Why it matters
The Arabian Horse Association of Arizona is the volunteer club of owners and breeders, founded at a Phoenix hotel in August 1952, that has staged the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show every winter since the mid-1950s and never handed it off. Every February about 2,400 horses, their owners, grooms and buyers from three continents fill WestWorld for eleven days, and the city counts the bill in nine figures.
The club matters out of all proportion to its size because the show came first. Before the golf tournament, the car auction and the resorts, what drew money to Scottsdale in February was horses, and the people who bred them, the Wrigleys, the McCormicks and Ed Tweed, were the city’s first winter aristocracy. WestWorld exists because the show needed a home, the Princess and WestWorld corridor grew up around it, and the global Arabian trade treats Scottsdale as its capital because this club made it one.
Where to find it today
WestWorld of Scottsdale, 16601 N. Pima Rd., for the February show and the September Arabian National Breeder Finals. scottsdaleshow.com for membership, the smaller club shows and the association’s own history pages. McCormick Ranch, where street names like Arabian Trail mark where Paradise Park stood. The western heritage guide explains what you are watching once you get there.
How it started
The Arabians came to the Valley with money. The Philip K. Wrigley family, who owned the Arizona Biltmore, shipped their horses from Chicago each winter and kept them at the hotel’s stables. Fowler and Anne McCormick bought their first Arabian in 1948 and were, by Arizona Highways’ account, “the first of the larger breeders to settle in the Valley.” Edwin J. “Ed” Tweed, a Chicago businessman, founded Brusally Ranch in 1950 seven miles north of Scottsdale; his stallion Skorage would win 22 halter championships. By the early 1950s Arizona had seventeen Arabian breeders, fourteen of them around Paradise Valley, and nowhere to show.
In August 1952, at the Hotel Westward Ho in downtown Phoenix, a small group of owners formed the Arabian Horse Association of Arizona, electing Tweed president, Hal Clay vice president and Dorothy Clyde Long secretary-treasurer. The first exhibitions were modest affairs at the Casa Blanca Inn. The first real competition came at the Arizona Biltmore arena, sponsored by Helen Wrigley, the McCormicks and Tweed. The association’s own history dates it to 1954 with 102 horses; the show’s publicity and most retellings say 1955 and about fifty horses from a dozen farms, and the show numbers its editions from 1956. The club incorporated in 1955.
Anne McCormick then built Paradise Park, a masonry-walled arena with palm trees on the northern part of her ranch, and from 1957 or 1958 the All-Arabian Horse Show was held there. The 1961 show drew more than 300 horses from 39 states, Canada and Mexico, and Arizona Highways, in January 1962, called it “the most important Arabian show in the United States” six years after it began. More than eighty percent of exhibitors were small owners, the detail that explains the club’s survival: a show for everyone who owned an Arabian, run by the people who owned the most.
The decisions that locked it in
One show, every February. The club could have been a social circle that put on exhibitions. Instead it committed to a single annual competition and built everything around it, which is why the association today has a $5.6 million budget, a largely volunteer workforce, and a date the Valley’s winter horse calendar still turns on.
Polish blood. In the spring of 1963 Anne McCormick imported the Russian-bred stallion Naborr, the first Russian Arabian registered in America since 1913, and Tweed’s trainer Steve Spalding brought fourteen Polish and three Russian horses back to Brusally. By one count Scottsdale came to hold 72 Polish imports, more than the rest of the country combined; the LaCroix family’s Lasma Arabians became the breed’s most aggressive marketer, and the show became the place a Polish-bred horse made its reputation.
Stay in Scottsdale, twice. Anne McCormick died on May 25, 1969. Her will asked that the show remain on the ranch for ten years, but the club could not reach terms with the estate for 1969 and 1970 and moved to Kemper Marley’s property at Bell and Tatum roads before returning in 1971. The ranch had been sold in 1970 to Kaiser-Aetna, and on March 1, 1978, as the 24th show closed, the developer served notice to vacate; the land became houses, and McCormick Ranch named the streets after horse breeds. The club could have taken the show to Phoenix or California. It leased 85 acres of state land on Bell Road west of Scottsdale Road, built Paradise Park II, and opened there in 1979 on borrowed time.
Take the city’s offer. The city had wanted a horse grounds since the airport’s runway expansion closed Cholla Park. In July 1982 it signed a cost-sharing agreement with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for 132 acres of a flood-retention basin protecting the Central Arizona Project canal; Horseman’s Park broke ground on November 3, 1982, took in 224 more acres in 1985, and in 1986 the city hired K-Lin Corporation under Howard Keim to run it and build the covered Equidome, dedicated February 8, 1987. Renamed HorseWorld in 1988, it received the show in February 1989. WestWorld, as it became in 1990, was a landlord the club could not be evicted by and one with a motive to invest: the city spent $51.3 million on the Tony Nelssen Equestrian Center in 2013, and on January 13, 2015, approved contract 2015-012-COS giving the association the grounds each February and September from 2014 through 2023, with a ten-year extension at the club’s election to 2033.
The years it nearly ended
The association’s near-death experiences were about land, and then about money that was not its own. The evictions of 1969 and 1978 ended with the club on new ground inside the city and the show bigger. The third crisis it could not control.
In the early 1980s the Arabian became, in one industry history’s words, “living art” for investors who needed losses. Breeding operations qualified as tax shelters only if the animals kept reproducing, so they did: more than 100,000 purebreds were registered between 1982 and 1986, more than in the previous 65 years combined. The mare NH Love Potion sold for $2.55 million in 1984; the stallion Padron was syndicated for $11 million. Scottsdale was the epicenter, with Lasma’s auctions and farms built like resorts, and the show hit its all-time peak of 2,460 horses in 1985.
Then the Tax Reform Act of 1986 ended the passive-loss deductions the shelters ran on, and the market collapsed. Registrations fell by more than 15,000 a year from 1986 to 1991; horses that had sold for six figures were repossessed, dumped at low-end auctions or sent to slaughter; by decade’s end average prices were back to $10,000 to $25,000. Farms around Scottsdale failed. The association had taken none of the shelter money and could do nothing but keep showing. It did, and over the 1990s the show rebuilt itself on a different economy: Gulf and European buyers for whom the Arabian was heritage rather than a deduction. That the club owned no farm, no horses and no debt is why it is still here and most of the 1985 exhibitors are not.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1952 purpose was “to promote interest in the Arabian horse,” and the first show was a breeders’ showcase for a dozen members. Today’s statement adds welfare, education, youth programs and preservation of the breed’s heritage, and the club has several hundred members. The real change is scale and partners. A members’ show has become an eleven-day commercial event with 350 vendors, $3 million in prize money, a 300,000-person gate and a city that commissions studies to prove its worth: close to $100 million a year by the figure the city and the association both use, inside a WestWorld total an Arizona State University study put at $163.6 million in state GDP for 2023-24. The association became a tourism institution, and the city’s interest is the hotel tax. The club still runs the show, and the city, for all its investment, is the landlord.
Who the record leaves out
The club’s own history is a history of founders and venues. The grooms, trainers and barn help who have done the work for seventy years appear nowhere in it, and no one has recorded their account of show week. The small owners who were eighty percent of exhibitors in 1961 are a statistic; their names are in old programs, not online. The 1980s are told as a story of prices, not of the people who bought a share of a stallion on a banker’s advice and lost it, or of the horses that went to slaughter. The ground under the show was federal flood-control land before the city leased it, and whose desert it was before that is not part of the account. And the women who built the show, Anne McCormick above all, appear as benefactors; who actually ran the club’s committees in its first decades is not public.
What it didn’t have to become
The show did not have to stay in Scottsdale. In 1978 a club with no land and a developer’s eviction notice had every reason to go where the showgrounds already were, and the Arabian world would have followed; California had the horses and the facilities. The club chose a state-land lease on Bell Road instead, and a decade later the city, which had built HorseWorld for exactly this tenant, made the choice permanent. Without that, WestWorld is a flood-control basin with a soccer field, Barrett-Jackson finds another town, and Scottsdale’s February belongs to golf alone. The breeders’ club of 1952 set out to show its horses close to home, and kept insisting on the close-to-home part until the city built it a home.