A resort in a Depression
Scottsdale in 1936 was an unincorporated farm town of a few thousand people, three years past a bank failure, living on dude ranches, health seekers, and the artists and architects the Depression had oddly delivered. Its one real resort was the Jokake Inn, a painter’s tearoom that had grown casita by casita below Camelback Mountain. The desert north and west of town was, for practical purposes, empty.
Jack Stewart saw that emptiness differently. A sportswriter and publicist from Fargo, North Dakota, he wanted to build a pueblo-style hotel that would sell the Southwest itself — the mountain, the light, the dry winter — rather than the golf and ballrooms of the Arizona Biltmore. He found his money in John C. Lincoln, the Cleveland industrialist who had come to the Valley for his wife’s health and stayed to invest in it. Together they raised the Camelback Inn on the saddle of desert between Camelback and Mummy mountains, and on December 15, 1936, it opened with about seventy rooms, adobe walls, and a phrase that would outlast everyone in the building: Where Time Stands Still.
What it started
The Inn worked immediately. Industrialists, politicians, and film people booked the winter; casitas multiplied across the desert; the American Plan dining room became the address where the Valley’s winter society met. In 1967 the Marriott family bought it as the company’s first resort, and it remains the Valley’s longest-running full-service resort — the original that the Valley Ho, the Safari, the Princess, and the Phoenician all, in their different decades, imitated.
For Scottsdale the lesson was the model, not the building, which sat outside the town’s future limits in what became Paradise Valley. A full-service resort on cheap desert could pay in winter, and a town with more desert than anyone knew what to do with could build its economy on that fact. When Malcolm White and the Chamber coined The West’s Most Western Town a decade later, the customers they had in mind were the ones the Camelback Inn had already taught to come. The resort’s full story is in the resort guide; the rest of the year sits at 1936, and the dude-ranch decade in the 1930s chapter.