The early development of malls in Phoenix isn’t tremendously well documented online, so when you look up something like what the oldest mall in town is, you’ll likely get something telling you it’s Park Central from 1957 or Chris-Town. While both these malls are some of the earliest, with Chris-Town being our first indoor mall, Park Central isn’t actually the first mall that opened in Phoenix. It’s hard to pin down exactly what was the first mall in town as open-air retail centers evolved throughout the 1950s with areas like 5th Avenue and Pima Plaza in Old Town Scottsdale, and several others all across the Valley, but a likely contender for the oldest actual mall is the Shops at Town and Country on Camelback Rd and 20th St.

If you try to look into its history, you’ll be met with a never ending series of websites with wildly inaccurate dates for when things happened. The general consensus seems to be that the mall opened up sometime in the 1960s, which would lead most of us to just see it as an old mall, but not something as significant as it really is. After doing some looking through The Arizona Republic archives, I found when Town & Country actually opened. The opening ceremony for the mall was held on January 26, 1957, over two months before Park Central would open. Both malls had been in development since early 1956, with Town & Country starting that January, and Park Central starting February. There wasn’t going to be a major department anchor at Town & Country, so development started on the actual mall right away while Park Central began work on their Goldwater’s anchor first. That Goldwater’s would open on November 8, with the rest of the mall opening on April 1, 1957. Their main anchor would open up before anything at Town & Country, but Town & Country would start opening several stores throughout December 1956. Their 9-hole golf course opened on the 3rd, leading several shops to open over the next few weeks, including an electronics store named Culver’s, Contour Chair Shop, The Village Craft and Hobby Shop, Eden’s Candies, Village Indian Center, and Ernie Brewer’s children shoe shop. Several more would open in January leading up to what was advertised as the Ground Blessing Ceremony on the 26th. The large crowd at the ceremony was entertained with native dancers, and hosted by French artist and anthropologist, Paul Coze. The mall was developed by Jere Strizek, a California based developer who had leased all the land along Camelback Rd between 23rd St and the newly built Lou Regester flag ship store (now Copenhagen) in 1955 from Michael Alan Feeney. Feeney had previously operated the land as the Milky Way Hereford Ranch since 1944. He had married into the Mars candy family, naming his ranch after the candy bar. The Mars family would remain the owners of the land while Strizek started construction of the mall in 1956, and are still the owners of the land to this day.

He had opened several Town & Country locations in California before this, but he gave this location a bit of time to prove its merit before ordering what is now its most iconic feature.in 1958, he reached out to Paul Coze once more, this time to commission a piece of art. Coze was well known by this time for his studies on the native tribes around Arizona and his art pieces focused on them, as well as being the French consul for Arizona. This piece wouldn’t be about natives, but instead the Phoenix bird. It was announced in August that Coze would work with Scottsdale based artists Jos Maes  and George Cavalliere II to construct a 20 foot tall wrought iron fountain-sculpture of the Phoenix with stained glass panels throughout the body. The men worked together over 4 months, Maes handling the glass, and George Cavalliere doing the metal work, while Coze designed the piece. It was finished by December, being raised up by a crane to a 20 foot tall pedestal on the 2nd. The sculpture ended up being 17 feet tall, but its pedestal had it towering above Camelback Rd, ensuring no one would miss it. As if the height wasn’t enough to make it unmissable, the pedestal had both fountains and features to spit flames up under the sculpture. This statue is still in place at the mall, in more or less the same location it was originally placed in 1958. It now sits atop a bed of flowers, recessed back from Camelback Rd, with a row of palm trees directly behind it. It’s considerably harder to see than it was on the original pedestal, although it only stood there for around 7 years before new owners of the mall would move it during a major remodel of the entire property.

Strizek had been kicked out of his lease after Feeney passed away in 1959 and his estate went into lengthy litigation. The lease was sold to Transamerica Corp. of San Francisco in 1963. In mid 1965 they began major upgrades to the property, paving most of the lots that had previously been dirt, installing sidewalks, adding 40,000 sq feet of floor space, and new lighting around the entire property that won first place in the outdoor category of the annual commerce lighting contest put on by the Valley of the Sun Electric League. By far the most impressive improvement they made was the widening of Camelback Rd to provide better access to their 800 parking spaces. They would also move Coze’s Phoenix statue from its spot along Camelback Rd, shifting it south to a new pedestal that used to stand where the entrance to Nordstrom Rack is now. People driving into the newly renovated mall would turn down the paved entrance lined with palm trees, heading strait towards Coze’s Phoenix in front of the mall’s main entrance. It stood atop a new, slimmer stone pyre that retained the fire and fountain, and added a cactus garden around the base. This is where it stood until 1988. By then the mall had changed hands a few times, and several changes had been made. The Food Bazaar had been moved from the west side of the structure to the east, the Whole Foods building was added in 1969, and a theater was opened in 1976. The renovations that started in 1988 were a lot more like the 1965 renovations than those projects though. The main entrance road off Camelback was rerouted slightly to its current orientation, the fountains throughout the walkways were renovated, performing much needed work to refresh the property. The most notable change made during this was the “restoration” of Coze’s Phoenix. Its metal had started to turn green over the years, so it was removed from its 1965 pedestal to be painted and moved to a new location atop a new base.

Its new home would be just about where it had originally stood at the entrance along Camelback Rd. Unlike when it was installed there in 1958, there was no 20 foot tall stone pedestal, just a pond that it stood in the middle of. The flames that used to spit up under the bird weren’t installed in the new location, and most jarring of all, it was painted white. When it was unveiled in October 1988 with the grand reopening of the mall, it was met with disappointment from the papers and anger from Paul Coze’s widow, Kay Coze. The following year, heavy remodeling to the east wing of the mall began, clearing away parts of the old Food Bazaar in 1989/1990 to build the hotel that is now a Sonesta Select. During that work, they would also develop the empty land south of the movie theater into more shops, as well as a new anchor space that would house Arizona’s first TJ Maxx.

The mall passed through a few more owners in the 90s and 2000s, including the original developers of Arizona Mills, and former Phoenix Roadrunners president, Claude Lemieux. None would do too much with the property though until it was purchased by James Shough in either 2009 or 2010. By 2011 he was partnering with RED Development to perform some major work on the mall to breathe new life into the aging property. By then it had lost a lot of the eclectic shops that once gave it so much character, including Juttenhoops in 2005. Shough and RED would level everything that was left of the original east wing of the mall, including the green space in front of the movie theater, to develop a new anchor store space. They made some attempts to blend it in with the older buildings, including tiled awnings over part of the walkway beside it, but overall it looks quite out of place. Its back is right up to the front of the old movie theater, which had closed in the 90s but has had its facade left untouched except for a uniform coat of tan paint. Along with the new anchor space, stores would be renovated to remove interior walkway access, shifting the entrances to almost every store to be on the north and western outside facades. This change left the once bustling interior walkways pretty dead, but business was doing well. The Nordstrom Rack brought in customers, which attracted Chris Bianco back to reopen his original Pizzaria Bianco location there in 2013. While their work did remove a lot of what made it fun to come here and walk around, it has helped keep the doors open and crowds of people coming every day. It’s rare you see the parking lot very empty, even if the big draws aren’t little eclectic, locally owned shops anymore. Even with all the changes they made, they did actually restore one of the most important parts of the mall. While relandscaping, they removed Coze’s Phoenix from atop its puddle. Rust was showing by this point, and it was really in need of some love. The paint was removed, glass panels restored and replaced where needed, and it was placed up on a flowerbed that made up part of the new sign at the Camelback entrance. A plaque was installed beside it a couple of years later, crediting Paul Coze, but not George Cavalliere II and Jos Maes. Maes is not really too known anymore, but the blacksmith shop that George Cavalliere built this in still stands at 2nd St and Brown Ave in Old Town Scottsdale. It’s been there and in business since 1910, still owned by George Cavalliere III. Coze’s work is also still prominent around Phoenix. He did a lot of large pieces that are on display in churches and public buildings. His 3 panel mural of the Phoenix stood in Terminal 2 of Sky Harbor for decades until it was relocated to their new rental car building a few years ago. There’s a piece of his work that everyone in Phoenix has seen more times than they can count, but never really noticed, and that is the Seal of Maricopa County. He created it in 1965, and an updated version was adopted in 1992. It makes sense why he’s the one recognized on the plaque as he is the most prominent member of the project and the one who designed it, but it would be nice to see the other men who helped create such an iconic piece of art get some recognition.

Shough and RED Development are still managing the mall to this day, and the Mars family owns the land it sits on. Despite all the changes, it still retains a lot of the character that it had when it first opened 69 years ago. The Snooze building, Trader Joe’s, and Banana Republic buildings are the three original buildings left. The Snooze building used to extend out more to the east but was modified in the late 80s, and then partially demolished in 2014 or 2015 to what’s there today. The Trader Joe’s building was shortened in the late 1960s when they built a Smitty’s, now Whole Foods. While they might not be exactly the same as they were when their doors first opened in January 1957, they’re still part of the oldest operating mall in Phoenix. Even if you consider Park Central to be older because one anchor opened there in 1956, it’s not a shopping center anymore. Town & Country may have changed in many ways, but it’s always been a place to shop and eat.

Opened in 1957 as the Camelback Town & Country Village, the Shops at Town & Country is still open as the oldest mall in Phoenix