The people who made Scottsdale

The Huhugam (Hohokam) Canal Builders

Ancient Canal Engineers

For roughly a thousand years the people archaeologists call the Hohokam, and their O'odham descendants call the Huhugam, moved Salt River water through hundreds of miles of hand-dug canals and farmed the desert that Scottsdale now covers. Their descendants, the Akimel O'odham and Piipaash of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, still live along the city's entire eastern edge. No individual builder is named in the record, which is why this profile is a collective one.

Huhugam Ki Museum, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community · Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park, Phoenix · Canal alignments reused by the Valley's nineteenth-century settlers

Winfield Scott

Founder of Scottsdale

A Michigan-born Baptist minister, Union veteran and Army chaplain, Winfield Scott put about $320 down in July 1888 on 640 acres of creosote beside the new Arizona Canal, then spent the rest of his life selling the place to sober farm families. The town took his name in 1894, and Old Town still sits inside his square mile.

The name Scottsdale · The Scott Resort & Spa, named for Winfield and Helen Scott · Scottsdale, Hayden, Indian School and Chaparral Roads, which trace his 1888 claim

William J. Murphy

Arizona Canal Builder

In 1883 the Arizona Canal Company hired a railroad contractor named W.J. Murphy to run a canal along the high line of the north Salt River Valley, where no ditch had ever gone. He took the job largely on credit, finished the 41-mile Arizona Canal in 1885, and opened the desert bench where Winfield Scott would buy his square mile three years later. Then he built the Valley's first resort to sell the rest of it.

The Arizona Canal, still carrying Salt River Project water · The Arizona Canal Path · The Ingleside name on the district around his old citrus colony

George Washington Scott

First Permanent Resident

Winfield Scott bought the land, but his brother George lived on it first. A Union veteran, George Washington Scott arrived in 1889, camped on the empty section, cleared the brush and got water flowing from the Arizona Canal's laterals, becoming the first permanent resident of the future city.

Frank Titus

Railroad Executive and Pioneer Rancher

Frank Titus came from San Francisco, was an executive of the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad, and in 1891 settled 160 acres of open desert for a citrus farm and horse-breeding ranch, about three miles south of Winfield Scott's farm. The brick farmhouse he had architect James Miller Creighton design in 1892 still stands on Hayden Road. The 1982 National Register nomination calls it the oldest house in Scottsdale.

The Titus House (1892), listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the Scottsdale Historic Register

Helen Scott

Pioneer Rancher

Helen Scott moved onto the ranch full-time with her husband Winfield in 1893 and, by the town's own account, ran much of it while he worked the territory as preacher, promoter and politician. The record keeps only a few facts about her, and this profile sticks to them.

The Scott Resort & Spa, named for Winfield and Helen Scott

Albert G. Utley

Townsite Founder

Winfield Scott's most consequential recruit was a retired Chicago banker. In 1894 Albert G. Utley bought land next to the Scott ranch and platted a 40-acre townsite, the seed of today's Old Town. The paperwork first said 'Orangedale'; by the time it settled, the town was Scottsdale.

Old Town's street grid around Brown Avenue, Main Street and First Street

Hattie Green

First Schoolhouse Teacher

In 1896 the settlers of School District No. 48 built a 16-by-18-foot frame schoolroom, and Hattie Green taught its fourteen pupils for $45 a month. It was Scottsdale's first public building; the district's very first classes, that spring, had met in Alza Blount's adobe home. The brick Little Red Schoolhouse that replaced it in 1909 is now the city's history museum, and the record of her is one line long.

J.L. Davis

First Merchant and Postmaster

In 1897 J.L. Davis opened a one-room, adobe-fronted general store at what is now the southwest corner of Brown Avenue and Main Street, and the first post office under the Scottsdale name went inside it, with Davis as postmaster. That room was the town's whole commercial district, and the corner has hosted commerce ever since.

Benjamin A. Fowler

Father of the Salt River Project

Benjamin Austin Fowler, a Yale-educated Massachusetts publisher, came to Phoenix in 1899 for his health and found a valley dying of drought. He chaired the county's water-storage committee, spent the winters of 1901–02 and 1902–03 in Washington working with George Maxwell, Frederick Newell and Gifford Pinchot for the National Reclamation Act, and on February 7, 1903 became the first president of the Salt River Valley Water Users' Association — 4,800 landowners, Scottsdale's farmers among them, who pledged 200,000 acres to build Roosevelt Dam. His obituary called him the father of reclamation.

Roosevelt Dam and the Salt River Project · The Arizona Canal, which the association took over and still runs through Scottsdale

George Cavalliere

Pioneer Blacksmith

George Cavalliere was an Italian-immigrant blacksmith who came to the Valley to work on the deepening of the Arizona Canal, settled in the Scottsdale townsite in 1909 and opened his forge in 1910. The adobe shop he built on Brown Avenue in 1920 is still a working forge, run by the fourth generation of his family: the oldest continuously operating business in Scottsdale.

Cavalliere's Blacksmith Shop, Brown Avenue (the 1920 adobe forge)

Jessie Benton Evans

Landscape Painter

Jessie Benton Evans was an Italian-trained landscape painter who settled at the foot of Camelback Mountain and drew a circle of artists and architects to winter around her from the mid-1920s. On her estate her son built the adobe house that became the Jokake Inn in 1926, the resort that set the template for a century of Scottsdale hospitality. Its 1936 bell towers still stand on The Phoenician's lawn.

Jokake Inn bell towers (1936), The Phoenician grounds

Carlos Montezuma

Yavapai Physician and Activist

Born Wassaja near Four Peaks around 1866, captured by Pima raiders at five and sold to an Italian photographer for thirty silver dollars, Carlos Montezuma became one of the first Native American physicians and the fiercest critic of the Indian Bureau. From 1910 until his death he used a power of attorney, his newsletter and Congress to keep the Yavapai of Fort McDowell — the nation on the Verde over the McDowells from Scottsdale — from being moved to the Salt River reservation so that farmers downstream could have their water. He came home to die in a brush shelter on the land he saved.

Dr. Carlos Montezuma Wassaja Memorial Health Center, Fort McDowell · Wassaja Hall, University of Illinois · His grave at Ba Dah Mod Jo Cemetery, Fort McDowell

Charles Miller

Farmer, Power-Company Founder and Legislator

Charles Miller, born in Iowa in 1863, came to Scottsdale in 1908 and farmed land Winfield Scott had first irrigated. After Scott died he bought 80 acres of Scott's own orchard and vineyard at Scottsdale and Indian School roads and built a Craftsman bungalow there. He co-founded the town's first electric company in 1918, gave ten acres for Scottsdale High School, and died in 1923 during his first term in the state legislature. Miller Road is named for him.

Miller Road · The Charles Miller House (c. 1913), on the Scottsdale Historic Register · The ten-acre site of Scottsdale High School (1922–1983)

E.O. Brown

Rancher-Merchant

Edwin Orpheus Brown took over Scottsdale's only general store in 1909, then in 1916 pushed cattle north to the McDowell Mountains under a brand called DC. The store gave Old Town its Brown Avenue; the ranch, which reached about 44,000 acres, became the DC Ranch community and the Preserve's Brown's Ranch Trailhead. Few people shaped more of the modern map without meaning to.

Brown Avenue, Old Town · Brown's Ranch Trailhead and Brown's Ranch Road, McDowell Sonoran Preserve · DC Ranch, the community named for his cattle brand · DC Ranch Park

Marjorie Thomas

First Resident Artist

Marjorie Thomas trained in portraiture at the Boston Museum school and came to Arizona in 1909 with her mother and a tubercular brother; each homesteaded 160 acres, and she set up a studio in her cottage at Indian School and Scottsdale Roads. Her first commission was Winfield Scott's army mule, Old Maud, which the chaplain led to her door. She painted the workhorses, hogans and unbuilt desert of the Valley for the next seventy years, and the city calls her its first artist.

Old Maud, her painting of Winfield Scott's mule, in the Scottsdale Fine Art Collection · Southwest Women's Art Collection at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West

The Corral Family & the Mission Builders

Mexican-American Pioneer Families

The Corrals came north from Cananea, Sonora, in the cotton boom (the family dates its arrival to September 1919) and stayed when the boom went bust. With their neighbors they hand-made the 14,000 adobe bricks of the Old Adobe Mission, finished in 1933, and in 1928 built the adobe hall that became Los Olivos, which the family still runs. They, and the named builders of the mission beside them, made the Old Town buildings that are actually old.

Old Adobe Mission (Our Lady of Perpetual Help), Brown Avenue · Los Olivos Mexican Patio, 2nd Street · Bernabé Herrera's stained-glass windows, Old Adobe Mission

The Yaqui Families of Scottsdale

Canal Workers and Founders of Penjamo

Yaqui families fled persecution in Sonora and came to the Salt River Valley in the early 1900s, recruited by the water users' association to dig and tend its canals. Some settled in Scottsdale, helped raise the Old Adobe Mission, moved from camp to camp for decades and in 1972 settled for good in four cul-de-sacs in south Scottsdale they named Penjamo. It is the smallest of Arizona's Yaqui settlements, and it is still there, beside Vista del Camino Park.

Penjamo (Vista del Camino) Yaqui village, south Scottsdale · Yaqui Mural by Mario Martinez, Vista del Camino Community Center · Old Adobe Mission, Brown Avenue

E.M. Saba

Founder of Saba's

E.M. Saba was a Syrian-born merchant who opened a dry-goods department store on Scottsdale's Main Street in 1921, in the middle of the cotton crash. His family dressed the farmers, then the dudes, then the whole Western-themed town, and Saba's Western Wear still trades from Old Town more than a century later.

Saba's Western Wear, Old Town flagship

Robert T. Evans

Adobe Builder and Architect

R.T. 'Bob' Evans, painter Jessie Benton Evans' son, built the adobe house that became the Jokake Inn, designed every adobe structure on its grounds including the 1936 bell towers, built the 1920s mansion that became the Casa Blanca Inn, and gave the Old Adobe Mission its design and tools. Two of the most visible survivors of 1920s and 1930s Scottsdale are his.

Jokake Inn bell towers (1936), The Phoenician grounds · Old Adobe Mission (Our Lady of Perpetual Help), design and tools

Sylvia Evans

Jokake Inn Innkeeper

Sylvia Byrnes Evans started hosting tea parties in her husband's new adobe house below Camelback Mountain in 1926, with her friend Lucy Cuthbert. By 1928 the guests were staying overnight, and the Jokake Inn she ran became one of winter Scottsdale's defining resorts. She kept it going through her 1940s divorce and sold it in the early 1950s.

Jokake Inn bell towers, The Phoenician grounds

The Song Family

Main Street Grocers and Importers

Jew Chew Song, born in China, bought Johnny Rose's white glazed-brick pool hall at the corner of Main Street and Brown Avenue in 1929 and ran a grocery in it for a quarter century, his family living in the rooms behind. In the 1930s he added a hipped-roof wing meant to bring 'a bit of Chinatown' to Scottsdale; in the 1950s the store became Mexican Imports, which his grandchildren were still running in 2019. The building is on the city's historic register.

The Johnny Rose / Song building, 3933 North Brown Avenue, Scottsdale Historic Register · Mexican Imports, at the corner of Main Street and Brown Avenue

Jack Stewart

Founder of Camelback Inn

Jack Stewart was a sportswriter and publicist from Fargo, North Dakota, who talked a Cleveland industrialist into financing a pueblo-style inn on roadless desert in the middle of the Depression. The Camelback Inn opened on December 15, 1936, has never closed, and every casita resort in the Valley has been running his play ever since.

JW Marriott Camelback Inn, still open · The slogan 'Where Time Stands Still'

Frank Lloyd Wright

Architect of Taliesin West

In December 1937 the most famous architect in America, aged 70, bought a mesa of creosote and rock below the McDowell Mountains, and the next month he and his apprentices started building Taliesin West out of the desert itself. He wintered there every year until his death in 1959, and the compound is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the reason Scottsdale is in the history of architecture.

Taliesin West, UNESCO World Heritage Site · Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard · Frank Lloyd Wright Spire

Lloyd Kiva New

Cherokee Fashion Designer

Lloyd Kiva New was a Cherokee designer who settled in Scottsdale after the war and, in 1955, built the Kiva Craft Center on the new curve of Fifth Avenue: his own fashion and handbag studio at the center, working artisans around it, and the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma down the hall. For a few years the most important Native design studio in the country was on a Scottsdale shopping street; in 1962 he left to co-found the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe (co-founded 1962) · Fifth Avenue's Native-jewelry trade

Earl Shipp

Grocer and Downtown Builder

Earl Shipp clerked at Byer's General Store on Scottsdale's main corner as a teenager, graduated from Scottsdale High in 1928 and, in 1935, bought the store and renamed it Earl's Market. For twenty-four years it was where the farm town bought its groceries, and in the 1950s Shipp built a bank, post offices, an appliance store and a drugstore downtown. Woolworth's took the corner in 1959, and the Legacy Gallery holds it today.

John C. Lincoln

Industrialist and Camelback Inn Backer

John C. Lincoln founded Lincoln Electric in Cleveland in 1895 and came to the Valley in 1931 for his wife's health. Five years later he gave a Fargo publicist named Jack Stewart about $200,000 and a stretch of his own desert between Camelback and Mummy mountains, and the Camelback Inn opened on December 15, 1936. The road the resort sits on carries his name.

Lincoln Drive · JW Marriott Camelback Inn · John C. Lincoln Medical Center, Sunnyslope · Lincoln Steakhouse & Bar and Bar 1936 at the Camelback Inn

Bernabé Herrera

Tinsmith, Glassmaker and Catechist

Bernabé Herrera was a Scottsdale tinsmith who made light fixtures and table ornaments for the Jokake Inn and then, for his own parish, turned salvaged Tucson church glass into the windows of the Old Adobe Mission, finished in 1933. He was also the parish's catechism teacher. His craft is visible every day the mission is open, and almost nothing else about his life is in the public record.

The stained-glass windows of the Old Adobe Mission (Our Lady of Perpetual Help), Brown Avenue

Lon Megargee

Cowboy Artist and Builder

Lon Megargee was Arizona's original cowboy artist, a Philadelphia runaway who painted the West into its most familiar images and, in the mid-1930s, built himself an adobe house below Camelback with his own hands. He sold it in 1941; ninety years, one fire and one careful restoration later, it is the Hermosa Inn, and its restaurant carries his first name.

The Hermosa Inn (his Casa Hermosa) · Lon's at the Hermosa · LON's Last Drop bar

George & Rachael Ellis

Founders of Cattle Track

George Ellis, a government surveyor turned builder, and Rachael Murdock Ellis, a schoolteacher, homesteaded ten acres beside the Arizona Canal in 1937 and built their first house out of salvaged pipeline staves. They let artists move in, and their family never sold, so Cattle Track is still a working artists' compound nearly ninety years later.

Cattle Track Arts Compound, National Register 1999

Olgivanna Lloyd Wright

Leader of the Taliesin Fellowship

Olgivanna Lloyd Wright was Frank Lloyd Wright's wife, partner in the Taliesin Fellowship, and the person who held it together after he died in 1959. For the next quarter century she kept the household, the school and the architecture practice running on the mesa below the McDowells, which is a large part of why Taliesin West is still there to visit.

Taliesin West, UNESCO World Heritage Site

Pedro E. Guerrero

Frank Lloyd Wright's Photographer

Pedro E. Guerrero was a 22-year-old art-school dropout from Mesa when Frank Lloyd Wright hired him in 1939 to photograph the construction of Taliesin West. He became Wright's photographer of choice for the next twenty years, and his black-and-white pictures of the desert camp are still how most people first see it. He went on to a long New York career photographing modern houses, Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson, and died in Arizona in 2012.

Picturing Wright, his book on the Wright years · The best-known photographs of early Taliesin West

Leland Hayward & John H. Connelly

Founders of Southwest Airways

Hollywood talent agent Leland Hayward and John H. Connelly founded Southwest Airways, the civilian contractor that ran Thunderbird Field II, the Army flight school built on farmland north of Scottsdale in 1942. The school trained more than 5,500 pilots in two years, and its runway became Scottsdale Airport and the Airpark around it.

Scottsdale Airport, on the Thunderbird Field II runway · Thunderbird Field II Veterans Memorial

Lou Witzeman

Founder of Rural Metro

In 1948 Lou Witzeman watched a neighbor's house burn with no fire department to call, because the unincorporated town had none. He organized Rural Metro, a private subscription fire brigade, and the arrangement lasted far longer than anyone could have planned: Scottsdale kept its fire service private for fifty-seven years, until the city's own department took over at midnight on July 1, 2005.

Louise Lincoln Kerr

Violinist, Composer and Patron

Louise Lincoln Kerr was a Cleveland-born violinist and composer, the daughter of inventor John C. Lincoln, who came to Arizona in 1936 and became the Valley's great patron of serious music. In 1948 she built an adobe house on Scottsdale Road and in 1959 an adobe studio beside it, where Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals played to a few hundred people. Both went to Arizona State University, and the ASU Kerr Cultural Center still stages chamber music there.

ASU Kerr Cultural Center, her house and studio · Phoenix Symphony (charter violinist and benefactor, 1947) · Arizona Women's Hall of Fame (2004)

Philip C. Curtis

Surrealist Painter

Philip C. Curtis came to Arizona with the Federal Art Project to set up the state's first art center, the institution that became the Phoenix Art Museum, and stayed to become its most distinctive painter. From 1948 he worked in a barn the Ellis family moved onto their Cattle Track homestead for him, painting Victorian figures stranded in desert light.

Cattle Track Arts Compound, where he lived and worked from 1948

Paolo Soleri

Architect and Bell Maker

An architect from Turin who came to the desert in 1947 as a Frank Lloyd Wright apprentice, Paolo Soleri founded Cosanti with his wife Colly in 1956 and spent the rest of his life building by pouring concrete over mounds of earth. His windbells paid for everything, including Arcosanti, and in 2010, at 91, he watched Scottsdale dedicate the only bridge he ever built.

Cosanti, Doubletree Ranch Road (Arizona Historic Site) · Soleri Bridge and Plaza, Scottsdale Waterfront · Arcosanti, seventy miles north

Bennie Gonzales

Architect of the Civic Center

Hired by the city in 1965, Arizona architect Bennie Gonzales drew a 1966 master plan for a civic center in the heart of Old Town and delivered City Hall and the Civic Center Library in 1968, then the Center for the Arts in 1975. His sculptural white, adobe-inflected modernism became the look of civic Scottsdale, and the campus he planned is still the city's front lawn.

Scottsdale City Hall and its kiva council chamber · Civic Center Library · Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts · Scottsdale Civic Center

William Wesley Peters

Chief Architect of Taliesin Associated Architects

William Wesley Peters was the first apprentice to join Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in 1932, married Wright's stepdaughter, and became the engineer behind Fallingwater, Johnson Wax and the Guggenheim. After Wright died in 1959 he led Taliesin Associated Architects from the drafting room at Taliesin West for more than thirty years, and in 1970 he married Stalin's daughter there in the Valley.

Taliesin Associated Architects, headquartered at Taliesin West (1959–2003) · William Wesley Peters Library, School of Architecture

Bill Schrader

Mayor of Scottsdale, 1962–1964

Bill Schrader grew up on a farm at Indian School and Hayden roads, joined the town council at 29 and in 1962 became the first mayor elected under Scottsdale's new charter. In two years he annexed land in every direction ahead of Phoenix, including the old Thunderbird airfield and the McDowell foothills, then spent four decades at the Salt River Project, finishing as its president.

Bill Schrader Volunteer Impact Award, City of Scottsdale

Malcolm White

First Mayor of Scottsdale

Malcolm White turned a service station at Main Street and Scottsdale Road into Whitey's Cafe and Bar in 1941, built the town's first movie theater, and with the Chamber of Commerce pushed the slogan 'The West's Most Western Town.' When Scottsdale incorporated in 1951 he was appointed its first mayor, and the new town turned his marketing into law.

'The West's Most Western Town,' still on the city seal

Fowler & Anne McCormick

Ranchers and Arabian Breeders

Fowler McCormick, grandson of both Cyrus McCormick and John D. Rockefeller, and his wife Anne "Fifi" Potter Stillman McCormick assembled a ranch of roughly 4,200 acres in the middle of what is now Scottsdale. Anne made it one of the country's serious Arabian horse operations, the couple gave the city 100 acres for a park in 1967, and the 1970 sale of the ranch produced McCormick Ranch, one of America's pioneering master-planned communities.

McCormick Ranch · McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park · The Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show

George "Doc" Cavalliere

Blacksmith, Councilman, Restaurateur

The second-generation Cavalliere came home from repairing B-24s in World War II, ran the family forge on Brown Avenue for four decades, and sat on Scottsdale's first Town Council from 1951 to 1959. Then he bought a stagecoach stop in the far-north desert and built the cowboy steakhouse and the beer-and-burger corral that defined a Scottsdale night out for half a century.

George "Doc" Cavalliere Park, Alma School Parkway · Cavalliere's Blacksmith Shop, Brown Avenue

Tom Darlington

Co-Founder of Carefree

Tom Darlington came to Phoenix to run a wartime aircraft-parts plant and stayed to sell the desert. In 1946 he opened a craftsmen's center at Main Street and Brown Avenue in Scottsdale, the seed of the town's arts trade, and in 1955 he and K.T. Palmer bought an old goat farm north of Scottsdale and began selling lots in a planned town they called Carefree, on streets with names like Easy Street and Ho Hum Road.

Tom Darlington Drive, Carefree · The town of Carefree and its Easy Street and Ho Hum Road

Charlie Briley

Owner of the Pink Pony

Charlie Briley bought the Pink Pony on Scottsdale Road in 1948 and ran it for five decades, but his biggest table was a ballpark: in 1955 he and fellow businessmen put up $56,000 to build Scottsdale Stadium. Big-league spring training arrived the next year, and his steakhouse became the unofficial clubhouse of the Cactus League.

Scottsdale Stadium, seeded with $56,000 in 1955 · Pink Pony building, Scottsdale Historic Register 2004

Daniel E. Noble

Motorola's Man in Arizona

Daniel Noble ran research for Motorola, designed the Army's walkie-talkie, and in 1949 opened the company's transistor lab in a rented building on Central Avenue in Phoenix because he liked to ride and needed dry air. The Government Electronics plant he put on McDowell Road in Scottsdale in 1957 employed 7,500 people at its peak, filled the south side with engineers' ranch houses, and made electronics the boomtown's second industry.

Daniel E. Noble Science and Engineering Library, ASU (1983) · IEEE Daniel E. Noble Award for Emerging Technologies · The 8201 East McDowell Road plant, now General Dynamics Mission Systems

Mort Kimsey

Mayor of Scottsdale, 1958–1962

Mort Kimsey ran one of Scottsdale's first service stations on Scottsdale Road, ran the local electric utility's Scottsdale office for years, and sat on the first town council in 1951. The council made him mayor in 1958, voters kept him there in 1960, and on his watch the town passed 10,000 people, fought Phoenix for land and voted itself a home-rule charter.

The Kimsey, the Old Town development on the family's Triangle Building site

Charles Alberding

Owner of the Jokake Inn

Charles Alberding ran Alsonett Hotels, a Chicago-based chain that bought aging resort hotels across the country after World War II, from the Vinoy Park in St. Petersburg to the Peabody in Memphis. In the early 1950s he bought the Jokake Inn from Sylvia Evans and kept it running as an adobe relic into the late 1970s, long enough for its bell towers to survive into The Phoenician era.

Jokake Inn bell towers, The Phoenician grounds

Dale Anderson

Restaurateur and Civic Leader

Dale Anderson came to Arizona in 1947 after Marine Corps service in the Pacific, managed Lulu Belle on Main Street, and then opened restaurants of his own: Dale Anderson's downtown, The Other Place at the Smoke Tree Resort in 1969 and The Quilted Bear on Scottsdale Road in 1974. He also led the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club and the Scottsdale Charros, and fed the same local families for four decades.

The Other Place, Lincoln Drive (1969) · The Quilted Bear, Scottsdale Road (1974–2009) · Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce History Hall of Fame, 1996

Charles Loloma

Hopi Jeweler and Potter

Charles Loloma was a Hopi potter from Hotevilla who opened a shop in Scottsdale with his wife Otellie in 1954, became one of the first tenants of Lloyd Kiva New's craft center on Fifth Avenue, and there began making the jewelry that changed Native art: gold as well as silver, stones set in stacked inlay, forms that looked as modern as anything in New York. He left for Santa Fe in 1962 and later worked from the Hopi mesas, but the change started on a Scottsdale shopping street.

Fifth Avenue's Hopi inlay and overlay trade · Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe (taught from 1962)

Al Beadle

Modernist Architect of the Safari Hotel

Al Beadle was a Phoenix modernist who never went to architecture school: he learned to build with the Navy Seabees, moved to Phoenix in 1951, and designed flat-roofed glass-and-steel boxes for four decades. In Scottsdale his signature was the Safari Hotel, opened on Scottsdale Road in 1956 and demolished in 1999, a year after his death; smaller Beadle buildings, including a 1958 apartment court on the edge of Old Town, still stand.

Day-O Garden Apartments, East Second Street (1958) · Beadle houses in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley

Edward L. Varney

Architect of the Valley Ho

Edward L. Varney trained under Frank Lloyd Wright and designed the Hotel Valley Ho, the long, low modernist hotel that opened in downtown Scottsdale in December 1956. The building was restored to his drawings in 2005, and the tower he designed but never saw built finally went up in 2008.

Hotel Valley Ho, Main Street, Old Town · The Valley Ho tower, built in 2008 from his design

Robert & Evelyn Foehl

Hotel Valley Ho Founders

Robert Foehl was the original owner-operator of the Hotel Valley Ho, and he ran it with his wife Evelyn from its December 1956 opening as downtown Scottsdale's modern clubhouse. Their hotel hosted Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner's wedding reception a year later, and it is the rare 1950s Scottsdale landmark you can still check into.

Hotel Valley Ho, Main Street, Old Town

Bill Jenkins

Mayor of Scottsdale, 1974–1980

Bill Jenkins taught government and economics at Scottsdale High School for nearly three decades, served eight years on the city council, and became mayor in July 1974 when Bud Tims left for the Corporation Commission. Voters kept him in 1976. His years carried the Greenbelt forward, stretched the city east along Shea, opened the Center for the Arts and the first McCormick Ranch resorts, and handed a city of 88,000 to Herb Drinkwater in 1980.

William Jenkins Youth Leadership Award, Scottsdale Leadership

Barry Goldwater

Merchant and U.S. Senator

Before he was a senator, Barry Goldwater was a merchant: he ran Goldwater's, Arizona's own department store, from the 1930s until he went to the U.S. Senate in 1953. His family's store opened Scottsdale Fashion Square as its anchor in 1961, and in 1965 he put his name behind the campaign that kept houses off Camelback Mountain's summit, which is why a public trail reaches the top today.

Camelback Mountain's public summit, a Phoenix park since 1968 · The Fashion Square anchor site his family's store opened in 1961

C.W. 'Bill' Clayton

Mayor of Scottsdale, 1964–1965

Bill Clayton was a three-term councilman whom the council appointed mayor in October 1964, after John Woudenberg resigned. His fourteen months in office covered the launch of the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program, the citizen wish list that produced the Civic Center, the first parks and the airport, and the 1965 special census that counted 54,504 people. He died in office on December 21, 1965.

Bud Tims

Mayor of Scottsdale, 1966–1974

Dr. B.L. 'Bud' Tims was a first-term councilman when the council made him mayor in January 1966, after Mayor Bill Clayton died. He then won the job as a write-in candidate and held it until July 1974. His years delivered much of the STEP wish list, from the airport and Eldorado Park to Bennie Gonzales's open-plan City Hall, and also brought McCormick Ranch, the Labor Day flood of 1970 and the start of the Greenbelt.

George Wiseman & Anne Gale

Founders of Wiseman & Gale Interiors

George Wiseman, a designer from California, and Anne Gale, who came to the Valley from New Mexico, opened a design studio off Marshall Way in 1965. Wiseman & Gale grew into the firm that furnished the Valley's most serious houses, and its founders' taste for commanding scale, luxury fabric, bold color and fine antiques shaped a generation of Arizona designers. The firm still trades from Marshall Way.

Wiseman & Gale Interiors, 4015 N Marshall Way · The antique-anchored Southwest luxury look

John Gardiner

Tennis-Resort Pioneer

John Gardiner had already built the tennis-resort format at his Carmel Valley ranch when, in 1967, he bought the Paradise Valley Racquet Club on Camelback Mountain and made it the genre's desert flagship. For a quarter century his Tennis Ranch drilled executives and senators on up to 18 courts, and its five surviving courts still give lessons at Sanctuary.

The tennis courts and pro program at Sanctuary Camelback Mountain

Bob Sikora

Founder, Bobby McGee's Conglomeration

Bob Sikora was a Phoenix nightclub operator before he was a restaurateur, and in 1971 he brought the two trades together in Scottsdale: Bobby McGee's Conglomeration, a prime-rib supper club with costumed servers, a bathtub salad bar and a disco attached. A year later he opened Mabel Murphy's on Main Street to hold the overflow, and Bobby McGee's grew into a chain of about two dozen restaurants.

Bobby McGee's Conglomeration, about 24 locations at its peak · Mabel Murphy's, Main Street, 1972–2009 · Bobby-Q, Phoenix

Guy Stillman

Railroad Park Co-Founder

Anne McCormick's son Guy Stillman owned something most people don't: a working 15-inch-gauge railroad on his Paradise Valley property. In 1971 he offered it to Scottsdale if the city would build a park around it, and the result, opened in 1975 on land his family donated, is still the best $3 in Arizona.

McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park · The Paradise & Pacific Railroad

Tom Barrett & Russ Jackson

Barrett-Jackson Auction Founders

Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson were Scottsdale collectors who met through a classified ad, staged local car events together in the 1960s and held their first auction in 1971. The sale they started moved to WestWorld in 1989, grew into a nine-day televised spectacle, and anchors the late-January cluster of sales now called Arizona Car Week.

Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale auction, WestWorld · Arizona Car Week

Bob Karatz

Developer of the Scottsdale Hilton

Bob Karatz opened the Scottsdale Hilton at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive in 1973, with a freestanding bell tower that has been a landmark on the road north ever since. A tennis player who made sure the resort had good courts and resident pros, he also built the Shops at Hilton Village beside it, and the Scottsdale Hilton Casitas homes went up next door during the same decade.

Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas and its bell tower · The Shops at Hilton Village

Herb Drinkwater

Mayor of Scottsdale, 1980–1996

Herb Drinkwater sold liquor and cheese through a drive-thru window at Scottsdale Road and Shea, then served sixteen years as mayor, from 1980 to 1996, while the city annexed its way north and landed the Princess, the Mayo Clinic and the TPC. He governed by remembering names, usually with his dog along, and the town still calls him 'Mr. Scottsdale.'

Drinkwater Boulevard, around the Civic Center · Statue with his dog, Scottsdale Civic Center · Drinkwater Peak, McDowell Sonoran Preserve (named 2007–08)

Jane Rau

Preserve Co-Founder

Jane Rau and Karen Bertiger signed the incorporation papers of the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust on January 21, 1991, and the volunteer group went on to persuade a fast-growing city to buy roughly a third of its own land as permanent desert. The result is the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, the largest urban preserve in the country, and a half-mile accessible trail at Brown's Ranch carries her name.

Jane Rau Interpretive Trail, Brown's Ranch Trailhead

Bob and Kax Herberger

Arts Patrons

G. Robert 'Bob' Herberger built a Minnesota department-store chain; his wife Katherine Kierland 'Kax' Herberger was a small-town doctor's daughter with a University of Minnesota degree. They moved to the Valley in 1949, lived in Paradise Valley for half a century, and gave the region its arts infrastructure: the Scottsdale Artists' School she founded in 1983 in the old Loloma School, the Herberger Theater Center they paid for in 1989, and more than a hundred gifts to ASU capped by a $12 million bequest that put her name on the college of fine arts. The Kierland district on Scottsdale's western edge carries her maiden name.

Scottsdale Artists' School, in the old Loloma School on Marshall Way · Herberger Theater Center, Phoenix (1989) · Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, ASU · Kierland, named for Kax's family

Will Bruder

Architect of SMoCA

Will Bruder is a sculptor turned architect who learned to build as Paolo Soleri's apprentice at Cosanti in the late 1960s and ran a desert practice from New River for decades. In Scottsdale he is the architect of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the 1999 conversion of a Civic Center movie theater into five galleries, and of Temple Kol Ami, a 1994 synagogue of stone walls and courtyards.

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art building, Civic Center · Temple Kol Ami, Scottsdale (1994)

Melvin Marcus

ASU Geographer, Namesake of the Marcus Landslide

Melvin Marcus was a physical geographer who studied glaciers from Alaska to New Zealand, taught at Arizona State University from 1974 until his death in 1997 and led a generation of students into the field. He never saw the landslide that bears his name. ASU researchers recognized it in the McDowells in 2002 and named it for him, which is why a flat interpretive trail out of Tom's Thumb Trailhead carries the name of a glacier man.

Marcus Landslide and Marcus Landslide Trail, McDowell Sonoran Preserve · Melvin G. Marcus Memorial Fellowship, Arizona State University · AAG Mel Marcus Fund for Physical Geography

Lyle Anderson

Developer of Desert Highlands and Desert Mountain

Lyle Anderson came to Scottsdale from Seattle in 1975 to buy land and, in 1983, opened Desert Highlands below Pinnacle Peak: a gated community around Jack Nicklaus's first desert course, where buying a lot bought you into the club. The first Skins Game, played there that Thanksgiving, sold the place out on national television. Desert Mountain followed in 1986 on 8,000 acres of the old Carefree Ranch. The model has been copied more than two thousand times, and it is the reason north Scottsdale looks the way it does.

Desert Highlands, at the foot of Pinnacle Peak · Desert Mountain, 8,000 acres and seven Nicklaus courses in the far north · The Skins Game, first played at Desert Highlands in 1983 · Sierra Reserve, off Dynamite Road

Florence Ely Nelson

Civic Leader and Desert Educator

Florence Ely Nelson spent decades in volunteer leadership across Scottsdale institutions, but her signature work was teaching children about the Sonoran Desert, through programs credited with reaching tens of thousands of Valley schoolchildren. She was inducted into the Scottsdale History Hall of Fame in 2000, and a desert park in the far north carries her name.

Florence Ely Nelson Desert Park, Pinnacle Peak Road · Scottsdale History Hall of Fame, 2000

Ivan Makil

President, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community

Ivan Makil led the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community for three consecutive terms, from 1990 to 2002, the years its western edge stopped being farmland facing Scottsdale and became an economy. On his watch the Community negotiated the Loop 101 across its land, opened Talking Stick Golf Club and Casino Arizona, built Chaparral Business Park and brought more than 1,000 acres back under tribal ownership.

Casino Arizona, McKellips Road and the Loop 101 · Talking Stick Golf Club · Chaparral Business Park

Charles Keating

Developer of The Phoenician

Charles Keating, a Cincinnati lawyer turned Phoenix developer, assembled the Jokake Inn, Paradise Inn and neighboring land below Camelback in the mid-1980s and opened The Phoenician in October 1988 at a cost of roughly a quarter-billion dollars. Within months his Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed, regulators took the resort, and Keating became the face of the savings-and-loan crisis. The resort outlived the scandal and is still the city's definitive luxury address.

The Phoenician resort · Jokake Inn bell towers, kept on the Phoenician grounds

Vern Swaback

Architect and Planner

Vern Swaback apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, stayed in Scottsdale, and built a practice on Wright's organic principles. His Citadel, a fortress-like adobe complex of shops, galleries and restaurants that rose out of open desert at Pinnacle Peak and Pima in 1985, announced that the far north was about to become the city's most expensive address.

The Citadel buildings, Pinnacle Peak Road and Pima Road

Alfretta Antone

SRPMIC Vice-President

Alfretta Antone, then Vice-President of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, visited museums on other reservations in the 1980s, decided her Community needed its own, and pushed the Council until it had one. The Huhugam Ki Museum opened in 1987, and it still tells the Akimel O'odham and Piipaash story in the Community's own words, fifteen minutes from Old Town.

Huhugam Ki Museum

Carla

Executive Director, McDowell Sonoran Land Trust

Carla, who goes by one name, grew up in south Scottsdale as a Woodall and joined the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust in its first years. While her archaeologist brother Greg mapped the land at risk, she worked the politics: the sales-tax campaign that let the city buy its mountains. A newspaper called her the 'Marxist of the McDowells.' By 2000 she was the Trust's executive director, and the Preserve she argued for now covers about 30,500 acres.

Fritz Scholder

Luiseño Painter and Printmaker

Fritz Scholder was a Luiseño painter from Minnesota whose 1967 'Indian' series, Native figures with beer cans, flags and pickup-era faces, blew up the romantic Western portrait and made him the most talked-about Native artist in America. After Santa Fe and Manhattan he settled for good in what had been his winter home on Cattle Track Road in Scottsdale, across from the arts compound, and died there in 2005.

Scholder's Indian series, in the Smithsonian, the Heard and the Phoenix Art Museum · Apocrypha, his private press

Sam Kathryn Campana

Mayor of Scottsdale, 1996–2000

Sam Kathryn Campana was elected in 1996 as Scottsdale's first new mayor in sixteen years, succeeding Herb Drinkwater. The voters had just funded the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, and under her the city began closing on the land, acre by acre, while the population passed 200,000.

Peter Kasperski

Founder, Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz World Wine Bar

Peter Kasperski opened Cowboy Ciao on Stetson Drive in 1997, when the street was a back lane behind Fifth Avenue, and kept building on the same block: the hidden Kazimierz World Wine Bar, Nobuo Fukuda's Sea Saw and later Digestif. For about a decade it was the most adventurous dining address in the Valley. Tax debt and bankruptcy closed Cowboy Ciao and Kazimierz on the same day in October 2018.

The Stetson chopped salad, still served as the Original Chop · Stetson Drive's restaurant row, now Southbridge

Mary Manross

Mayor of Scottsdale, 2000–2008

Mary Manross was Scottsdale's mayor from 2000 through 2008, the decade the city went vertical: Loop 101, the Waterfront towers, the Valley Ho's rebirth, SkySong and then the crash. Her years also brought the 2004 vote that added a second preserve tax and kept the McDowell Sonoran Preserve growing through the bust.

Sam Fox

Founder, Fox Restaurant Concepts

Sam Fox arrived from Tucson in 2001 with two restaurants to his name and opened Bloom at Gainey Village, his first in the Valley. North followed at Kierland Commons in 2002, and over two decades his Fox Restaurant Concepts used Scottsdale as a laboratory, launching concepts, keeping the winners and taking several national. The Cheesecake Factory bought the group in 2019.

North Italia's original location, Kierland Commons · Culinary Dropout and Olive & Ivy, Scottsdale Waterfront

Jim Lane

Mayor of Scottsdale, 2009–2021

Jim Lane was Scottsdale's mayor for twelve years, from 2009 to 2021, taking office as the Great Recession froze the city and leaving as the pandemic emptied its resorts. In between came the long rebound, the Museum of the West, OdySea Aquarium, an Airpark tech boom, Old Town's high-rise debates and the 2018 vote that locked the Preserve.

Tomaso Maggiore

Chef and Founder, The Maggiore Group

Tomaso Maggiore came from Sicily by way of New York kitchens and opened Tomaso's on the Camelback Corridor in 1977, the room that taught much of the Valley what formal Italian service looked like. In 2005 he and his son Joey founded The Maggiore Group; its Hash Kitchen opened at Gainey Village in 2015, and in 2017 he opened his own trattoria in north Scottsdale. He died in 2021, and his daughter runs The Italian Daughter in the same space.

Hash Kitchen, Shops at Gainey Village (2015) · The Italian Daughter, 23655 N Scottsdale Rd (2021)

David Ortega

Mayor of Scottsdale, 2021–2025

David Ortega, an architect, became Scottsdale's mayor in 2021 as the city marked seventy years since incorporation and tourism came roaring back. His one term was consumed by growth and water: short-term rentals, the 2023 Rio Verde Foothills cutoff and the Axon headquarters approval. Lisa Borowsky unseated him on November 5, 2024.

Lisa Borowsky

Mayor of Scottsdale

Lisa Borowsky, an attorney and former Scottsdale councilwoman, was elected mayor on November 5, 2024, defeating incumbent David Ortega with about 54% of the vote after campaigning against high-density apartment development and city spending. She was sworn in in January 2025 as the city's third mayor of the decade.