America’s Friendliest Big City Now Rocks a Legitimately Cool Downtown

“It’s hard to get noticed here,” said owner Ross Simon, a red-headed Scotsman. “The people who decide these things, the cocktail writers, the judges, they all want to go to New York or Miami. Nobody thinks about Phoenix having great cocktail bars.”

Drinking in Phoenix, however, is not limited to upscale cocktail havens — breweries have popped up like CVS locations. At Helio Basin Brewing, chefs use spent grain to make tortillas for the tacos found at the adjoining gastropub. Helton Brewing offers an expansive patio, ideally suited to live music. And if you’ve got a long layover at Sky Harbor, Walter Station Brewery, stationed in a defunct firehouse, sits across from the airport.

Natural landscape and an arts scene, wrapped up in one

Just north of downtown Phoenix you’ll find a neighborhood awash in street murals and kitschy little shops. This is Roosevelt Row, where gourmet hot dog stands alternate with donut counters, art galleries, and bizarre souvenir stores.

Along with rounded pastries and outlandish dream catchers, the area has also become home to Phoenix’s art scene. And unlike in cities like Portland and San Francisco, it’s not in danger of being edged out by downtown expansion.

“The artists here, they saw what was going on when ASU came in and started buying up property,” said Mike Oleskow, curator at downtown’s art-themed Found:Re hotel. “So they bought the houses and buildings here so they’d always have this place. It won’t turn into Austin.”

While he spoke, we rounded the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and North 5th Street, where bars, and coffee houses are tucked into the rustic remains of old houses, not unlike the structures lining Austin’s Rainey Street. A woman with unkempt dreadlocks wandered aimlessly into a coffee shop, while a heavily tattooed couple argued loudly (to the point of tears), shaded by an overhanging public art project, called Shadow Play. The streets were alive before 11am, littered with pseudo-hipsters and paint-stained art kids.

Perhaps everyone was out so early to evade the afternoon heat, diffusing already into the dry air. To some, that very climate is part of the city’s charm: Phoenix has tons of accessible wilderness, with 41,000 acres of desert parks and 200 miles of hiking trails.

Those less inclined to trek up mountainous terrain can still see stunning desert scenery as they float in tube down the Salt River in Mesa. On weekends, the river transforms into a raucous floating party — while during the week, it remains a quiet, tranquil stretch for tamer floaters.

“This place has all the great nature of the West Coast, with a Midwest sensibility,” mused Matt Hook, my Arizona Outback Adventures guide, as he paddled dexterously ahead of me on the river on a serene Thursday morning. “People here, when they say they’re gonna do something, they do it. That’s why I like it better than California.”

A Midwestern culture minus the snow

Spend a night chatting up locals at a bar in Phoenix, and you’ll likely meet someone from every state in the Midwest. And as you’d expect from a group of people who migrated from icy winters to uninterrupted sunshine, they all seem genuinely ecstatic to be here. I’d seen few people quite so happy as my secondary tour guide on the Salt, a recent transplant from Buffalo, who was giddy with civic pride at the ripe hour of 5am.

Beyond the general air of positivity, Phoenix has seemingly managed to escape the big-city coastal competitiveness you might find in other major warm-weather territories like LA, Miami, or San Francisco. Phoenicians seem to be honestly invested in one another’s success. Tell that to a New Yorker.

“I don’t think people know how much we support each other,” said Lauren Bailey, a restaurateur from Ft. Wayne, Indiana, as we sat down to lunch in her bustling eatery, Windsor. “It’s a city of people who are creative and want to move the needle, to get some national recognition. In other cities they think if a new restaurant opens it means less customers for them. But here it’s yay for them, yay for me. There have never been more restaurants in this neighborhood than there are today, and we’ve never been busier.”

She explained that when her ice cream machine shorted out, a neighboring restaurant rushed in to offer support. A different restaurateur entirely has helped her insure her business when she was new to the scene. Folks were reliably kind, even if you were a competitor.

After lunch we went next door to Bailey’s adjoining ice cream parlor, Churn, where a line stretched well beyond the door frame. Despite the 90-degree heat, people queued up and chatted jovially, patiently awaiting their cones.

Well, most people. Having arrived from Miami, I was accustomed to a slightly different rhythm of life. In my experience, heat is oft-cited as a valid excuse for everything from bad driving to money laundering. So when a small collective of hungry locals ducked ahead of me in line, I called them out bitterly to the cashier.

“You can go ahead of us if you like,” a mother with two kids offered gently. “Looks like you’re in a hurry and we’re just out for a nice afternoon.”

I wasn’t in a hurry, but I ordered anyway, tactlessly skipping ahead of a teenage girl in the process.

“It’s OK,” she said, when I turned to apologize. “I’m not in any rush.”

I had been prepared for folks in this hellishly hot city to be as rude and impatient as they were in Florida, California, or Las Vegas. Instead I found a warm-weather Buffalo.

“Phoenix people, they’re not uppity at all,” said Englehorn, as we polished off our beers at twilight outside Angel’s Trumpet. As predicted, his back patio had begun to buzz with an energetic young crowd. “There’s no pretentiousness. People just want to hang out and have fun.”

Sure, he missed “the old Phoenix” — everybody misses the old somewhere. But more so, he was jazzed by the urban metropolis it was becoming — by the local beers, the cocktail bars, the restaurants, and the thriving arts scene. He ordered us another round of porters, and we sat and watched as the sky began to turn a rich, orange-flecked purple.

“We got a big sky here,” he says. “People look at it as a barren wasteland. But you’ll never see a sunset quite like you do in the desert.”