Stand on the Civic Center lawn by the LOVE sculpture and look east toward the performing arts center. Until the early 1970s this was a neighborhood: adobe houses, families who had been here since the cotton years, a church they built by hand a few blocks west. The people who grew up there called it home, and some of them called it Eskatel. The city called the larger project the Civic Center Mall, and it paid for the clearance with federal money.
None of this is secret. The city’s own 2012 historic context, A Modern Dynamic City, 1961–1979, says it in two paragraphs. It just isn’t on any plaque, and almost nothing on the web tells it at length. Here is what the record shows, what it doesn’t, and where the rest of the story is kept.
The neighborhood
Scottsdale’s Mexican families came for farm work. Arcadia’s description of José María Burruel’s 2007 book Mexicans in Scottsdale says E.O. Brown, the town’s banker and merchant, recruited workers from Arizona border towns in the early 1900s for the cotton fields and farms. After 1916 the Arizona Republican was reporting wagonloads of Mexican workers arriving for Scottsdale’s cotton each day, according to the Salt River Stories project. Many sent for their families and stayed.
Before there were houses there were tents. Sally Anne Thompson, a Paradise Valley writer who has spent years on a book about these families, told the Daily Independent in 2019 that the Corral family, the largest, lived in the only house, with a single spigot outside, and that seven of the original families camped along Second Street, cooking and living in the open. That house still stands as part of Los Olivos at 7328 E. 2nd St. Thompson counts about 34 recorded original Mexican families.
Salt River Stories places the 1920s barrio between Main and Second streets, east of Brown Avenue, in adobe homes painted pink and blue. Its description of the Civic Center Mall gives a wider outline: Brown Avenue to 75th Street, Indian School Road to Second Street. Burruel, born in the Scottsdale area in 1925 and raised in the barrio, described it to the East Valley Tribune as a quarter-mile strip known as the “Eskatel Barrio.” The two outlines don’t quite match, and probably describe the core and the edges of the same place.
It was a working neighborhood in every sense. Local Mexican workers made the adobe bricks for the towers of the Jokake Inn, and Scottsdale tinsmith Bernabé Herrera made its light fixtures and table ornaments, according to the city’s arts-colony context. In 1933 the families finished the Old Adobe Mission at Brown and First, Scottsdale’s first Catholic church. Their youngest children went to school in the 1909 brick schoolhouse on Main Street, renamed the Coronado School in 1928 (see the segregated classrooms). In December the parish staged the Miracle of the Roses pageant for Our Lady of Guadalupe. Salt River Stories and the parish date it 1953 to 1966 at Scottsdale High; the city’s arts context says it began in 1949 on the schoolhouse steps and moved to a flatbed truck in the barrio before growing into a candlelight procession through town. Salt River Stories says that as late as the 1960s the barrio had “a rich commercial and cultural life.”
How it was cleared
Bennie Gonzales’ City Hall and Civic Center Library were dedicated on October 11, 1968. The council liked the result and wanted more. In the city’s words, it “applied to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Department of Labor for Neighborhood Development Program funding for the expansion of the Civic Center Mall.” The money came through, and “HUD funds were used for land acquisition, demolition and to relocate displaced residents for the mall. Displaced families, mostly Hispanic, were relocated to rental housing as a result of this redevelopment project, often called urban renewal today.”
By the early 1970s the city had assembled 18.5 acres between Indian School Road, Second Street, 74th Street and a line half a block east of Brown Avenue. Salt River Stories describes it as a $5.2 million Neighborhood Redevelopment Program that bought about 18 acres “including the barrio,” says the city used eminent domain, and puts the start of major construction in 1973. The city’s context doesn’t use the words eminent domain. Either way, the houses were bought or taken, emptied and demolished.
Then came the buildings:
- 1974. The landscaped mall was dedicated, and Main Street was closed for good from Brown Avenue east to Civic Center Boulevard, now Drinkwater. The city also built a Taliesin Associates-designed parking deck.
- 1975. The Scottsdale Center for the Arts, also by Gonzales, opened on October 23: an 800-seat theater, a 175-seat cinema and an atrium. The city gives the cost as $4.9 million, and Salt River Stories says $3 million. On land the city had assembled with the federal money came the Pepperwood retail buildings and a 206-room Doubletree Hotel (Salt River Stories calls it a $7 million hotel).
- 1976. The Senior Center opened on Second Street.
- 1977. The Mercado Verde shops opened on the west side of the mall.
The comparison that matters is one the city made itself. In 1969 Scottsdale started a second federally funded redevelopment project at Vista del Camino, where Yaqui families had been flooded out of homes along the Indian Bend Wash. That project built new housing for the people it moved, plus a park and a community center. The Civic Center project, as far as the record shows, built a theater and a hotel and sent its families to rental housing.
Salt River Stories is blunter than the city. It calls the clearance part of a pattern, seen across Maricopa County and the country, of using urban renewal to remake downtowns and push non-white residents out of them. By 1980 the census counted Scottsdale as 3.1 percent Spanish origin, against 14.8 percent in Phoenix and 16.2 percent statewide.
What survived
Three buildings, each saved for its own reason.
Los Olivos. The city’s history says the Corral family’s restaurant on Second Street “was also spared from the bulldozer.” It still serves Sonoran food in the family’s adobe, and the 1974 parking deck stands between it and the schoolhouse.
The Little Red Schoolhouse. Empty after the library moved into the new Civic Center in 1968, it was slated for demolition. Residents organized the Scottsdale Historical Society that year (it incorporated in December 1969) and raised $60,000 for repairs. The Chamber of Commerce took a 25-year lease at $1 a year. It is now the Scottsdale Historical Museum, the one building on the mall that belonged to the barrio’s children before it belonged to anyone’s government.
The Old Adobe Mission. It sits on Brown Avenue, just outside the western edge of the redevelopment area. The parish had already moved to Miller Road in 1956, and the adobe survived decades of neglect before volunteers restored it in 2003. It is the families’ own monument, built with their bricks.
One correction for anyone reading Salt River Stories: its Civic Center page lists “Our Lady of Guadalupe” among the surviving buildings. The surviving church is Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the Old Adobe Mission. The Guadalupe statue the parish received in 1945 now stands in a chapel at the Miller Road campus.
What the record doesn’t show
The city’s published history gives no count of the families moved, no names, no addresses, no appraisal figures and no dates for the council votes. It also leaves one thing open. Sally Anne Thompson’s account has the families staying “until they tore their houses down and put up the City Hall, library and everything,” while the city documents relocation only for the expansion that came after the 1968 buildings. Both may be true, since the 1968 complex sat inside Salt River Stories’ outline of the barrio. The land records would settle it.
Here is where those records are:
- City Clerk. Council minutes and resolutions from 1969 to 1974. Search for “Neighborhood Development Program,” “relocation” and “Civic Center Redevelopment Area.”
- The Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library. The city’s local-history collection, dedicated as the Southwest Room on May 15, 1973, while the clearance was under way. It holds the Scottsdale Progress and photograph collections where relocation notices and pictures of the houses before demolition would be. See the library’s history.
- The National Archives. HUD’s Neighborhood Development Program files (Record Group 207) may hold the project number, a count of relocated households and appraisal maps.
- The Maricopa County Recorder. Condemnation and eminent-domain filings by the City of Scottsdale, 1970 to 1974.
- The families. Burruel’s Mexicans in Scottsdale (Arcadia, 2007) has more than 200 photographs. Geographer John Harner’s paper “The Mexican Community in Scottsdale, Arizona” is available through ASU Library. In 2019 a group of descendants, including Ernie and Jay Corral and the Leyva and Gardella families, met Tuesday mornings at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 7655 E. Main St., to piece the neighborhood back together. Whether that group still meets, and whether Thompson’s book has been published, we could not confirm.
Walk it
The whole thing takes an hour. Start with lunch at Los Olivos on Second Street. Walk east past the 1974 parking deck to the Little Red Schoolhouse, open Wednesday through Sunday in season and closed in summer, and ask the volunteers about the Coronado School years. Go west to the Old Adobe Mission at 3817 N. Brown Ave. Then walk back onto the mall, find the performing arts center, and stand where Main Street used to run east of Brown.
If you want to go further, the Scottsdale Room is in the Civic Center Library on the same lawn. Ask for the Progress from 1970 to 1975. The archive that could name every family who lived here sits on the land they lived on. For the word itself, see Eskatel in our lexicon.