Nineteen thirty-seven opened with the strangest weather in the town’s memory and closed having acquired its most famous resident. No other year of the quiet 1930s did as much for Scottsdale’s story.
On January 20, a cold storm dropped roughly four inches of snow on the desert — one of the heaviest falls ever recorded in the Valley, enough for snowmen beside the saguaros and photographs that families kept for generations. Old-timers retold the date for fifty years; the day has its own page.
The year’s other event moved slower and mattered more. Frank Lloyd Wright — 70 years old, rebuilding his career, wintering in Arizona since his Biltmore consulting days — bought roughly 600 acres of raw desert at the foot of the McDowell Mountains: miles beyond town, no water, no power. With his Taliesin Fellowship apprentices he began raising a winter camp of desert masonry, canvas, and redwood, and called it Taliesin West.
The purchase looked eccentric in 1937. It turned out to be a founding act. Taliesin West seeded Scottsdale with designers, craftsmen, and an idea — that buildings here should answer to the desert — which echoed through the town’s midcentury architecture. The camp became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most visited landmark in the city. In a decade when the town’s biggest institution was a guest ranch, the 1930s ended with architecture’s future camped in the foothills.