What is the Valley Field Riding and Polo Club?
It’s one of the best-documented buildings in the Scottsdale area that almost nobody can see, and one of the most often misdated.
The Valley Field Riding and Polo Club is a single-story Pueblo Revival adobe clubhouse at 2530 N. 64th Street, on 9.29 acres of walled, mostly native desert northeast of the Papago Buttes. Phoenix architect Lester Byron Sr. designed it, builder H.R. Meadows built it in 1937, and it was the clubhouse of a riding and polo club that, in the words of its National Register nomination, was “a who’s who of Valley powerbrokers.” It has foot-thick adobe walls, hand-carved vigas over 30 feet long, latillas, a great hall with 15-foot walls and a big stepped fireplace.
The club wasn’t founded in Scottsdale or in 1924. It began in 1929 in Phoenix as the Westward Ho Riding Club, tied to the then-new Westward Ho Hotel, and was renamed in 1932. It moved out here only after its first clubhouse burned in 1936. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 5, 2009.
It is private, and you can’t visit it. This page is mostly a record: what the nomination says, what other sources got wrong, and what nobody knows about the property today.
Seeing it, honestly
You can’t, really, and you shouldn’t try. The remaining 9.29 acres are enclosed by a stuccoed masonry wall with an entrance gate, and the club owns them. In the nomination’s description, homes across 64th Street to the east are “out of sight due to noise abatement walls” built when the road was widened. That works in both directions. Sixty-fourth Street is a busy road with nowhere to stop and nothing to see over the wall. Don’t drive into the neighboring subdivisions looking for an angle either.
Read the nomination instead. The full National Register nomination, prepared in September 2007 by Helana Ruter and Deborah Abele of Akros, Inc., is free on the National Park Service’s NPGallery site under reference 08001405. It’s twenty pages of floor plans, the club’s history from its own archives, and a photo log listing views of the great hall, the original fireplace, the arch between hall and bar, the caretaker’s cottage, a surviving piece of adobe wall and the undisturbed desert.
Walk the landscape it was built for. The club chose this ground because it was “above a level that could be watered by the Salt River Project,” so it couldn’t be farmed and stayed open desert with saguaros. You can still get that experience in Papago Park, just south across the Phoenix line. Walk the buttes in the morning, then take the Crosscut Canal path north to the marker for the 1944 POW escape tunnel. The Army officers who guarded that camp used the polo club’s clubhouse.
From a riding academy to a society club
The nomination traces the club to Capt. H.A.M. Mosse, who taught English-style riding and polo at a riding academy on Missouri Avenue between Central Avenue and Seventh Street, on land leased from the Phoenix Land and Investment Company. In 1929 three interests came together. George Lindholm, manager of the new Westward Ho Hotel, arranged rides for hotel guests. Phoenicians boarded horses there to ride in the desert. A group of polo players wanted to grow the game. Articles of incorporation for the Westward Ho Riding Club were filed on October 2, 1929, with Mosse, Roland Haskell and Dr. S.I. Bloomhardt as the key names. Bloomhardt served as president from 1929 to 1941. The first field day, announced January 10, 1930, featured a walk-trot-and-canter race, a ring-tilting tournament, an “iced bun race,” steeplechases and a polo-pony return race. A clubhouse called “The Barn” went up by October 1930, and the grounds became Valley Field. The club team was the Valley Field Blues.
Then came the money trouble. The hotel stopped paying its share of the $500 ground lease, Mosse held a controlling interest, and the shareholders couldn’t agree with him. Mosse was paid to turn in all but two of his shares. On December 27, 1932, stockholders renamed the club the Valley Field Riding and Polo Club and made it a nonprofit.
Lawyer Harry M. Fennemore shaped what it became. A former president told an interviewer in 1998 that Fennemore had tired of the Phoenix Country Club in the 1920s because it admitted people he didn’t consider “the right kind,” and that “Fennemore picked the people he wanted.” The membership offering asked for “congenial people who have lived in Arizona a substantial number of years.” The nomination calls it an elite organization from a time when a small group of local businessmen and professionals still ran Phoenix’s political economy. That exclusivity is a large part of why it’s historically significant.
The 1936 move to the buttes
On August 1, 1936, the Barn burned. Col. J.E. Thompson, a Magma Copper man whom the nomination identifies as the brother of mining magnate Boyce Thompson, offered 21.68 acres he owned south of the Phoenix city reservoir. The land was desert too high for SRP water, northeast of the Papago Buttes, a quarter mile north of Papago Park. He also offered to buy $1,500 in first-mortgage bonds. Lou Ella Archer bought $500 more. At the November 19, 1936 board meeting, member and architect Lester Byron presented figures for an adobe clubhouse and stables. H.R. Meadows built the clubhouse from locally made adobe brick. The nomination gives the construction as January to April 1937 in one place and “completed by October of 1937” in another. A 1937 newspaper photo ran under the headline “Valley Field Riding and Polo Club to Open New Home Today,” and showed the Bloomhardts on horseback with Harry Fennemore, Mrs. Baron Goldwater and others. The stables were finished in November 1938.
War, decline and selling off the land
In November 1942 the club rented its clubhouse to the U.S. Army’s 364th Infantry, which the nomination says was guarding German prisoners of war at Camp Papago Park. The officers put a tent over the south entrance and stayed for the rest of the war. Our Camp Papago Park page dates the camp’s prisoners from 1943, so the Army may have arrived before the Germans did. Polo never came back the way it had been, nationally or here. In 1959, after wind damage and years of little use, the stables came down, and the club became purely social. That’s why the nomination’s period of significance ends in 1959.
After that the club survived by selling land and adding on. Lester Byron Jr. designed a brick dining-room addition in 1966. A 1976 fire damaged the caretaker’s cottage, which was rebuilt by September 1977. In 1988 the club sold 1.5 acres to the west to United Blood Services, and about 10 acres to the north became a 1990 subdivision. A 1991 addition, 16 by 40 feet with a beehive fireplace, moved the main entrance from the north side to the east to make the most of the remaining desert view. Both additions were stuccoed to match the adobe. The nomination argued that this sequence, a modern addition later reworked to blend in, is itself typical of how American country clubs evolved.
The 1924 problem, and other open questions
Wikipedia’s list of historic properties in Scottsdale says the club “was built in 1924,” and the Wikimedia Commons photo used on Wikipedia’s Maricopa County National Register list carries 1924 in its file name. The nomination says the club was founded in 1929 and the clubhouse built in 1937. The only 1924 in the nomination is a University of Arizona polo championship. Until someone produces a 1924 source, treat that date as an error.
Some things the record doesn’t settle:
- Current condition. In 2007 the clubhouse was in use for monthly member dinners. Wikipedia now says, without a source, that it’s in “a total state of abandonment” inside a gated community. We couldn’t confirm either way.
- City limits. The nomination places the property “in the city of Scottsdale,” ZIP 85257. It isn’t on Scottsdale’s own Historic Register, which runs its own designation process. The Maricopa County Assessor’s record for parcel 129-24-003C, named in the nomination, would show the jurisdiction.
- The club’s archives. The nomination’s main sources were Dorothy “Dot” Webb’s 1998 club history and her 1998 oral history with former president John Clements, both “Valley Field Riding & Polo Club Archives.” Whether those papers are still kept, and by whom, isn’t public.
Why it matters
Most of what this area keeps of the 1930s is a brochure version of the West: dude ranches, rodeos and cowboy storefronts. This place is the other side of it, where Phoenix’s bankers, lawyers and mining families rode, played polo and had supper among the saguaros, with a carefully chosen guest list. The building is genuinely good regional adobe architecture, and the land around it is one of the last walled pieces of the pre-suburban desert north of the buttes. It’s worth knowing about, and worth dating correctly.