and Uptown Phoenix and three in downtown. The three-year construction process commenced in late 2005, with the final rail being laid in late April, 2008.
The alignment of light rail down the center of Central permanently reshaped its physical layout and impacted the future of the surrounding neighborhoods. Light rail influenced growth as Phoenix adopted transit oriented development zoning standards in 2003 within 1/2 mile of stops, rendering an autocentric Central Avenue a thing of the past.
In Midtown, the market responded with two new mid-rise projects, the Artisan Lofts (1326 N), which opened in 2004 and the Tapestry on Central (2302 N), which opened in 2007. Tapestry's construction brought down the second-to-last estate home in the Central Avenue Corridor; the 1917 Ellis-Shackelford House (1242 N) still remains north of Margaret T. Hance Park.
Capitalizing on its retro mid-1960s styling, Camelback Towers became the Landmark on Central in 2004, continuing a tradition of the city's few apartment
An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are ma ...
towers becoming ownership condominia later on. Also that year, Century Plaza (3225 N), originally built in 1974 as offices, had a complete exterior and interior remodel
Renovation (also called remodeling) is the process of improving broken, damaged, or outdated structures. Renovations are typically done on either commercial or residential buildings. Additionally, renovation can refer to making something new, ...
as part of its conversion to condominiums. As reconstruction continued, two additional floors were started in 2007. Century plaza is now known as "One Lexington".
Steele Indian School Park
Steele Indian School Park is located on the northeast corner of Indian School Road and Central Avenue in Encanto Village, Phoenix, Arizona.
Geography
Indian School Road, on which the former Phoenix Indian School and the current Steele Indian S ...
opened in November 2001 on the site of the old Phoenix Indian School five years after an intricate three-way land exchange involving the Barron Collier Company and the federal government
A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governin ...
. In Phoenix, Collier received a portion on the southwest corner of the siteWelcome – Maricopa County Recorder and Elections Website
/ref> for long-term investment in addition to the Downtown block on which the Collier Center was built.
Gallery
The north and south sides of the Central Avenue Corridor of Phoenix are lined with historical houses and buildings. These are the images of those properties. Some are listed in the National Register of Historic Places and some are listed in the Phoenix Historic Properties Register. There are also some historic properties which are listed in both registers.
See also
*Phoenix Historic Property Register
The Phoenix Historic Property Register is the official listing of the historic and prehistoric properties in the city of Phoenix, the capital and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona.
History
The register was established on 1986 with the ai ...
*List of historic properties in Phoenix
This is a list, which includes photographic galleries, of some of the remaining historic structures and monuments, of historic significance, in Phoenix, Arizona, United States. Included are photographs of properties identified by the African, Asia ...
* Phoenix metropolitan area arterial roads
* Central City, Phoenix
Central City Village is the urban village of Phoenix, Arizona, that includes the downtown area of the city. As of 2010, it had a population of 58,161 residents.
Geography
As defined by the boundaries, Central City Village has an area of roughly 1 ...
* Encanto, Phoenix
Encanto Village is one of the 15 Urban villages that make up the City of Phoenix, in Arizona. The village includes the city's midtown and uptown districts, as well as the popular Encanto neighborhood, its namesake. In 2010, Encanto had a population ...
* Phoenix City Square
Phoenix City Square, formerly Kent Plaza and the Rosenzweig Center, is a mixed use high rise complex covering 15 acres at 3800-4000 N. Central Ave. in Phoenix, Arizona. The project was developed by the Del Webb Corporation in 1962. The complex fea ...
References
Phoenix Central Neighborhood Association
{{Coord, 33.4926, -112.0723, type:landmark_region:US-AZ, display=title
Transportation in Phoenix, Arizona
Neighborhoods in Phoenix, Arizona