What is the Valley National Bank at 74th & McDowell?
The City of Scottsdale’s own description is that this branch “looks a bit lonely at 74th and McDowell Road today.” When it opened in 1962, it was meant to stop traffic.
The bank at 7345 E. McDowell Road was built for Valley National Bank and designed by Cartmell & Rossman, the Phoenix firm whose Wendell Rossman also gave Scottsdale the St. Maria Goretti church. Its signature is a row of diagonal concrete struts holding up a broad overhanging roof, which the city’s tour calls “a subtle folded concrete roof that looks like a large shade canopy.” Under that roof is an ordinary working bank. As of the most recent public listing we could check, it’s a Chase branch with a drive-through.
It is stop 10 on the city’s “Drive Yourself Mod” mid-century architecture tour, which treats it as part of the same story as the city’s concrete-shell churches. It isn’t on the Scottsdale Historic Register, and outside the city’s tour PDF it has almost no presence online. This page collects what’s known and lists the open questions.
How to look at it
From the sidewalk, in this order.
- The struts. Look at their angle first. They lean, and that lean is the building’s whole personality. A normal 1960s branch would have stood its roof on plain columns. Cartmell & Rossman set theirs on a slant so the structure itself is the decoration.
- The roof edge. Step back far enough to see the full overhang. The fold is shallow, as the city says, more like a stretched canopy than a zigzag. The overhang does the practical job in this climate, shading the glass and the people under it.
- The setting. The city’s word “lonely” is fair. Set back beside a wide arterial and its parking, the building looks smaller than it was meant to.
Be a polite architecture tourist. It’s an operating bank. Take photos from the public sidewalk, keep customers, the entrance and the ATM out of the frame, and don’t loiter in the drive-through lane. If you need the bank’s hours, check Chase’s branch locator; we haven’t listed them here because bank hours change.
Build a loop. On the city’s tour this is the last stop before the drive north to Town & Country and City Hall. Stop 9, Motorola’s Government Electronics Division plant at 8201 E. McDowell, is about a mile east. The city calls its 1957 building the best intact “Garden Industrial” building in Scottsdale, if not the state (our Motorola in Scottsdale page tells that story). The two thin-shell churches, St. Maria Goretti and the Glass & Garden drive-in church, are a short drive north on Granite Reef Road and McDonald Drive. The historic districts on the tour are covered in our midcentury historic districts note.
A banker’s architecture program
The city’s tour gives the background in one sentence: Walter Bimson of Valley National Bank liked to use prominent local architectural firms for his bank branches around the Valley. That habit makes VNB branches one of the few building types in metro Phoenix where you can follow the region’s best firms side by side. Each neighborhood got a small, freestanding building that announced the bank was there. The city’s report adds that “other Valley National Banks by prominent firms around the Valley are also worth preserving and being recognized for their unique designs.” Coming from a preservation office, that sentence is a quiet request.
This branch went up in 1962, five years after Motorola’s plant opened a mile east. The city credits Motorola with drawing new housing into south Scottsdale. New subdivisions needed groceries, schools, churches and banks, and the Valley’s biggest bank wanted a branch they’d notice from the road. The Los Arcos Mall at Scottsdale and McDowell Roads became the commercial center of this stretch. It closed in 1999, and the site is now ASU’s SkySong.
Cartmell & Rossman
Wendell E. Rossman is the better-documented partner, mostly because of his concrete shells. SPS+ Architects, the firm’s successor, credits him with designing St. Maria Goretti in 1961. Modern Phoenix reports that by February 1975 his office had finished fifteen concrete-shell buildings, and it calls the firm’s ASU law school building the most peculiar on campus. The same architect-engineer team built Los Arcos Methodist Church (1966, demolished 2012) a few blocks from this bank. Next to those buildings, the bank is restrained: no shell, just a roof with a slight fold and struts that make the structure obvious. The city’s tour classes it alongside Expressionist buildings for that reason, and says it “is difficult to classify as a sub-style.” The tour spells the firm “Cartwell” in one line and “Cartmell” everywhere else. Cartmell is correct.
The Los Arcos question
Modern Phoenix says Rossman and Cartmell designed “the VNB branch at Los Arcos.” That is very likely this building, a VNB branch near the old Los Arcos Mall designed by the right firm. We haven’t seen it confirmed, and “at Los Arcos” could also mean a branch inside or next to the mall itself.
What the record would tell us
Three archives would fill in this page:
- The Valley National Bank Collection (MS 44) at the Arizona Historical Society in Tempe, which holds branch files and photographs. It would confirm the opening date, the architects’ drawings and the original name of the branch.
- City of Scottsdale building records. The eServices document viewer, searched by address, should have the original permit and possibly the plans, including the engineer, whom no source we found names.
- The Scottsdale Progress, 1962, on microfilm in the Scottsdale Room at the Civic Center Library. Branch openings got newspaper coverage, often with an architect’s rendering.
Why it matters
Scottsdale’s midcentury landmarks are mostly churches, hotels and houses. This is the one on the city’s tour that’s simply a place to do errands, and that’s why it’s worth a stop. Valley National commissioned a good building for a small branch on a road out of town, and the building is still being used for the same job. It isn’t protected, it doesn’t have much online, and it would be easy for a future owner to remodel away. Go look at the struts while they’re still there.