Walk La Montana Drive toward the library this fall and you will pass three new murals in a row, all within about a quarter mile, all by the same artist. That is not a coincidence and it is not just a beautification grant spent quickly. Those three walls, painted by AnnMarie Perry, trace the actual walking route from the Community Center to the International Dark Sky Discovery Center, the observatory and planetarium the town broke ground on back in 2024 and still has not opened.
That is the thing worth knowing about Fountain Hills right now. The town's fiscal year 2023-2024 budget set aside $25,000 for its downtown mural program, modest money that ended up painting a walking path toward one of the more ambitious civic builds the town has ever taken on. Two years after groundbreaking, that building still is not done. The paint got there first.
Where the paint went
Nine murals went up around downtown earlier this year, the work of four Arizona artists brought in through a national call for artists that the town ran with a nonprofit called Art State Arizona. Each artist got a different stretch of pavement:
- AnnMarie Perry, a spray-paint artist known for blending nature and surrealism, painted three murals along La Montana Drive, the corridor that runs past the library, the River of Time Museum, and the Discovery Center construction site.
- Reckers painted three at the entrance to Plaza Fountainside along El Lago Boulevard.
- Anthony Farias, working out of Phoenix, painted two at the corner of Saguaro Boulevard and Paul Nordin Drive.
- Jesse Perry painted one near Fountain View Coffee inside Plaza Fountainside, featuring a hummingbird.
A tenth mural landed separately at Fountain Park, a Sonoran Desert scene designed and painted by students from the Inspiration Academy under local artist Laura Thurbon's guidance. That one is not part of the Dark Sky route, but it is part of the same year of the town leaning hard into public art as a way of marking where things are headed before they exist.
The town's own economic development director, Amanda Jacobs, made the connection explicit in a release covering the project. She pointed to what happened right after Jesse Perry finished his mural near Fountain View Coffee.
"While Jesse was working on his mural in Fountain Hills, the newly reopened Streets of New York hired him to install three additional murals, demonstrating the ripple effect public art can have on local businesses and artists."
That is a restaurant paying a town-commissioned muralist to paint its own walls within weeks of watching him work. Public art in Fountain Hills this year is not decoration sitting quietly on a wall. It is functioning as a signal that businesses are reading and acting on.
The building at the end of the route
Here is what the murals are walking you toward. The Discovery Center broke ground in April 2024, timed deliberately to coincide with that year's total solar eclipse, and it has been under construction since. By October 2025, the center had installed the largest telescope in metro Phoenix, a 27.5-inch PlaneWave CDK700, giving the region its first research-grade instrument available to the public and to students at Arizona State University and the Maricopa community colleges.
The timeline for actually opening the doors has moved more than once. In October 2025, coverage described the center as scheduled to open sometime in 2026, with one outlet specifying summer. By July 2026, the Fountain Hills Times was reporting that phase two construction, which covers the planetarium, theater, exhibit hall, classrooms and kitchen, had only just gotten underway that June, with completion now placed in early 2027. Phase one, the building's exterior and roughly a third of its interior, wrapped in 2025. The rest is still being built out.
None of that is a criticism of the project. Fountain Hills earned its International Dark Sky Community designation back in 2018, the 17th place in the world to receive it, and a facility with a planetarium, a theater and a research-grade observatory is not the kind of thing that gets built on a rushed schedule. What it does mean for anyone living here is that the murals arrived well ahead of the attraction they are pointing at, and if you have been wondering when you will actually get to look through that telescope, the honest answer this month is not this year.
A pizzeria bets on the same corridor
The clearest sign that businesses believe the wait is worth it sits two blocks off that same mural route. Streets of New York, the Arizona pizza chain that opened its first location in Phoenix in 1976, had run a Fountain Hills store for more than 20 years before it closed in January 2025. It came back in December 2025, taking over the former Euro Pizza space at 12645 N Saguaro Blvd after a full remodel, and it is now the chain's 16th Arizona location. The company's director of operations, Ryan Glaeser, framed the return as a bet on the town's continued draw, and Mayor Gerry Friedel tied the reopening directly to what he called the strength of the local economy and the vitality of downtown.
A second bet landed a few miles away earlier this month. Trilogy Restaurant, a new seafood concept from chef partner Richard E. Pelz and general manager Dennis Payne, opened August 20 at Eagle Mountain, 14815 E Shea Blvd. It is a different pocket of town from the Saguaro Boulevard corridor, closer to the golf community than to the murals, but it adds to the same pattern this year of restaurant operators reading Fountain Hills as a place worth reinvesting in right now, not waiting until the Discovery Center is finished to do it.
What's actually on the calendar this fall
If you want a reason to walk the mural route before the weather turns, or just want to know what is worth putting on the fridge calendar, here is what is confirmed for the next several weeks:
| Event | Dates | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Peach Market, 5th Annual | Saturdays through September, 8 to 11:30 a.m. | Tractor Supply Co., 17130 E Shea Blvd |
| Oktoberfest | October 2 to 3 | Centennial Circle and the Community Center |
| Fall Fountain Festival of Fine Arts & Crafts | November 13 to 15 | Avenue of the Fountains |
Oktoberfest is run by Fountain Hills Sister Cities and leans into its reputation as one of the few authentic Bavarian-style festivals in the Valley, with a keg-tapping ceremony from Mayor Friedel to open things Friday evening. The Fall Fountain Festival is the bigger draw of the three, spread across the Avenue of the Fountains for a full weekend of artists and food vendors.
None of these events sit directly on the mural corridor, but the timing lines up with a season where the town is visibly investing in what downtown looks and feels like, even while its anchor project is still a year from ready. If you have lived here through the past decade of hearing about the Discovery Center's progress, this fall is a good moment to actually walk past the murals, notice where they lead, and see for yourself how close the building at the end of that walk is to finished. Right now, close is still measured in months, not weeks.
The paint got there first. What it is pointing at is almost real.
Whether you are watching Fountain Hills change from the inside or thinking about what a move here would look like down the road, Kerri DeWaters tracks this market the way a longtime local does, block by block. Start Your Move — Request a Free Consultation.
