If you've heard the Old Town Scottsdale Farmers Market is leaving Brown Avenue, you've heard half the story. The half that gets left out is the one that actually matters if Saturday mornings at the market are part of your week: the market isn't shrinking, disappearing, or getting squeezed out of Old Town. It's moving because it outgrew the building it's been living in.
For sixteen years, the market has set up inside the parking structure at Brown Avenue and 1st Street, a footprint it shared with commuter and shopper parking every week since 2009. That arrangement worked when the market was smaller. It stopped working as the market became the biggest weekly draw of its kind in the Phoenix metro. This October, when the 2026-27 season opens, the market relocates to the City Hall surface lot at 75th Street and Bennie Gonzales Way, a few blocks from where it's always been. The move became necessary once the city approved a $20.9 million expansion of the Brown Avenue garage in April 2026, a project that broke ground this summer and makes the market's old spot unavailable. Right now, in the middle of August, the market is in its usual summer dormancy. It closes for the hottest stretch of the year and comes back in the fall. This year, "coming back" means coming back somewhere else.
What's Actually Different
Here's the comparison worth having in your head before the first Saturday in October.
| Brown Avenue (2009-2026) | City Hall Lot (starting October 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Multi-level parking structure | Open surface lot |
| Vendor count | 107, at capacity | Room to expand beyond 107 |
| Vendor applications | Being turned away | City framing the new site as growth room |
| Walk from the Arts District | A few minutes | A few minutes longer, still walkable |
| Power setup | Generators required for stalls | Generators no longer needed, per the city |
That last line matters more than it sounds. Councilwoman Solange Whitehead, one of the people who pushed for the City Hall site, described the old location plainly at a January "downtown summit" called by Mayor Lisa Borowsky: the market was "landlocked," and organizers had been turning down vendors for years simply because there was nowhere to put them. A garage floor has a hard ceiling on how many stalls fit. An open lot doesn't have that ceiling in the same way, which is the entire argument for why this move is a gain and not a downsize.
The Politics Got Messier Than the Market Deserved
City hall drama isn't usually a reason to care about a farmers market, but it's worth knowing because it explains why this took a full year to sort out and why the details kept shifting through the spring.
The city council voted unanimously on November 17, 2025, to approve the relocation. City Manager Greg Caton framed it as continuity: "Moving it to City Hall keeps it close to the heart of Old Town and gives vendors and visitors the space they need while we make improvements elsewhere." That was the official line. The unofficial line, aired at that same summit, was less tidy. Whitehead credited herself, fellow Councilwoman Maryanne McAllen, and Mayor Lisa Borowsky with leading the push to find the market a new home. Borowsky pushed back on that framing in the same meeting, saying she'd actually wanted the parking garage itself relocated instead, not the market: "I do not want the farmers market to relocate. I want them to stay right where they are."
Both positions came from people who wanted the market to survive. They just disagreed about which piece of Old Town should have to move to make that happen. The market lost that argument, which is why it's the one packing up. But the disagreement is a useful signal for residents: this wasn't a quiet bureaucratic reshuffle nobody noticed. Public comment at the council meeting included pointed questions. Resident Steve Sutton told the council flatly that his regular customers didn't want to shop at a parking lot next to City Hall. Another speaker, Dan Isaac, asked for a cost-benefit breakdown covering waste removal, public safety, and electricity at the new site, along with an honest look at what the move might do to foot traffic on Old Town's retail streets. Neither analysis had been included in the staff packet at the time, according to meeting coverage. The council also caught and fixed a drafting error in the original contract language that would have ended the market's current agreement immediately, before amending the deal to keep the market operating at Brown Avenue until a mutually agreed transition date.
None of that changes where the market ends up. It does mean the version of this story you get from a press release, "exciting new chapter," isn't the full picture. Real disagreement shaped this, and some of it is still unresolved in the way any local political decision is unresolved: people got outvoted, not necessarily convinced.
Your Saturday, Mapped Between Now and October
The market you know is currently on its summer break, which is normal. The seasonal rhythm has always looked like this:
- October through April: 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- May: 8 a.m. to noon
- June: 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., to beat the heat
- July through September: closed
That pattern doesn't change with the new address. What changes is where you park and where you walk once the season restarts. The City Hall lot sits close enough to the Civic Center that the city has already committed to wayfinding signage pointing shoppers toward Civic Center parking, along with dedicated vendor parking under the Civic Center garages so vendor trucks aren't competing with shoppers for spots. If your Saturday routine has always been market first, then a walk into the Arts District for coffee or a gallery stop, that sequence still works. The distance from the new lot into the heart of Old Town is longer than the walk from Brown Avenue, but it's still a walk, not a drive.
If you want a Saturday morning market fix before October and don't want to wait, there's a smaller option that's been running independently of all this. The Old Town Farm and Artisan Market sets up on the grounds of Scottsdale United Methodist Church at 4140 N. Miller Road, a family-run operation started by Christian Beresford and Cailey Tovar as a sister market to the one Beresford's mother runs in Casa Grande. It's a fraction of the size of the Brown Avenue market, built around fresh bread, local honey, jerky, shaved ice, and a rotating cast of artisans selling everything from custom jewelry to secondhand clothing. It's not a replacement for the market you're used to. It's a different kind of Saturday, smaller and more personal, and it's been quietly running while the bigger story plays out across town.
Why This Actually Matters if You Live Here
The easy version of this story treats the move as loss: sixteen years at one address, then a forced exit because a parking garage needed the room more than the market did. That version isn't wrong, but it's incomplete. The market outgrew its space years before the city acted on it. Turning down vendor applications because there's no floor space left is not a sign of a market that's struggling. It's a sign of one that needed a bigger home and finally got the argument settled, even if the settling took a year, a unanimous vote, a contract correction, and a public disagreement between the mayor and a councilwoman about who deserves credit.
What you're actually getting in October is the same Saturday tradition with room to grow into, on a lot without a low concrete ceiling over anyone's stall. That's worth knowing before the first weekend back, and worth remembering the next time someone tells you Old Town is losing something. Sometimes what looks like an exit is really just Old Town finally catching up to how much people showed up for it.
If you're already living the Old Town Saturday routine and you're curious what any of this means for your own home's value in a neighborhood this actively shaped by local decisions, the team at Jonny West Real Estate knows this market block by block. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's next for your property.
