Arizona Center

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Arizona Center is a shopping center and office complex located in downtown Phoenix, Arizona.

Arizona Center was designed by the Rouse Company (on its festival marketplace model, which worked to great success in other cities) and opened in the fall of 1990 to great fanfare and high expectations, as it was considered one of the original components of the ongoing downtown revitalization efforts in Phoenix taking place since the early 1990's.

The expectations were high since it was developed by the same firm that created the highly successful Faneuil Hall Marketplace (Boston) and Harborplace (Baltimore); Arizona Center was hoped to be a retail, dining and entertainment magnet which would jump-start interest in downtown redevelopment, but some critics felt suburban-oriented Phoenix was not ready to embrace a downtown development of this caliber, and in some regard the critics were correct: by 2003, a massive second-story food court, similar to those found in suburban shopping malls, was closed and reconfigured into the Phoenix regional office of Detroit-based architectural firm SmithGroup.^[1] Critics have also pointed out the relative scarcity of permanent upscale apartment and/or condominium housing in the immediate vicinity as a factor in the lackluster performance of the mall.^[2] Most of the residential districts surrounding the downtown area are middle-to-lower income, not adequate to support the middle-to-high end marketing mix that Arizona Center set out to provide.

Arizona Center features two office buildings (one of which is the headquarters of local electric utility Arizona Public Service or APS) and 120,000 square feet of retail space (including a 24-screen AMC movie theater), built around richly landscaped courtyards and fountains. While no longer the huge draw it was designed to be at inception, it still draws relatively healthy lunchtime office-worker crowds to its remaining eateries, as well as large numbers of local residents (from the largely blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods surrounding downtown) on weekends to the movie theater, which is the only one for several square miles. Out-of-town conventioneers, tourists and sports fans who come downtown to attend games of the Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks also provide acceptably healthy foot traffic.

In the summer of 2006, Arizona State University announced plans to use 4000 square feet on the second floor as a student union for its newly expanding Downtown Phoenix branch campus. [1]^[3]

Arizona Center's fortunes are expected to revive as a 30-story Sheraton hotel is under construction across the street and expected to open in late 2008. Also, several high-end condo projects in the downtown area are either under construction, newly opened, or in the planning stages.