Tempe, One Neighborhood at a Time

Tempe is a small city, but it does not feel like one place. Adobe houses from the 1890s sit a few blocks from glass towers on the lake, and a postwar ranch street can be a short bike ride from a neighborhood built without resident parking. The best way to understand it is the way residents do: one neighborhood at a time.

How Tempe draws its own map

Tempe does not divide itself into official villages. Instead, neighborhoods organize themselves. The city's Neighborhood Services office works with voluntary neighborhood associations, open to every resident, with dues optional and boundaries usually set around 40 to 400 households, alongside homeowners' associations. The city keeps an interactive map of every association, and Neighborhood Services can tell you whether your address falls inside one.

History draws a second map. The city's Historic Preservation Office lists properties on the Tempe Historic Property Register and helps owners seek the National Register of Historic Places, and its online directory covers more than 200 historic buildings. Five residential districts appear there: Borden Homes, Date Palm Manor, Roosevelt Addition, Tomlinson Estates and University Park.

Downtown and Maple-Ash

Downtown is where Tempe began, at the foot of Hayden Butte, where Charles Trumbull Hayden's ferry crossed the Salt River in 1871. Mill Avenue still carries the old town's buildings, including the 1899 Casa Loma, alongside offices and apartments that rose after Town Lake opened. On weekdays, Window Coffee Bar pours espresso inside The Beam on Farmer Avenue, a few blocks west of Mill. On Sundays, the new City Hall Farmers Market brings vendors downtown.

Just south of downtown, the Maple-Ash neighborhood is a grid of older homes on Maple and Ash avenues, several of them listed in the city's historic directory, such as the Byron Redden House on Ash and the Baker Cedar Lowenthal House on Maple. Casey Moore's Oyster House sits at Ninth Street and Ash, in what it calls Old Town Tempe, serving oysters, seafood and pub food, with a full bar and late hours most nights.

South of campus: University Park, Eighth Street and Apache

University Park, immediately south of the ASU campus between Mill and McAllister avenues, was platted in 1945 on former farmland and built out through 1960. Its 159 properties, most of them single-family houses in Ranch, International and Spanish Colonial styles, form a National Register district. The George Ditch irrigation canal still divides Parkway Boulevard down the middle.

East along Eighth Street is one of Tempe's oldest Hispanic neighborhoods. Manuela Sotelo, widowed in 1872, subdivided her land as the railroad brought newcomers, and the Sotelo Addition was platted in 1890. The adobe Elias-Rodriguez House at 927 E. Eighth St. survives from that community. This fall the Tempe History Museum unveiled a new exhibit there on the two families who lived in the house.

Apache Boulevard, the old U.S. 60, now carries the light rail and many of the city's international restaurants. The Dhaba, near Apache and McClintock, cooks Punjabi dishes in a clay tandoor over charcoal. Farther east, Culdesac Tempe, at 2025 E. Apache, is a 17-acre neighborhood with no resident parking, built around ground-floor shops and its own light rail station.

The postwar ranch districts

After World War II, Tempe's population boomed and farms became subdivisions. Three of those neighborhoods are now protected. Roosevelt Addition, platted in March 1946, is a compact district of 22 brick Ranch houses with steel casement windows. Borden Homes, platted in 1947 with 79 lots, stands out because 40 of its houses were built of row-lock brick, a technique the city calls rare in the Phoenix area. It joined the Tempe register in 2005 and the National Register in 2011.

Date Palm Manor, at the southwest corner of Mill Avenue and Broadway Road, was built on the former Valsunda Date Gardens. It was Tempe's first residential subdivision south of Broadway and its earliest postwar custom-home development, with its homes set around a loop of street, looking in at one another. Most of its homes went up between 1954 and 1959, and the city designated it a historic district in 2009.

North by Papago, south by the Lakes

North of the river, Tempe meets Papago Park's red buttes. The pink adobe Eisendrath House, on College Avenue beside the park, hosts the city's public art staff; it is closed for adobe restoration until April 2027. Nearby, Glenrosa cooks Sonoran food over live fire at the Rolling Hills golf course on North Mill Avenue, and Hundred Mile Brewing, a woman-owned brewery on Scottsdale Road, keeps its beer within a 100-mile radius and hosts a Sunday morning run club at Town Lake.

At the city's south end, the Lakes neighborhood is built around its own water, and Kiwanis Park is changing. In September the city announced a dementia- and age-friendly park in the design phase there, planned southwest of Kiwanis Lake with shaded paths, porch swings and gardens. No opening date has been set.

Whichever corner you call home, the city's association map is a good first stop. Find your neighbors, learn what your street used to be, and the rest of Tempe starts to make sense.