The most consequential arrival of 1935 came with no announcement. George L. Ellis, a construction engineer, married Rachael Murdock and moved to Scottsdale, to a piece of desert on the north bank of the Arizona Canal off what is now Cattle Track Road. Two years later he began building adobe houses there with his own hands, one at a time, and renting them to artists. The compound he made — Cattle Track — became the studio-village where Philip Curtis painted for half a century, where Fritz Scholder and Louise Lincoln Kerr worked, and where the Ellis family still keeps the buildings the way George left them. The city’s historic register dates the arrival to this year and the first house to 1937; the online lists that say 1925 are wrong.
Around the town, the Depression’s economy of “lungers, dudes and artists” kept growing. The Arcadia Guest Home opened in a converted residence on the Camelback side, another bed for the winter trade, and the Camelback Inn was under construction on Mummy Mountain for a December 1936 opening. On July 16 Phoenix bought Sky Harbor from the Acme Investment Company for $100,000, the field through which the resort city’s guests would eventually arrive by the million.
The year’s biggest news was on the Colorado. On September 30 Franklin Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam, and that fall the Bureau of Reclamation took bids for Bartlett Dam on the Verde — the Scottsdale-adjacent storage that the Water Users would finish in 1939, the last piece of the river system that made the 1930s survivable and the postwar boom possible.