Tag Archives: Scottsdale

Phoenix – FL Wright’s Taliesin west, & Pane Bianco Central

I last visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s artistic compound in Scottsdale over 20 years ago with my mom and it was pouring rain with dark skies. Very different on a perfectly sunny spring day and worth the steep admission price ($44 for a self-audio tour.) Good thing we booked ahead; the place was busy. Taliesin west was the famous architect’s western retreat, studio and school where his students/disciples roughed it in the desert. Today it is a more manicured estate, at the foot of the mountains.

For lunch, I found a bohemian NY style pizza and sandwich shop, Pane Bianco Central, created by a James Beard winner.

Pane Bianco

Great atmosphere and sandwiches (the prosciutto, mozzarella on chewy focaccia: and the coffee-crusted roast beef with horseradish aioli on a thick baguette) were outstanding and too big to finish so the leftovers are on the plane with us now. The restaurant was a short backroads drive to the phoenix airport (Note to self: next time, go to the arco station near the sandwich place for the cheapest gas.)

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Public Market Cafe, Roosevelt Row – Phoenix./ Acadia Market – scottsdale

Gorgeous morning in Phoenix so I walked around on a Sunday morning near our hotel downtown. Very quiet and not many people around, except for occasional street people and farmer/conventioneers. I did find a lovely little pocket of urban pioneer hipness at the Public Market Cafe, just north of the convention center area.

The place was bustling with a mixed crowd, families, millennials, older folks, all drawn to a place with good hearty comfort food (and what looked like great bloody Mary’s.) How great was it to sit on the open air patio under a tin roof by a fireplace, estimg a light breakfast. Later  I walked a little further north to the Roosevelt row art district which is still in process, with stucco bungalows in various stages of restoration or recreation as galleries or little shops and new modern loft complexes.

The development is still spotty — at that attractive stage where you sense change is happening and you feel a sense of discovery.

Early SoHo, I call it, harkening back to the days in the 1970s when I used to visit artists with my mom in the emerging soho district of New York, long before it became overrun with artists and over commercialized.

Dad and I stopped briefly for lunch in Scottsdale at a pretty place called Arcadia farms, again eating on the outdoor patio. 79 degrees today! nice change from subzero temps in Iowa.

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