Ten Things Worth Knowing About Tempe

Every Tempe resident eventually becomes a tour guide. A cousin visits, a coworker moves from out of state, a friend wants to know why there is a giant letter on a hill. These ten facts, each drawn from the city's own history pages and records, are the kind you can point to on the spot, because almost all of them are still standing.

A Greek name and two founding towns

1. The name came from an Englishman's memory of Greece. The town was officially named Tempe in 1879, and the Tempe History Museum credits "Lord" Darrell Duppa, an Englishman who also helped found Phoenix, with the suggestion. The butte, the wide river and the green fields around them reminded him of the Vale of Tempe in ancient Greece.

2. Tempe started as two settlements, not one. The first settlers were Hispanic families from southern Arizona who helped dig the first canals, and in 1872 some of them founded a town called San Pablo east of the butte. West of the butte, Charles Trumbull Hayden homesteaded in 1870 and built a store, a flour mill and a ferry across the Salt River. The two grew into a single community within a few years.

Buildings that outlived the farm town

3. Hayden's 1874 adobe house is still in use. The city calls the Hayden House, at the southwest corner of Mill Avenue and Rio Salado Parkway, the oldest continuously occupied building in Maricopa County. For decades it was Monti's La Casa Vieja steakhouse, which closed in 2014. The adobe was restored to its 1924 appearance, the city now owns it, and the Downtown Tempe Authority uses it as offices.

4. The flour mill across the street has burned and risen twice. Mills have stood on the Hayden Flour Mill site since 1874. The first burned, and so did its 1895 adobe replacement in 1917; the concrete mill standing today went up in 1918 and was designed to resist fire. Its 1951 grain silos were Tempe's tallest structures until 2007, and milling ended on April 1, 1998, after the longest continuous run of any industrial building in the metro area. In October 2023 the city approved an agreement with Venue Projects and Sunbelt Holdings to redevelop the site, and the city says the work will honor the mill's history.

5. Mill Avenue had a hotel with presidential guests. The three-story Casa Loma Building at Fourth Street and Mill was built in 1899 as the Casa Loma Hotel, on the site of Tempe's first hotel. City records say President William McKinley stayed there in 1901 and Buffalo Bill Cody in 1911. A 1927 remodel gave it the Spanish Colonial look it has today. Its ground floor holds restaurants, including Caffe Boa Bistro and Wine Bar, which has served downtown for more than three decades.

6. An 1892 ice factory still stands on Eighth Street. The compound on East Eighth Street began in 1892 as an ice plant, became a creamery, and was bought in 1927 by the Borden Milk Company, which added buildings and the Mission Revival parapets you see now. Borden closed it in 1953, and a rehabilitation of the buildings was completed in 1997. Today Infusion Coffee and Tea Crafters runs a café at the compound's address, 1300 E. Eighth St.

The mountain with a letter on it

7. The letter on A Mountain was not always an A. Hayden Butte holds about 500 petroglyphs made by the Hohokam between roughly A.D. 750 and 1450, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community considers it sacred. Students from the Tempe Normal School placed an N on the butte with the class of 1918, changed it to a T in 1925 and first formed an A from loose rocks in 1938. Today's 60-foot concrete A dates to 1955, the year the college became Arizona State University. The city protects the butte by allowing no development above 1,180 feet.

A lake in a dry riverbed

8. Tempe Town Lake opened on November 7, 1999. It grew from an idea first sketched by ASU architecture students in 1966. It covers 220 acres and runs two miles along the Salt River. In a major flood, the steel gates of its dam are lowered so the river can pass through, then raised again to refill the lake. That system was put to work in November 2026: on November 1 the city paused boating while the Salt River Project released water from upstream reservoirs, keeping the lakeside parks open.

9. The city reports the lake's water temperature. Tempe runs a weather station at Town Lake that posts current air temperature, humidity, wind, rain and the lake's own temperature, with daily, monthly and yearly highs and lows. It is a useful thing to check on a summer morning, when Phoenix-area normals put the average July high above 106 degrees.

Buses named for planets

10. Tempe's free neighborhood shuttles are named after planets. The six Orbit routes, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, cost nothing to ride and run every day of the year. On neighborhood streets they use flag zones, so a rider can wave a bus down anywhere along the route where it is safe to stop.

Most of these stories fit inside a mile of the Mill Avenue bridge. Start at Hayden House, look up at the A, walk past the mill to the lake, and you will have covered a century and a half of Tempe before lunch.