The Best Places to Drink and Do in the United States

Once a month in the Melrose District, vendors spread out midcentury color across an outdoor vintage market, fall through spring. Clothes, jewelry, vinyl, and house decor carry the neighborhood's funky retro energy, and a few snack booths keep you going through the browsing. Dogs are welcome, which matters more than you'd think when the find of the morning turns out to be nothing.

The clack of a Remington or an Olivetti fills this old-school typewriter shop, which has been around forever and looks every year of it. The shelves run from clunky pre-war workhorses to sleek midcentury portables, and the staff will sell you one, rent you one, or fix the one gathering dust in your closet. Ideal for anyone who's decided that a glowing screen is the problem and a ribbon-inked page is the solution.

A rotating light tunnel will make you grab for a wall you don't need. The Museum of Illusions is an interactive attraction where slanted rooms make one person look like a giant beside another, and every exhibit comes with a plain-language explanation of why your brain got fooled. It sits inside the Arizona Boardwalk complex and runs well on a hot afternoon when you want air conditioning with a side of mild existential confusion.

A neon sign shop that's been bending glass tubes for Phoenix since the early 80s, Naturalite Neon has lit up everything from Ferrari dealerships to dive bars without anyone knowing to credit them. That anonymity is sort of the point. Half the glowing signs you've admired on a slow summer drive through the city probably came from this warehouse in Avondale, doing quiet, luminous work in the background of Phoenix's whole visual identity.

A VR lounge in Mesa that leans hard into the basement-gaming aesthetic rather than the cold, sleek future that VR always threatens to become. You can race cars, hit the slopes, or survive a zombie cage, and an hour runs just over twenty-five dollars. The crowd spans hardcore gamers and curious first-timers, which is sort of the whole point. Phoenix New Times named it the best virtual reality lounge in the valley in 2023.

A nonprofit arts center running classes in ceramics, drawing, glass, jewelry, painting, and music across two Phoenix locations, this is the kind of place that assumes you want to actually learn something. Instructors cover theory alongside technique, and most courses run five or six weeks, so the commitment is real but not daunting. A good antidote to wandering a craft store hoping for inspiration to strike.

An outdoor outlet mall on the Gila River Indian Community, Phoenix Premium Outlets trades indoor air conditioning for open-air discount hunting across a solid spread of name brands. Coach, Kate Spade, Nike, Adidas, and a Saks OFF Fifth anchor the handbag and sneaker heavy lineup, with factory stores for Banana Republic, Gap, and Columbia filling out the rest. It won't be confused with Scottsdale Fashion Square, but the prices will remind you that's fine.

Ten acres, four greenhouses, imported pottery, and occasionally a yoga class held among the succulents. Plant Stand of Arizona is a nursery that runs a little wild with its square footage, stocking everything from hardy desert plants to indoor exotics to the kind of statement specimen that needs its own corner of the room. It draws beginners hunting for something to not kill and collectors who already know what they want and just need fifty of them.

Mini-golf gets the nightlife treatment at this high-energy entertainment venue inside Scottsdale Quarter. Ball-tracking sensors handle the scoring so you can focus on navigating four illuminated nine-hole courses, each with inventive obstacles loosely themed around gems. Bars on both floors and DJ sets on weekends keep things moving, and yes, you can carry a cocktail through the whole round, though the pinball-style holes may test that commitment.

Seven lakes filled with reclaimed water sit inside a 110-acre desert preserve in Gilbert, and that unlikely combination pulls in birds you'd never expect this far from a coast: egrets, avocets, herons, stilts, and peregrine falcons passing through on migration. Doves and quail show up too, but they're almost beside the point. Veteran birders patrol the paths with telescope lenses, and they tend to be generous with tips if you're just starting out.

A mile of Roosevelt Street running between Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street, this walkable arts corridor threads past galleries, historic bungalows, live music venues, and enough bars and restaurants to justify multiple laps. It reads differently depending on the night, but the through line is a Phoenix that feels genuinely patched together rather than planned. Best experienced in the cooler months, when the weather finally cooperates with the city's ambitions.

A historic park in Glendale where peacocks graze under fruit trees while doves call from tall palms overhead. The grounds are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the old ranch buildings make a handsome backdrop for a walk through the gardens. There are playgrounds and sports fields on the other side if you need a reason to bring kids. The peacocks, though, do most of the convincing on their own.

Wild horses standing in the shallows while the skyline sits just out of frame is the image that makes the Salt River stretch near Phoenix worth knowing about. Drop one car at Phon D Sutton, put in at Water Users, and you have a mellow half-day float with a few Class I bumps at the Pinball section. Bighorn sheep, otters, and the famously unbothered feral horses tend to do most of the entertaining. You'll need a Tonto Pass for the parking lots.

The fuzzy handcuffs are practically the greeting cards section here. Smokin' Lingerie is an adult shop where the inventory goes well past anything you'd find at Target, stocking a deep run of BDSM gear, kink equipment, and smoking supplies for good measure. The Phoenix New Times named it the best place to buy BDSM gear in the Valley, which tracks given the sheer ambition of the catalog. Come with a clear sense of what you're after, or at least a tolerance for surprises.

Every night in Mesa, a neon woman dives forever into a pool that isn't there, which is either poetic or just very Phoenix. The Starlite Motel's "Diving Lady" sign is a midcentury relic that got knocked out by a storm and came back after a community-funded restoration effort that cost six figures. She glows in the way old neon does, warm and slightly buzzing, the kind of thing worth slowing the car down for.

The Arizona Cardinals call it home, but State Farm Stadium earns its keep on the concert calendar. The retractable-roof arena seats 64,000, which means when a stadium tour rolls into the Phoenix metro, the spectacle scales accordingly. The Rolling Stones, Metallica, and U2 have each played it twice, and Taylor Swift launched the Eras tour here. Big room, big sound, big crowds dressed accordingly.

A showroom full of classic cars and trucks where you can walk the floor without anyone pressuring you to buy. Streetside Classics is a national dealer specializing in vintage American iron, and the Mesa location keeps a deep inventory, the kind where a '53 Buick and a '72 Bronco might be neighbors. Even if dropping five figures on a Road Runner isn't the plan, an afternoon here passes easily, half browsing, half quietly doing the math.

Frank Lloyd Wright built Taliesin West as his own desert home and studio, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site is about as far as you can get from a velvet-rope museum. Docent-led walking tours cover the office, a private home theater, and a collection of Asian art, with the McDowell Mountains as the backdrop. Evening tours run too, if the afternoon heat is uninviting. Workshops and rotating exhibitions go deeper into Wright's philosophy for the genuinely curious.

Film still on the shelves is the first clue that this isn't a big-box camera department pretending to care. Tempe Camera is an old-school camera shop and repair house where the staff are all photographers, happy to talk you through a lens decision without making you feel like a tourist. Downstairs handles repairs, sensor cleanings, and gear rentals. They also run workshops if you're still figuring out what half the buttons do.

Tucked under the historic Daniels & Fisher Clock Tower, this variety nightclub runs the full spectrum from burlesque and drag to stand-up and live music, sometimes in the same week. The European-style room is dim and intimate enough for a date, loud and loose enough for a bachelorette party, which about covers the range of people you'll find there. A full bar keeps things moving. Shows run Wednesday through Saturday.

The Duce is part-bar, part-gym, part-vintage trailer diner, part-dance hall, which sounds like a fever dream but somehow holds together. You can swing dance, throw a punch in the boxing area, browse vintage goods, and still find time for a pot pie and an old-school cocktail, all under one roof. Ping-pong and shuffleboard are there if you need to justify the drinks as cardio. Phoenix has plenty of bars, but few with this particular range of excuses to stay.

No signage in the lobby, no floor indicator in the elevator, just the sound of a crowd spilling out when the fifth-floor doors open. The Pub at Thunderbird is a full bar on a Thunderbird School of Global Management campus, open to the public on weekdays, with alumni spirits behind the bar, a rooftop with downtown Phoenix views, and Thursday nights where students and professors share a table like it's the most normal thing in the world.

A dachshund-shaped iron toilet paper holder is the kind of thing that ends up in somebody's bathroom forever, and it came from a strip mall next to a Kohl's in Ahwatukee. Vintageous is a vintage furniture and decor shop with a well-curated rotation of midcentury modern pieces, old denim, and oddball gifts, all spread across a roomy, easy-to-navigate floor rather than the usual tchotchke labyrinth.

A 190-foot-long mural running along Adams Street between First and Second, painted by local artist Kayla Newnam. Gila monsters, saguaros, and mountain ranges roll across the wall in bold desert colors under a painted sunset that takes up most of the sky. Newnam opened two community paint days during the process, so a fair number of Phoenicians had a hand in it. The Phoenix New Times named it Best Mural in 2023.

A half-day on the Salt River for the price of a decent lunch is the pitch at WildHorse Paddleboards, a Mesa outfit that rents boards by the half or full day. The owner's enthusiasm for Arizona's waterways is the kind that turns a transaction into an orientation, so first-timers leave knowing more than which end to stand on. A solid way to spend a Sunday without committing to garage storage.

Xico has been anchoring Latino and Indigenous arts in downtown Phoenix since the mid-seventies, and it shows in the best way. This nonprofit gallery and arts hub runs the full range: rotating exhibitions, artist talks, and classes that draw a crowd well beyond the First Friday tourists. Shows skew toward Latina and Indigenous voices, and the programming actually changes, so there's a reason to come back.