What is the First U.S. Post Office Building?
There’s an ordinary-looking brick building on Brown Avenue that was the most important address in town for about twenty years.
For its first three decades Scottsdale had no post office building. From 1897 the mail was handled in a general store at Brown and Main, and after that in a series of Main Street stores. In 1928 construction began on the first building in town meant only for the mail, and the city dates it to 1929. It’s a plain two-story brick box with a flat roof, built right up to the sidewalk on a lot about 60 feet by 55. The city’s register report calls it “typical of the public buildings built in small towns during this time.” It was substantial enough to say the town had arrived, and nothing more.
The ground floor was the post office, with two doors from the street. A separate outside stair on the south wall led up to two rental apartments, later a doctor’s office. For the next two decades it was, in the city’s words, “a hub of community activity,” because everyone came in to check the twice-daily deliveries from Phoenix.
After World War II the town needed a bigger post office and the mail moved out. In 1949 the building was painted red and turned into a store, and the two post office doors were bricked in. It became Porter’s Western Wear, part of the remaking of downtown into “The West’s Most Western Town.” It went on the Scottsdale Historic Register in 2000 as “the first federal building in Scottsdale.”
How to read the building
Look from across the street. The best view is from the opposite sidewalk of Brown Avenue, in front of Mexican Imports at 3933 N. Brown. That building opened in 1923 as Johnny Rose’s pool hall, which doubled as a silent-movie house on Saturday nights, and its white glazed bricks are original. From there, the old post office’s façade is easy to read once you know what to look for. The city’s register report lists the details:
- The two doors. The post office had two front doors. They flank a large center opening that is now partly glazed and boarded at the top. The doors were bricked in around 1949 and fitted with fixed single-pane windows in wood surrounds. The center opening still sits on its original concrete sill.
- The cornice. A small parapet crowns the front, and corbelled brickwork frames two recessed sign panels near the roofline. That’s where the lettering went.
- The south wall. The outside staircase to the upstairs apartments was removed. The second-floor doorway at its top was altered to look like a window, and the first-floor windows on that side were filled in. The outlines are still visible.
- The red paint. The brick was originally unpainted. The red dates from the 1949 conversion to a store.
- The back. The one-story addition on the north and rear sides dates from 1952.
What’s inside now. The city’s Old Town walking tour, last revised in 2024, lists this as stop 6 and says the building “now is a jewelry store.” It’s a private business. Go in as a customer if it’s open, but there’s no exhibit about the post office.
Make it a Brown Avenue walk. In about two blocks you can see four buildings on the city’s register: this one; Mexican Imports across the street; the Old Adobe Mission, the church the barrio built by hand in 1933, at 3817 N. Brown; and Cavalliere’s, the 1920 adobe blacksmith shop, at 3805 N. Brown. The Little Red Schoolhouse museum is a few minutes east on the Civic Center grounds and fills in the rest. Our Old Town on foot route covers the area.
A mail-day bonus. Scottsdale still celebrates the mail. Every winter the Hashknife Pony Express brings real, postmarked U.S. Mail to town on horseback from Holbrook. The ride began in 1958, about a decade after the post office moved out of this building.
Thirty years without a post office building
Scottsdale got a post office long before it got a post office building. The city’s register report says that, like most small towns, it “housed its postal operations in a variety of stores in the Main Street area beginning in 1897.” This site’s page on the J.L. Davis general store covers the first of them. The arrangement was normal for a farm settlement: the post office was a counter in somebody’s store.
What changed in the 1920s was volume. The 1920 census counted 1,047 people in the Scottsdale precinct, not counting the Salt River reservation. By the middle of the decade there were about 2,000. The main-line railroad reached the Valley in 1924, and the cotton and cattle trade brought in farm-supply businesses. The register report notes that “having sufficient volume to require separate facilities attests to the prosperity of the twenties in Scottsdale.” Salt River Stories lists the standalone post office with electricity and a local bank as the signs that the town was growing up, and the town opened its second grammar school, Loloma, in the same year construction started here.
A disputed year
The building’s date varies by a year. The city’s register entry gives 1929, and its register report says “the building was constructed in 1929” in one place and that “in 1928 construction began” in another. The city’s 2004 Arts Colony historic context says the post office building on Brown was “constructed in 1928.” The city’s walking tour says that “by 1928 Scottsdale was big enough to have a regular post office.” The simplest reading is that the building was begun in 1928 and finished in 1929. Coverage in the Arizona Republican of 1928–29 would settle the opening date. So would the Post Office Department’s records of the Scottsdale office, held at the National Archives.
The post office years
The building was simple: masonry walls, a flat roof, and a front that let the brick do the work. On the ground floor, two doors opened into the postal rooms. Upstairs were two rental apartments, reached by their own outside stair on the south side. The space was later a doctor’s office.
The register report gives one detail of daily life: patrons came “to check the twice-daily deliveries from Phoenix.” In a farm town before home delivery, the post office was where you saw your neighbors, twice a day. The building kept that role through the Depression and the war, until “growth necessitated a larger facility” after World War II. The record we have doesn’t say where the post office moved next or in what year. The Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library, which holds the local newspapers, is the place to look.
Porter’s, and the Western makeover
The conversion of the building is one of the clearest examples of what happened to downtown after the war. The Arts Colony context describes how, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, businesses “soon joined in the efforts to convey the image of the Old West.” Knotty pine and board-and-batten went up, along with rustic signs and hitching posts, and the town “took on the appearance of a Hollywood frontier movie set.” Older buildings were remodeled to fit. The context names three: the post office building, which “became Porter’s Western Wear in the late 1940s”; the 1921 drugstore that became Saba’s in 1948; and the 1921 Farmers State Bank, which became the Rusty Spur in the early 1950s.
According to the register report, in 1949 the old post office was painted red, converted to retail, and had its front doors bricked in and replaced with fixed windows. A one-story addition followed on the north and rear in 1952. The report treats those alterations as historic in their own right, saying the conversion “is representative of the influences that shaped the development of Scottsdale’s downtown during the post war period.” The red paint and the infilled doors are part of the building’s history, not damage to it.
There’s one small conflict. The Arts Colony context puts Porter’s in the building in the late 1940s, matching the 1949 conversion. The city’s walking tour says “in the 1950’s, it became Porter’s Western Wear.” Porter’s is profiled on its own page. The walking tour, last revised in 2024, says the building “now is a jewelry store,” so Porter’s is no longer in it. We haven’t confirmed when the store left.
On the register
The city zoned the building for historic preservation in 1983 under its earlier preservation program. When the council created the Scottsdale Historic Register in 1999, the first properties considered were the ones that already had that zoning. The First U.S. Post Office Building was listed on May 23, 2000 as SHR-00-4 under Resolution 5550, along with Scottsdale Grammar School No. 2. At the time it was owned by Margie and Robert Meadows (parcel 130-23-112), and the report notes that the building was still “popularly known as the ‘Porters.’”
The report makes two arguments for it. Historically, it was “the first federal building in Scottsdale,” built “for the exclusive use of the federal mail system,” and for over two decades it was a public building where the town gathered. Architecturally, it is “one of the few remaining examples of an early 2-story modest rectangular brick commercial storefront.” It survived the Western makeover, and the makeover is now part of its history.
What’s still unknown
- The opening date and the first postmaster to work here, from the 1928–29 Arizona Republican and the National Archives’ post office records.
- Who built it and who owned it. The register report doesn’t name an owner or builder for 1928. The building may have been built privately and leased to the government, which was common for small-town post offices then, but nothing we’ve seen says so. Maricopa County deed records for the parcel would tell.
- Where the post office went after the war, and in what year.
- The upstairs tenants, including the doctor whose office was here.