One Block of Cortez Street Now Runs From Espresso to Last Call
"The day is for the art gallery and artists to work quietly, and the night is fun parties that rock the place."
That's Cloud Oakes, the artist who opened Art Hive at 203 N Cortez Street in 2023, describing the two shifts her building runs on. The rest of the block keeps the same split schedule.
North Cortez sits one block off Courthouse Square, opposite the run of saloons and shops that make up Whiskey Row. Where Whiskey Row operates as one continuous strip built around tourist traffic and evening crowds, North Cortez runs a full rotation: coffee before eight in the morning, retail through the afternoon, a working art gallery on weekends, and cocktails past eleven at night, all inside about a block and a half of sidewalk. The addresses run from 115 N Cortez near Sheldon down to 216 N Cortez, and the businesses along that stretch increasingly stack on top of and beside each other instead of spreading out across downtown.
The Century Lounge, at 129 N Cortez, opens most mornings around seven inside a restored Western-era hotel bar and serves espresso and breakfast plates in the same room that pours craft cocktails and wine once the sun goes down. Upstairs, Papa's Uptown Italian runs dinner-only service out of 129 ½ N Cortez, stacking a third register directly on top of the first two.
Half a block down at 123 N Cortez, The Cortez covers the other end of the clock. It doesn't open until three in the afternoon and sticks to cocktails, small plates, and live music, no coffee at all. It opened in the weeks before 2024's Acker Night, and two years later it still runs a full calendar of live music alongside the bar menu. Between the two addresses, twenty feet of sidewalk covers both halves of a day without anyone needing to walk anywhere else for the second one.
Art Hive's building at 203 N Cortez used to house an antique mall, and before that a machinery shop. When Cloud Oakes opened it in 2023, the studio waiting list filled before construction was finished. Three years later the building holds more than 36 individual artist studios, according to Signals AZ's coverage of the gallery this August, along with a rotating main gallery that changes shows monthly, a framing shop, a podcast studio, and a toy store with its own street-facing entrance.
Public hours run Thursday through Sunday, quiet enough to walk the studio hallways and talk to whoever's at their easel that afternoon. Once a month, on 4th Friday, the gallery opens a new show and the same building fills with people who came for the art walk and stayed. It's one address operating on two different registers depending on what day and hour you show up, the same split Oakes described from the start.
Cocktail bars and a gallery are one kind of signal about a block. A running shoe store is a different one. Fleet Feet opened at 122 N Cortez in 2025, next to a stretch that already held Cortez Street Emporium at 115 for antiques and vintage, The Marketplace on Cortez at 117 for more of the same, Not Our First Rodeo at 121 for western apparel, and Luxe 133 at 133 for furniture and décor. None of that is nightlife. It's daytime retail choosing the same handful of storefronts the bars and the gallery chose, which says the pull here isn't limited to whoever's looking for a drink after dark.
Further up at 216 N Cortez, the NoCo Community Kitchen gives small food businesses shared commercial space to build out a product before they need their own lease. It's the kind of infrastructure that shows up when a district is trying to grow its next round of tenants rather than just filling the ones it already has.
None of this happened by chance. The corridor goes by NoCo, short for North Cortez, and the name traces back to Deppeana LLC, run in part by Ty Fitzmorris and Rebecca Horniman, which has spent recent years buying and renovating a cluster of buildings on this stretch of downtown. The footprint includes the Old Post Office on Goodwin Street, the Old County Bank Building at Willis and North Cortez, the Raven Cafe, and the Arizona Historical Society building on Marina Street. Fitzmorris is also the one who showed Cloud Oakes the empty building that became Art Hive.
A coffee shop that turns into a cocktail bar, an antique mall that became 36 studios, and a running store next to a vintage emporium didn't land on the same block by coincidence. A small number of people decided which buildings to buy and what to put inside them, then filled in the rest of the storefronts to match.
The clearest evidence of what that curation buys shows up in who gets booked. In July, the Fair Weather Social Club, another NoCo property, brought in Cedric Burnside, the Grammy-winning blues musician and grandson of R.L. Burnside, for a two-night run. That's a booking most single-block districts in a town Prescott's size don't land. Past NoCo Harvest Fest lineups have paired acts like Ben Dickey and the Galactic Thrummers, Titanic Orchestra, and The Sunpunchers with a flea market and food trucks strung down the same sidewalk that holds Fleet Feet and the Emporium during the day.
None of that changes what Whiskey Row is, the historic strip of saloons and shops a block over that dates back to before the 1900 fire that leveled and rebuilt it. What's different is that Cortez Street now runs its own separate loop, coffee to vintage to art to dinner to last call, on one line of storefronts that didn't hold this particular mix three years ago.
Martin de Bókay pays attention to changes like this across Sedona and the Verde Valley, not because a running shoe store or a cocktail bar changes anyone's address, but because a block that fills in this specifically usually says something true about where a town is headed next. If you want that kind of read on the towns you already live in, Martin de Bókay is worth following.
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