Why he matters
In the mid-1950s Scottsdale was busy dressing itself as the West’s Most Western Town. Al Beadle gave it the opposite. His Safari Hotel, opened on Scottsdale Road in November 1956, was a crisp modernist resort of flat roofs, glass and pool light, and with the Valley Ho down the road it proved the cowboy town could sell sleek.
Beadle was also an unlikely architect. He never studied architecture; he learned to build in the Navy, arrived in Phoenix as a contractor, and taught himself a strict, Mies-influenced modernism that locals came to call the “Beadle box.” Over four decades he designed houses, apartments, offices and towers across the Valley, and he is now counted among the pioneers of desert modernism.
Where to find his mark today
The Safari Hotel. Gone since 1999, but the guide covers the building, its lounges and the fight its demolition started.
The French Quarter. The Safari’s celebrated restaurant, added in an expansion around 1960.
Old Town. The Day-O Garden Apartments on East Second Street, from 1958, are a surviving Beadle building near 68th Street, at the district’s western edge.
The other half of 1956
Scottsdale’s modern turn came in a single year. The Safari opened in November 1956 and the Hotel Valley Ho, drawn by Edward L. Varney, followed in December. Both sold scene rather than solitude to a new generation of drive-in tourists, and both were a short drive from Main Street’s hitching posts. The difference is what happened next: the Safari came down in 1999, and the preservationists its loss stirred up saved the Valley Ho two years later. The year is at 1956, and the town that commissioned both is in the 1950s chapter.
The full story
Alfred Newman Beadle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1927, the son of a contractor. As a teenager in World War II he joined the Navy’s construction battalions, the Seabees, and built hospitals, barracks and piers in the South Pacific. After the war he built houses in Minnesota, and in 1951 he moved to Phoenix as a licensed building contractor.
He designed and built his own work, and that caught up with him: he was charged with practicing architecture without a license. Rather than take a grandfathered license, he earned the apprentice hours to sit the exam by working with Alan A. Dailey, and from 1956 to 1967 he was partner-in-charge at Dailey Associates. His first Scottsdale-area houses went up in Paradise Valley in the early 1950s.
In March 1956 ground broke on the Safari Hotel at Scottsdale Road and Highland for developer Ernie Uhlmann, and it opened that November, a two-story modernist resort that grew through expansions in 1957 and 1959. Beadle also designed a house for the Uhlmann family, and in 1958 the Day-O Garden Apartments on East Second Street. His national reputation came from Phoenix in the early 1960s: the Triad, Case Study Apartments No. 1 for Arts & Architecture magazine, and Executive Towers, for a time the tallest building in Phoenix.
He opened his own firm in 1967 and kept working through the resort decades, with Scottsdale houses in the 1970s and 1980s. Arizona State University mounted an exhibit of his work in 1993, the year he published Constructions, a book of his buildings. He died in 1998, the year the Safari closed; it was demolished in 1999 for a project that never came. His career spans the boomtown era, and its most visible Scottsdale building became the preservation movement’s cautionary tale.