Map of Glendale, Arizona in 2026

Glendale began as a canal builder’s land sale in the desert, and its old townsite still holds the bank, the sugar factory and the clubhouse the first settlers knew. This map prints the Beet Sugar Factory, the First National Bank of Glendale Building, the Glendale Woman’s Club Clubhouse and the Glendale Townsite-Catlin Court Historic District, with Hedgpeth Hills, Bullard Wash and Skunk Creek in the land around them.

Glendale is a city in Maricopa County, bordering Phoenix, the state capital.

KNOWOL made this map in 2026 and gave it the look of an old atlas. The shaded relief of Hedgpeth Hills comes from United States Geological Survey elevation data, and the streets were drawn from Census Bureau files. Historic sites such as the Beet Sugar Factory, the First National Bank of Glendale Building and the Glendale Woman’s Club Clubhouse were checked against National Park Service and National Register of Historic Places records. The city covers 65.1 square miles, the New River and the Agua Fria River run south through its western edges, and 248,325 people lived here at the 2020 census.

Murphy’s canal

In the late 1800s this was all desert. William John Murphy, a New Yorker living in Flagstaff, was in charge of building the 40-mile Arizona Canal from Granite Reef to the New River, and he finished it in 1885. He was deep in debt, since he’d agreed to be paid in company stock, bonds and land instead of cash. In 1887 he formed the Arizona Improvement Company to sell the land and water rights south of the canal, and he called that land Glendale. To bring buyers out from Phoenix he built an 18-mile diagonal road all the way to Peoria and named it Grand Avenue. In 1891 Burgess Hadsell worked with Murphy to bring 70 Brethren and River Brethren families here as a temperance colony, and more settlers came for the town’s ban on alcohol. Murphy platted the original townsite in 1895, with a town park and business lots, between Lamar Road, 55th Avenue, Myrtle Avenue and 59th Avenue.

The Beet Sugar Factory, a million-dollar plant built in the early 1900s by Murphy’s Arizona Sugar Company, made sugar only until 1913, but it brought immigrant and migrant families to Glendale. Families from Mexico settled in a part of town that came to be called Mexican Town, and Russian Spiritual Christian families, the Molokans, came to buy farmland, helped along by the sugar factory. The First National Bank of Glendale Building went up in 1906. The Glendale Townsite-Catlin Court Historic District includes Catlin Court, the bungalow neighborhood Otto R. Hansen laid out in 1914 and named for his wife’s maiden name. Catlin Court was the city’s first organized building program, and on June 9, 1992, it became the first of Glendale’s ten districts on the National Register.

The Woman’s Club and the high school

The Glendale Woman’s Club began in 1901 as a “Self Culture Club” for literary self-improvement. Its members raised money for the town’s first library and parks, and they ran the library themselves until December 1922, when the city took it over. In 1912 the club sold $5 shares of stock to build one of the first Woman’s Club clubhouses in Arizona. Thornton Fitzhugh designed it in the Craftsman style, in California redwood. From 1914 it served as a Sunday meeting place for several churches, and during World War I the Red Cross used it to make bandages, sew and pack supplies.

Glendale High School was founded in 1911, and it’s the oldest Arizona high school still on its original site, at Glendale and Grand Avenues since the fall of 1912. Its auditorium is on the National Register, and the country singer Marty Robbins and John F. Long, the developer who built Maryvale, both went there. The First Methodist Episcopal Church of Glendale Sanctuary, now the First United Methodist Church, is a Gothic Revival church with a castellated bell tower. The contractor W.M. Mullen built it “with ample labor provided by church volunteers,” and the sanctuary went on the National Register in 2006.

Thunderbird Field and the Hedgpeth Hills

In 1941 a group led by the Hollywood producer Leland Hayward built Thunderbird Field near Glendale to train pilots, with backers who included James Stewart, Cary Grant and Henry Fonda. The artist Millard Sheets laid it out to look, from the air, like a Thunderbird: the control tower was the tail, the hangars the wings and the gardens the head. In all, 10,000 pilots from 30 nations trained there before it closed in June 1945, and it gave its name to the television show Thunderbirds, whose creator’s brother had been stationed there. The site later became the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and Arizona Christian University holds it now.

On the Hedgpeth Hills, in the Deer Valley area of Phoenix, the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve protects more than 1,500 Hohokam, Patayan and Archaic petroglyphs on 500 basalt boulders, made between 500 and 5,000 years ago. They were studied in 1980, before the Army Corps of Engineers built Adobe Dam there to hold back floods on Skunk Creek. Arrowhead Towne Center opened in 1993, and the neighborhood around it, Arrowhead Ranch, made the area a hotspot for homes and shopping. State Farm Stadium has been home to the Arizona Cardinals since 2006.

Glendale High School has its place on the map, and so does the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Glendale Sanctuary. The streets reach from Arrowhead Ranch out to Village Park.

This Glendale map is a good addition to an office, library or den, and it can help teach children the geography and history of the area. It’s made for anyone who calls Glendale home, and KNOWOL created it in 2026 to show the city as it looks today. Zoom in on the preview above to explore the details, then click here to get your copy of the Glendale map.

Sources

• Glendale, Arizona, Wikipedia
• List of historic properties in Glendale, Arizona, Wikipedia
• Catlin Court Historic District, Wikipedia
• Glendale Woman’s Club, Wikipedia
• Glendale High School (Glendale, Arizona), Wikipedia
• First United Methodist Church of Glendale, Wikipedia
• Thunderbird Field No. 1, Wikipedia
• Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve, Wikipedia