Walk the dirt track that runs beside Central Avenue on any weekday morning and you will see strollers before you see saddles. Runners in reflective vests. A woman in scrubs walking a leashed greyhound before her shift at St. Joseph's. A man in a Creighton Bluejays cap jogging south toward Park Central. Nobody riding a horse.
That is the quiet joke of Murphy's Bridle Path. It was built for animals that mostly do not use it anymore, and it survives today not because the City of Phoenix decided to protect a relic, but because the neighborhood around it refused to let the relic disappear on the city's schedule instead of its own.
That is the part of the story most people who use this trail every week do not know. The path is not a city amenity in the way Encanto Park or North Mountain Park are city amenities. It is closer to a shared utility that the neighborhood has partly taken over paying for, one ash tree and one dog-waste bag at a time.
A Suburb Built Around Trees That Are Still Standing
The path exists because a developer named William J. Murphy platted a two-square-mile subdivision called Orangewood in 1895, running from what is now Bethany Home Road north to Northern Avenue, between 7th Avenue and 7th Street. Murphy's pitch was rural living within an easy ride of downtown Phoenix. He extended irrigation along the corridor and planted rows of olive and ash trees down both sides of Central Avenue, with citrus groves filling the interior lots to make the subdivision more attractive to investors and new residents.
Those trees are still there. Many of the olives lining Central Avenue are more than a century old, and the corridor's streetscape, the irrigation lateral running beside it, and the Bridle Path itself are listed on both the Arizona and National Registers of Historic Places. The Arizona Horse Lovers Club later championed the path as a riding trail, and their legacy still marks the route: an iron gateway shaped like a horse's head and horseshoe stands at Bethany Home Road and Central Avenue, the closest thing the corridor has to a cornerstone.
The practical footprint is modest. The path runs roughly 2.6 miles one way from Bethany Home Road to the Arizona Canal, wide enough for two people to walk side by side, shaded for most of its length by the same mature canopy Murphy planted more than a century ago.
What "Historic Register" Actually Stops You From Doing
A historic designation sounds ceremonial until you learn what it actually blocks. In 1977, the Phoenix City Council passed Resolution 14895, which specifically prohibits residents from paving over their section of the Bridle Path to create a driveway. That single rule is the reason the path stays dirt from one end to the other instead of turning into a patchwork of concrete aprons wherever a homeowner wants easier car access.
The same year, the city's animal-waste ordinance, still enforced today, set fines for uncollected pet waste on public paths between $100 and $2,500, a detail that tells you the city always understood this stretch of Central Avenue would be treated as a park, not a leftover right-of-way.
Those two rules, one protecting the surface and one governing behavior on it, are the entire legal skeleton holding the Bridle Path in its current form. Everything else, the trees, the trail surface, the bags for cleaning up after your dog, depends on who shows up to pay for it.
The City Stopped Filling the Bags
Years ago, a local Eagle Scout installed dog-waste bag stations along the path, a small project meant to keep a heavily used dog corridor clean. For a while the city kept those stations stocked. Then budget cuts hit, and the city stopped refilling them.
The stations are still there. They just do not refill themselves. According to the North Central Phoenix Homeowners Association, volunteers and neighbors have kept at least some of them stocked since the city stepped back, an unglamorous kind of stewardship that never shows up in a listing description but is exactly the sort of thing a longtime resident notices when it works and notices even more when it stops.
The tree situation followed a similar pattern. The city still owns and maintains the right-of-way trees along Central Avenue, but its capacity to replace dying or storm-damaged trees has shrunk. The Bridle Path, according to the association, is the only linear park in the state maintained by a city Parks and Recreation department, and that department can only replace a handful of trees each year out of city funds alone.
The North Central Phoenix Homeowners Association filled the gap. It offers to purchase, plant, and maintain a new 24-inch box ash tree for $350 when a resident or the city identifies a missing one, funded through resident donations. Over time, working alongside the city rather than instead of it, the association says it has helped replace more than 100 trees along the corridor.
None of that shows up on a map. It shows up in whether the shade is still there next July.
Who Is Actually Running This
The association behind that tree fund was founded in 1977, the same year the city passed its paving resolution, and it has represented roughly 2,500 residential and commercially zoned parcels between Missouri Avenue and Northern Avenue ever since. Its president, Mary Crozier, described the group's role plainly in an interview with North Central News:
"Many people don't know we exist, but you can tell from our activity, we quietly work behind the scenes 24/7."
That behind-the-scenes work has ranged from tree funding to something with higher stakes. In early 2025, the association spent part of its energy opposing a set of state legislative proposals that would have stripped local zoning control and allowed higher-density housing, duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, to replace single-family lots across historic neighborhoods including North Central, Willo, and Coronado. Whether or not you ever attend a meeting or know a board member's name, decisions like that are part of why the Bridle Path and the streetscape around it still look the way they did decades ago.
What the Trail Actually Feeds Into
The path is not an island. It runs past the entrance to the twice-weekly Uptown Farmers Market on North Central Avenue, where more than a hundred vendors set up on Wednesdays and Saturdays selling produce, honey, and baked goods, close enough that a morning walk on the Bridle Path turns naturally into a market stop.
Head south and the corridor spills into Park Central, the mid-century shopping center at 3110 North Central Avenue that now houses Creighton University's Phoenix campus alongside restaurants like Steak 44 and Joyride Taco House. A little further north, the strip mall at 100 East Camelback Road, restored to something close to its original 1955 look, marked its 70th anniversary in 2025 with vendors including Shake Shack and Dynamite Beer Co. taking part.
Along the corridor itself, the everyday rotation for residents includes Windsor for a burger and Churn for the ice cream that follows it, Federal Pizza and Postino across the street, and Lux Central for the kind of coffee shop that becomes a daily habit rather than a special occasion. None of these are detours from the Bridle Path. They are what the walk is usually for.
The Thing to Actually Notice on Your Next Walk
Next time you are on the path, past whichever café or market stall you started at, look at the trees over your head and the surface under your feet. Those are not simply landscaping choices from 1895 that happened to survive. They are the product of a 1977 city resolution that still bans paving them over, a tree fund that a volunteer board keeps solvent one $350 donation at a time, and a scout troop's dog-waste stations that neighbors, not the city, keep filled.
That is the whole story of the Bridle Path in one sentence: a piece of Phoenix's oldest infrastructure that the city protects with old rules and the neighborhood keeps alive with new money.
If you are curious about how North Central Phoenix's history shapes what it is like to live here today, or you want a longer conversation about a specific block, street, or sub-neighborhood along the corridor, the team at The Studebaker Group knows this stretch of Central Avenue well enough to talk about more than square footage. Schedule a personalized consultation whenever you are ready to talk through it.
