In the last peacetime year the census took Arizona’s measure — 499,261 people, Phoenix 65,414 — and, after a change in how it reported, gave no figure for Scottsdale at all, the Historical Society notes; the 1930 count for the precinct had been 2,761. It was a farm town with a school, a store, a bank building with no bank in it, and an adobe church. It had no government and would not have one for eleven more years. Next door, on May 15, voters of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community ratified a constitution under the Indian Reorganization Act, 171 to 127; the 1930–1951 politics chapter has both stories.
Up on the mesa below the McDowells, Taliesin West was becoming a building rather than a camp. In Wright’s third winter on the site the drafting room got its canvas roof, and by early 1941 the original compound — desert masonry, redwood, and light through cloth — was substantially complete. The apprentices who built it were about to be drafted; several of the Fellowship’s conscientious objectors would spend the war in prison, and the compound would sit half-empty until 1945.
At 40th Street and Camelback Road, on the Phoenix side of the line, Salvatore Cudia’s Cudia City movie lot had been open since 1938, with a handful of pictures to show for it. Columbia Pictures had looked at it for Arizona, failed to agree terms with Cudia, and in 1939 built its own set outside Tucson instead. The film opened in 1940, and the set became Old Tucson Studios and took the Western-movie trade with it. Scottsdale would have to sell its West in person. Eighteen months later Pearl Harbor ended the peace, and the 1940s chapter picks up the story with biplanes over the alfalfa.