School construction is the honest census. In 1928 Scottsdale built a second grammar school at Second Street and Marshall Way, the building later renamed Loloma, and the beloved 1909 brick schoolhouse — the town’s proudest building when it went up — was handed a new name, Coronado School, and a supporting role. A district that had run six teachers for 410 pupils in 1920, then voted itself a high school in 1922, now needed a third campus.
The city’s historic-register report on the building tells how it was paid for, though it cites no source for the figures. In January the board proposed a $50,000 bond; on February 9 it passed, 105 to 9; and on March 22 the voters chose the H. R. Bland tract southwest of town from three sites on the ballot. Ten acres cost $5,000, Lescher & Mahoney designed eight classrooms, work began by June, and the building was finished that fall at a cost of $35,069. Garland White was its first principal. The 1920s politics chapter puts the vote with the decade’s others.
The old schoolhouse’s new role mattered as much. At some point the district made Coronado the school for the town’s Mexican American children while Anglo children went to the new building; six years earlier it had rented a dance hall to hold “some of the Mexican children.” Our note on the Coronado School follows that arrangement into the 1950s. The next year brought a changing of the guard downtown and, in October, the crash that ended the decade everywhere — the story of 1929.