Why he matters
Most towns have a founding family and a fun family. In Scottsdale the Cavallieres managed to be both, and Doc is the reason. His father gave the town its oldest business, a blacksmith shop that has been on Brown Avenue since 1920. Doc kept that forge burning for four decades, helped write the new town’s first ordinances, and then drove north into empty desert and built two of the most beloved places Scottsdale ever had.
That is an unusual spread for one life: a working trade in the old farm-town core, a seat at the table when Scottsdale became a government in 1951, and a second career as the host of the far-north cowboy night out. He connects the horse-and-wagon town his father served to the resort city that eventually paved over his steakhouse.
Where to find his mark today
Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop. The family forge on Brown Avenue is still working, still family-run and still the one building in Old Town whose Western credentials are real. Doc ran it from 1945 into the late 1980s.
George “Doc” Cavalliere Park. The 34-acre park on Alma School Parkway was completed in February 2012, built from native stone and weathered steel, and became Arizona’s first SITES-certified landscape.
The lost roadhouses. Reata Pass Steakhouse and Greasewood Flat are gone, but their guides tell the story, and the land they stood on is a few minutes from his park.
The far-north night he invented
For locals, Doc’s Scottsdale was a drive. You went north until the city ran out, then kept going until the porch lights of Reata Pass appeared out of real darkness. Steak came off the mesquite onto a tin plate, and afterward you wandered down to the Flat for a burger, a cold beer and a seat by a fire barrel. With Pinnacle Peak Patio up the road, the two Cavalliere places made up the cowboy steakhouse belt that sold the Old West to tourists long after the real one had gone.
To see what is left, start at the park and look around. The Pinnacle Peak and Troon area that grew up around his 47 acres is now gated golf and custom homes, and Pinnacle Peak Park is the nearby climb if you want the view he had.
The full story
George “Doc” Cavalliere grew up around the anvil. His father, George Cavalliere, 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, opened his shop in 1910 and built the adobe on Brown Avenue in 1920. Doc was the second generation, and the war sent him a long way from Brown Avenue: in World War II he repaired B-24 Liberator bombers in North Africa and at Bari, Italy.
He came home in 1945 and took over the forge. The town he returned to was changing fast, and by the 1950s its business owners were ready to govern themselves. Scottsdale incorporated in 1951 with Malcolm White as its first mayor (more on White), and Doc sat on the first Town Council, serving through 1959. The family that had shod the town’s horses was now helping write its codes.
In 1955 Doc bought the 47-acre Reata Pass property, the site of an 1882 stagecoach stop on the Phoenix-to-Fort McDowell route, far beyond anything Scottsdale then counted as town. The restaurant’s history puts the purchase in 1955 with steaks on the grill “by the late 1950s”; the 1958 chapter of the city’s history and the park’s guide date the steakhouse to 1958. Either way, Doc and his wife Marge ran it for decades as a family outpost.
In 1975, as a retirement project, he opened Greasewood Flat around an 1880s bunkhouse from the old stagecoach stop, a saloon for friends and family that became the most democratic bar in the Valley: bikers, ranch hands, snowbirds and executives at the same picnic tables. The forge, meanwhile, carried on downtown, and Doc stayed at it into the late 1980s.
He died in 2009. The land that had been empty desert in 1955 was now among the most valuable in Arizona, and estate taxes did what no competitor could: Reata Pass closed in 2012 and sold to Taylor Morrison in 2013, and Greasewood Flat poured its last beer on March 31, 2015. The city had already put his name on something permanent. George “Doc” Cavalliere Park was completed in February 2012, the month north Scottsdale celebrated the Arizona Centennial there. His father’s story is at George Cavalliere, and the decade Doc helped govern is in the boomtown era.