No milestone made the record in 1931, but the shape of the decade was already visible. Farm prices were scraping bottom, cash was thinning out of the Valley, and the town’s one bank had two years left to live. What kept Scottsdale’s lights on was the trade the 1920s had stumbled into: winter guests. The Jokake Inn and the guest ranches around town sold sunshine, horses, and desert quiet to easterners the Depression had barely touched — “lungers, dudes, and artists,” in the old shorthand, were the imports keeping Main Street’s stores in business.
So 1931 passed the way the early thirties did here: hard on the farms, busy in the winter season, quiet through the summer heat. The decade’s dramatic years — the bank failure and the hand-built Mission of 1933, Wright’s arrival in 1937 — were still ahead.