Palm Walk is a pedestrian mall on Arizona State University's Tempe campus lined on either side with palm trees.
Palm Walk starts at the foot of University Bridge and extends south to the entrance to the Student Recreation Complex, a distance of about 0.4 miles.
The mall is roughly aligned with Normal Avenue, a Tempe city street located directly south of the campus. (A noncontiguous portion of Normal Avenue also exists in the same alignment in northern Tempe.)
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Trees were planted toward the north end of Palm Walk in 1916[1], and trees were added to the south end in the 1930s[2]. There are 111 trees lining palm walk.
In the 1930s, Palm Walk marked the eastern boundary of the Tempe campus[3], but ASU has since grown to the point that Palm Walk now serves as a central artery through the campus.
University Archives maintains a Web site that displays photos of Palm Walk from the 1930s, 1946, 1957, 1966, and the 1990s. A crowded Palm Walk is a standard photograph often used by the university to illustrate press releases about its growing enrollment[4].
In the fall of 2005, a Hot or Not-style rating site, PalmWalk.com, featured pictures of female students photographed on the campus walkway and asked users to rate their appearance.
The site — and particularly the indication that many of the pictures posted there were taken without the knowledge or permission of the women pictured — drew the ire of a columnist[5] at The State Press, and the campus newspaper's editorial board also expressed its disapproval of the site[6][7].
PalmWalk.com also attracted attention from university administrators and police[8] and spurred the creation of PalmShock.com, which allowed users to vent their frustration about the rating site[9].
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