What is the Kimsey Building?
From 1963 to 1968, if you had business with the City of Scottsdale, you went to a real-estate developer’s office building on Indian School Road.
The Kimsey Building, also called the Triangle Building, is a two-story, roughly 11,000-square-foot office block at 7120 E. Indian School Road, just west of Scottsdale Road. Ralph Haver designed it in 1961 as the headquarters of Butler Homes, the company of David J. Friedman, who was building Villa Monterey with Haver at the same time. Its front is one wide, low triangular gable facing the street. Underneath it are two mirror-image halves, glass from floor to roof, split by a breezeway with stairs on each side. Seven white globe lights hang under the gable.
In April 1963 the city rented the west half for one year while it planned a permanent home. It stayed until the new Civic Center City Hall opened in 1968, sharing the building with Lederman’s Music. The name comes from the land. William E. Kimsey bought it in 1909. His son Mort Kimsey, Scottsdale’s mayor from 1958 to 1962, leased it to Butler Homes in 1960. The family’s farmhouse was torn down in July 1961 to make room for the building.
It went on the Scottsdale Historic Register on April 6, 2021. The same year PEG Companies bought the site. As of fall 2026 the building is inside a construction project: an AC Hotel and an apartment community, with the Kimsey Building kept as the apartments’ office, gym and event space.
How to see it now
Stand across the street. The south side of Indian School Road gives you the elevation Haver designed: a symmetrical front set back behind its own parking, with the gable, the second-floor balcony, the recessed wood-and-glass storefronts and the decorative block panels on each side. The preservation plan’s must-keep list doubles as a viewing checklist:
- The 2:12 roof. It’s low enough that the gable reads as a single wide triangle and not as a house roof.
- The decorative corbels on the projecting beam ends at the second floor and roof.
- The seven white globe pendant lights hung from the roof deck, one per porch bay. The city’s tour calls them “a very ’60s feature.”
- The central two-story breezeway with stairs facing each other.
- The steel sign frame spanning the front porch posts.
Expect a construction site. The reported plan has the apartment phase starting in early 2026 and running to 2028, so as of this writing there will probably be fencing, trucks and changes around the building. Don’t go past the fence. The exterior is protected by the register, so whatever happens around it, the front you see from the sidewalk should survive.
Walk the Haver comparison. The city’s mid-century driving tour suggests comparing this building with Haver’s earlier Pima Plaza, the Feltman Building, at 7221–7237 E. 1st Avenue. The city dates it to 1953 and the preservation plan to 1952. It’s about a ten-minute walk south. There Haver dressed the same post-and-beam idea in board-and-batten for Old Town’s western-theme era. Here, a decade later, he let the glass show. Our Ralph Haver in Scottsdale note covers the rest of his local work, much of it gone.
Then go see where the city went next. The Civic Center is a short walk east and south. Bennie Gonzales’s 1968 City Hall is the building the city spent five years getting to. The Little Red Schoolhouse, which served as town hall in the 1950s, is on the same grounds.
The Kimseys’ acre
William Edward Kimsey was born in DeKalb County, Indiana, in 1851. He was a farmer, merchant, sometime postmaster and Clerk of the Circuit Court of Steuben County from 1886 to 1894. His daughter Lois married Thomas R. Marshall, who later became Woodrow Wilson’s vice president. Elizabeth Kimsey’s health brought the couple west around 1907–08. In November 1909, according to a newspaper report the preservation plan cites (no deed was found), Kimsey bought five acres from the widow Ida T. Underhill. The land lay north of the road near the northwest corner of today’s Scottsdale and Indian School Roads and ran up to the Arizona Canal. He built three houses and planted oranges.
He didn’t sit still. He was president of the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association from 1916, co-founded the Scottsdale Light and Power Company in 1918 with E.O. Brown and Charles Miller, was the first president of the Farmers’ State Bank when it opened on January 19, 1921, and was Scottsdale’s first justice of the peace from January 1922 until he died in April 1924. By the time Elizabeth died in 1932, the land had shrunk to about one acre, and she left it to their son Mort. Mort ran the power company’s Scottsdale office out of his service station at Main and Scottsdale Road, sat on the first town council in 1951 and was mayor from 1958 to 1962. He cleared the citrus, razed two of the houses, and in 1960 leased the property to Butler Homes for 50 years.
Haver, Friedman and a triangle
David J. Friedman of Butler Homes and Ralph Haver had worked together since at least 1954, on Phoenix subdivisions and on a 1956 two-story Butler office at 201 E. Camelback Road. In 1961 Friedman hired Haver for Villa Monterey and also for a new headquarters on the Kimsey lease. The Kimsey farmhouse came down in July 1961. The new building was planned with Butler Homes on half the second floor and the rest rented to offices and shops. Its interiors were deliberately plain: open bays, a small restroom at the back of nearly every one, and partitions placed on the structural grid wherever a tenant needed them.
The preservation plan’s authors at Ryden Architects make one argument that’s hard to forget. A circa-1916 photograph of the Kimsey farmhouse, now in the Scottsdale Heritage Collection at the Scottsdale Public Library, shows a symmetrical, low triangular front divided into three parts. It has projecting beam ends, a triangular gable vent, a beam splitting upper from lower, a three-bay porch, and a central door with sidelights. The 1960s building on the same spot has nearly all of that, scaled up. The plan asks whether Haver deliberately put the farmhouse’s proportions into its replacement, then concedes the link “may remain conjectural.” It’s a lovely idea, and the plan presents it as unproven.
Five years as City Hall
Scottsdale’s annexations were adding land and people faster than its offices could handle. In April 1963 the city leased the west half of the building, still listed as 60 W. Indian School Road under the old numbering, for one year. City Manager Ken Williams wanted the space while the city planned a permanent building. According to the plan, nobody expected it to take nearly five years: the bonds had to pass, the design had to be chosen, and the Civic Center had to be built. City directories suggest Butler Homes moved out for a while, and the city shared the building with Lederman’s Music for a little over four years. An aerial photograph from about 1963, reproduced in the plan, also labels an Olan Mill(s) photography studio in the building. The original two-story atrium at the west half may have been filled in to make more office space during the city years, or later. The plan says nobody knows yet. City government left when the new City Hall opened in 1968.
After that the building went back to ordinary tenants. The best known was the Arizona School of Real Estate, founded by James Pullaro in 1969. In early 1971 Scottsdale switched to the Phoenix street grid, and the address became 7120 E. Indian School Road.
The date tangle
You’ll find this building dated 1960, 1961, 1962 and 1963:
- Haver designed it in 1961, according to the preservation plan, which also records the farmhouse demolition that July.
- The same plan calls it “the 1962 Kimsey Building” in one passage and says it was “completed in 1963” in another.
- The city’s mid-century driving tour says 1962.
- The Scottsdale Historic Register gives the construction date as 1963.
- A Wikipedia list of Haver works says “1960 Scottsdale City Hall.” That may be a confusion with Haver’s 1960 Phoenix City Hall, done with Edward L. Varney Associates, which the plan lists separately.
Designed 1961, finished 1962–63 and in city use from April 1963 covers all the good evidence.
Register, sale and the hotel
The City Council placed the building on the Scottsdale Historic Register on April 6, 2021, by Ordinance 4491 (case 10-ZN-2020), with Ryden Architects’ historic preservation plan, revised June 14, 2021, as the rulebook. The plan judged the building eligible for the National Register too, at the local level, as a Contemporary-style commercial building. PEG Companies bought the roughly three-acre site in 2021 for about $27.5 million. Corina Vanek reported the plan in the Arizona Republic in February 2025: a 168-room AC Hotel by Marriott, built by Okland Construction and scheduled to open in February 2026, with a ground-floor restaurant facing Third Avenue, a public rooftop bar and a guests-only rooftop pool; then about 175 rental units along Indian School Road from early 2026 to 2028, with the Kimsey Building as their office, fitness center and event space. We haven’t independently confirmed the hotel’s opening or the current construction schedule, so check before you plan around either.
For a building rented as a one-year stopgap, it has done well: five years as City Hall, half a century of tenants, and now a protected place at the front of the biggest project on its block. The 1963 year page and the 1960s chapter cover the growth that sent the city looking for office space in the first place.