Out at the base of the McDowells, 1938 meant construction. Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentices were raising Taliesin West out of desert rock, canvas, and redwood on the 600 acres he had bought the year before — miles beyond town, with no water or power to start from. It began in January, when the Fellowship arrived to camp and quarry. In town, the year passed unrecorded: guest ranches through the winter season, farms through the summer, the same few blocks around Main Street and Brown Avenue.
That split screen — a world-famous experiment in the foothills, an unhurried farm town below — is the late 1930s in miniature. Scottsdale’s economic DNA was set by now, agriculture underneath and hospitality and art on top, and it would hold until the war rewrote everything. See 1937 for how the Wright story began.