Scottsdale’s 1929 is remembered for a store changing hands, which says something about the town’s scale and something better about its character. J. Chew Song bought Johnny Rose’s store, the downtown fixture that had opened as a pool hall in 1923 — continuing a small but established Chinese-American merchant presence on a Main Street where Anglo, Syrian, Mexican-American, and Chinese-American businesses traded side by side. For a small Arizona farm town, the merchant row was quietly more cosmopolitan than the marketing would ever admit.
Then October arrived, and Wall Street put an asterisk on the whole decade. Scottsdale had spent the twenties rebuilding itself after the cotton crash — a department store, a bank, a newspaper, two new schools, a polo club, and a winter resort — and now both of its new industries, merchants and winter guests, faced an immediate national test.
The test went strangely well. In one of Scottsdale history’s happy ironies, the Depression decade turned out to be a golden age for exactly the kind of tourism this town sold — guest ranches multiplied, an adobe church rose by hand, and Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in the desert. The town of 2,761 that closed out the twenties was better armed for hard times than the one the cotton crash had caught in 1920. What happened next belongs to the 1930s.