What is Loloma School?
Most people who know this building know it as the Scottsdale Artists’ School, the red-tile-roofed building on Marshall Way where people take drawing and painting classes. Its real name is Scottsdale Grammar School No. 2, and it is the building Scottsdale put up when it stopped being a crossroads and started acting like a town.
By the mid-1920s the 1909 brick grammar school on Main Street, now the Little Red Schoolhouse, had two classrooms for a district whose population had about doubled since 1920. In January 1928 the school board proposed a $50,000 bond. Voters passed it on February 9, 1928, 105 to 9, and on March 22 they voted again to pick the site: the H.R. Bland tract southwest of town. The district bought ten acres for $5,000 and hired the Phoenix firm Lescher & Mahoney.
The building was finished in September 1928 for $35,069: a one-story stucco school in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, with eight classrooms, an office, and a room for the nurse and teachers. It had 594 pupils in grades one through eight its first year, and its first principal was Garland White, who went on to be the town’s superintendent of schools. In the 1950s the district renamed it Loloma. It ended its public-school run as a vocational skills center and closed in 1981. A cable TV company owned it next, and the city bought it in 1992. The art school has been teaching in the old classrooms since the early 1990s.
It has a second history too. The same year it opened, the old brick school on Main Street became the Coronado School for the town’s Mexican-American children. How strictly the two schools were divided by race is something the sources don’t agree on, and we cover it below and in our note on the Coronado School.
How to see it
It’s a ten-minute look from the sidewalk. The school fills the southwest corner of Second Street and Marshall Way, on a lot of about 1.74 acres today, down from the ten acres the district bought in 1928. Start on Marshall Way, facing the main entrance. The city’s register report describes what you’re looking at:
- The center. A central archway with molded concrete trim, and recessed double doors under a decorated pediment, with sidelights.
- The windows. Large rectangular metal windows in sets of five on each side of the door and on each projecting wing. Each window is divided into five horizontal panes and sits on a plain concrete sill.
- The roof. Low-pitched red tile gables over the main block and every wing.
Then walk the back. The original plan was symmetrical: a main block with projecting bays in front and wings running back to the northwest and southwest, tied together by an open arcaded walkway. That arcade has been glassed in to make an interior hallway. From the Second Street side, look for the line of that old open walkway behind the newer windows. The art school’s own page mentions glazed Saltillo tile floors inside.
The marker. In March 2022 the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution put up a historic marker out front, after months of work with the city and the school. It is the only interpretive sign on the site.
Going inside. This is a working art school. The way in is a class, a workshop, a lecture or an open event. Check the school’s site or call (480) 990-1422. Don’t treat it as a walk-in museum.
Make it a walk. The Little Red Schoolhouse, now the Scottsdale Historical Museum, is about ten minutes east. Walking between the two buildings shows you the town’s two schools, the old one and the new one, and the Coronado School note explains why that walk matters. The Old Adobe Mission on Brown Avenue and the rest of the Old Town on foot route are on the way. Marshall Way north of the school is the gallery strip of the Main Street Arts District, and the Thursday-evening ArtWalk runs right past the front door.
A farm town buys itself a real school
The city’s register report makes the point plainly. In Western towns, schools were often the best buildings in town. Communities hired known architects, used the fashionable style of the day and paid for good materials, because a school was a statement about where the town thought it was going. Scottsdale’s 1928 school fits that pattern. The bond was more than ten times what voters had approved for the first grammar school twenty years earlier, and the town voted on where to put it as well as whether to build it. Three sites were on the March 1928 ballot.
The 1920s gave it the confidence. The 1920 census counted 1,047 people in the Scottsdale precinct, not counting the Salt River reservation, and by mid-decade there were about 2,000. Roosevelt Dam had made the water reliable, and a main-line rail connection had reached the Valley in 1924. Salt River Stories notes that the town got electricity, a bank and its own standalone post office in the same years (the post office is now its own page). In spring 1928 the brick schoolhouse on Main Street was still the only grade school in town. That fall the new one opened with nearly six hundred children.
The opening date depends on the source. The register report says the building was finished in September, and the Arizona Republican of October 18, 1928 reported a large crowd at the parents’ program and inspection. Joan Fudala gives the first day of school as September 17, 1928, and the art school also says September. Salt River Stories says the school opened in October, which looks like the open house. Many of the children came on horseback. One of the school’s early photographs shows pupils riding to class, because many farm families lived too far out to walk.
Additions, and dates that don’t match
The building was too small almost from the start. The register report says the south wing was extended “shortly after its construction” with three more classrooms and a basement. Its history section dates a Lescher & Mahoney design for that south-wing expansion to 1935, with a cafeteria following in 1936. Salt River Stories puts the expansion in 1934 and credits the federal Civil Works program of the winter of 1933–34. Fudala calls it a Works Progress Administration project of the mid-1930s. The DAR’s 2022 announcement of its marker gives additions in 1933 and 1936. All of the sources agree on the substance: Depression-era federal work money helped enlarge the school. The year differs from one account to the next, and the district’s building files would settle it.
Fudala adds bond-funded expansions in 1940 and 1948. The register report records wooden classroom buildings, restrooms and support space added in November 1948, replaced in the early 1950s when the main building was enlarged again. The Arts Colony historic context records that at the end of the Second World War this school and Scottsdale High were the town’s only two public schools. By the end of 1960 the district had built another high school and twelve new grade schools. Loloma was the old school in a fast-growing district from then on.
Two schools, one color line
The year Grammar School No. 2 opened, the district gave the 1909 brick building on Main Street a new name and a new job. It became the Coronado School, attended by the town’s Mexican-American children. The sources describe the arrangement in different ways:
- The City of Scottsdale’s 2012 context, A Modern Dynamic City, 1961–1979, says that “at some point” the district made Coronado “the public school for Hispanics and other non-White children” and that Loloma “became the school for White (Anglo) children.”
- The Scottsdale Historical Society calls Coronado a transitional school for immigrant children in grades one to three, who then moved on to Scottsdale Grammar School. The city’s Old Town walking tour says much the same: the children of Mexican workers went to Coronado, from 1928 to 1954, to learn English.
- Joan Fudala describes Grammar School No. 2’s own student body as Anglo, Hispanic, Native American and Chinese children from farm families of modest means.
These accounts can’t all describe the same school in the same year. Our Coronado School note sets them side by side. Its reading is that an early-grades “transition” arrangement may have hardened into separation by race at some point. Without the school board’s minutes for 1928 to 1956, that remains a reading. The city’s context records that Arizona courts struck down school segregation laws in 1953 and that Scottsdale’s schools were integrated by law well before the city’s 1961 charter. When you stand at Loloma’s front arch, keep in mind that the town built this school for some of its children and kept the old one for others. For the neighborhood the Coronado children came from, read The Barrio Under the Civic Center.
Loloma, the skills center, and the cable company
The renaming came with postwar growth. As the district added school after school in the 1950s, it gave them Native American names, and Grammar School No. 2 became Loloma Elementary. The art school dates the change to the early 1950s and Fudala to the mid-1950s. Salt River Stories connects the naming program to the town’s “West’s Most Western Town” branding, and our note on the naming covers where the names came from.
Enrollment then moved north and east with the new subdivisions. The district’s own chronology, reproduced in the city’s 2012 context, lists the school as K–8 and later K–6, closing as an elementary in 1977–78 and serving as the Loloma Skills Center from 1976 to 1981. Fudala describes the skills center as vocational and technical training. The art school says it closed as a school at the end of the 1980–81 year.
The district sold it at auction to what Fudala calls “Scottsdale’s first cable TV provider.” The company kept the building in educational use, teaching classes in the then-new video cameras, and gave the Scottsdale Historical Society space for exhibits and programs. This site’s 1985 page names the company as United Cable and dates its headquarters move to 1985. Fudala doesn’t name the company or the year, and we haven’t confirmed either. After the cable company consolidated elsewhere, it sold the building to the City of Scottsdale in 1992.
The art school, and the register
The Scottsdale Artists’ School was founded in 1983 by a small group of central Arizona artists and community leaders, with financial backing from the Scottsdale Artists League. It held its first workshop that September in a single studio. About a decade later it moved into the old school after the city bought it, with an interior refurbishment by Scottsdale architect and preservationist Douglas Sydnor. The school and the 2022 DAR account date the move to 1993. Fudala says 1994. The city’s lease file would settle it.
The building’s legal protection came in two steps. The city zoned it for historic preservation in May 1982, under the program that came before the current register. When the council created the Scottsdale Historic Register in 1999, the first properties considered were the ones that already had that zoning. Scottsdale Grammar School #2 was placed on the register on May 23, 2000 (SHR-00-5, Resolution 5550), in the same group as the first post office on Brown Avenue. The report found that despite the additions, the enclosed arcade and its many uses, the building “still retains a high degree of integrity.”
What’s still unknown
- The color line. Who decided which children went to which school, in what year and under what rule, and when it ended. The answer is in the board minutes of the Scottsdale school district (then District No. 48), held by Scottsdale Unified or the Arizona State Archives, and in the state superintendent’s enrollment reports.
- The 1930s additions. Whether the federally funded work was 1933, 1934 or 1935, and how much of it was Lescher & Mahoney’s. The district’s building records and the Arizona Republican would answer it.
- The cable company. Its name and the year it moved in. Maricopa County deed records for parcel 130-13-074C would show the 1981 sale and the 1992 sale to the city.
- The rename. The year the district adopted the name Loloma, which should appear in the board minutes.