What it means
Cattle Track is three things that share one name: a short lane off McDonald Drive beside the Arizona Canal, the ten-acre compound of adobe and salvaged-lumber buildings on it, and the idea that a Depression-era artists’ colony can still be a working one in a city of 243,000. When a Scottsdale local says “there’s a show at Cattle Track,” they mean the gallery and studios at 6105 North Cattletrack Road, where twenty to thirty painters, potters, printers, a blacksmith and an architect work in about eleven buildings that George Ellis put up between the late 1930s and the 1960s, and where his daughter Janie Ellis still lives.
It is the least Scottsdale place in Scottsdale, which is why residents guard it. There is no gate, no parking structure and no gift shop worth the name, just hedges, dirt, old trees and people making things. The compound guide covers visiting; the Ellis guide covers the family. This page is about the name and what it has come to mean.
Where you’ll meet it
Event listings for Cattle Track Talks and the occasional concert. Conversations about the city’s arts scene, where it is the counterexample to every gallery on Marshall Way. The canal path, which passes a hundred yards from the gate. And the National Register, where it has been since 1999.
Where the word came from
The name is older than the art and belongs to the cows. The Arizona Canal, finished in 1885, gave the north Valley a road as well as water: its maintenance bank was the flattest, straightest route across the desert, and cowboys moved cattle along it toward the auction yards in Phoenix. Where the drives crossed the bench north of the Scottsdale townsite, the dirt lane they used was called the cattle track, with no capital letters and no sign. It kept the name informally for seventy years, and the City of Scottsdale made it official in 2010 by naming the street Cattletrack Road, one word, which is how the compound spells its address and nobody else spells anything.
The homestead came in 1937. George Ellis had arrived in Arizona in the 1920s as a surveyor with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and met Rachael Murdock, a schoolteacher, at a company picnic. They filed on ten acres of raw desert beside the canal in a year when Scottsdale was a farm village of a couple of thousand, and George, who distrusted waste, built their first house from redwood staves pulled out of an abandoned water pipeline. He made adobe on site and salvaged everything else, and he built houses around the Valley for the rest of his life, including a 1959 residence for a young lawyer named Sandra Day O’Connor. The same winter the Ellises homesteaded, fifteen miles northeast, Frank Lloyd Wright bought the mesa that became Taliesin West; two compounds, one year, the same idea about building from what the desert had lying around.
The artists arrived because the rent was nothing and the company was good. In 1948 the surrealist painter Philip C. Curtis, sent to Arizona by the Federal Art Project to found the state’s first art center, met Ellis, and the family hauled a barn from a nearby ranch onto the property as a house and studio for Curtis and his wife. Fritz Scholder lived across the street. Photographers, sculptors and printers followed, and the place became a colony without ever calling itself one.
What it is not
Cattle Track is not a gallery district and not a museum. It is not Craftsman Court, the 1955 artisans’ lane downtown built for the craftspeople burned out of the Arizona Craftsmen center, though the two are the surviving ends of the same postwar craft scene. And it is not open the way a park is: the studios are workplaces and several buildings are homes.
The fine print
The record is better than most Scottsdale places get. The Cattle Track Complex, 6105 to 6207 North Cattle Track, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in September 1999 for buildings constructed from the 1930s through the 1940s with George Ellis as architect, and the city placed it on the Scottsdale Historic Register on May 1, 2001, by Resolution 5776, the same day it listed the Titus House and Saba’s. The city had formally recognized the property as an arts complex in 1996. The site’s own guide dates the homestead to 1937; the registers say “1930s,” and the one-year difference is the kind of thing the Ellis family can settle and the paperwork cannot.
The compound’s survival is a family decision, not a preservation program. The Ellises never sold, through fifty years in which every comparable parcel between Old Town and McCormick Ranch became apartments or a golf course, and Janie Ellis still lives in the family house. In the 2010s the artists organized Cattle Track Arts & Preservation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, to run the gallery, the Cattle Track Talks series and the performance space, and to hold the place together after the family. The address is in central Scottsdale, ZIP 85250, on a residential block where the neighbors’ walls are the only sign the twentieth century happened.
What visitors miss is the building method, which is the compound’s real argument. The adobe was made from the dirt it stands on; the lumber had a previous life as pipeline, barn or railroad; the floor plans grew by addition rather than design. That approach, cheap, local and improvised, is the ancestor of the desert modern architecture Scottsdale later made expensive, and Cattle Track is the one place in the city where you can still see it practiced by people who have to live in the results.