A year after the cotton market detonated, Scottsdale did something mildly audacious: it opened a department store and a bank. E.M. Saba, a Syrian-born merchant, set up his dry-goods store on Main Street, and the Farmer’s State Bank opened its doors as the town’s first bank. In the middle of the worst agricultural bust in the Valley’s short memory, two institutions were wagering that Scottsdale would still need credit and clothing. Half the bet paid off spectacularly.
Saba’s became the anchor of Main Street retail for generations. The family dressed the farmers first, then the dudes and winter visitors who arrived later in the decade, and Sabas were still selling western wear downtown into the 2000s — a century of trade from one 1921 storefront. The bank had a shorter run. It carried the town’s accounts through the twenties but would not survive the Depression, closing in 1933.
Together the two openings mark the moment Scottsdale’s center of gravity shifted from the fields to the storefronts. The merchant row that grew around Saba’s — E.O. Brown’s general store, Cavalliere’s blacksmith shop, and soon a pool hall and a newspaper — was quietly diverse for a small Arizona town, with Anglo, Syrian, Mexican-American, and Chinese-American businesses trading side by side. The build-out continued the next year with the town’s first paper, in 1922.