Why he matters
In 1921 the cotton market had just collapsed, the Valley’s farm economy was reeling, and a Syrian-born merchant named E.M. Saba chose that moment to open a department store on Scottsdale’s dusty Main Street. It was a bet that the town would still need clothes when the boom was over. It was a good bet. His store anchored the farm town’s first real Main Street, and the family name has traded downtown ever since.
Saba matters because his business is the clearest line between the working town and the themed one. The store sold dry goods to farmers. Then, when the dude ranches and resorts arrived, it sold the same kind of clothes to guests who wanted to look like farmers. By the time Scottsdale called itself “The West’s Most Western Town” in the 1950s, Saba’s had been selling the working West as a wardrobe for a generation.
He is also a reminder that early Scottsdale was not only Anglo farm families. The town’s first Main Street had a Syrian-born merchant at its center, an Italian blacksmith down the block and, by the end of the decade, a Chinese-American storekeeper as well.
Where to find his mark today
Saba’s Western Wear. The Old Town flagship is still in the Western storefront blocks near Main and Brown. Get fitted for boots; that is the family trade.
The 1921 neighbors. The Rusty Spur Saloon pours in the 1921 bank building that opened the same year as Saba’s store, and Cavalliere’s forge is around the corner on Brown.
The Main Street he anchored
Between 1920 and 1925 Scottsdale acquired the toolkit of an actual town, and the 1920s chapter lists it: Saba’s and the Farmer’s State Bank in 1921, the Scottsdale Bulletin in 1922, a new high school, E.O. Brown’s store and Cavalliere’s shop. Of the businesses on that list, only two still trade: Saba’s and the forge. The bank closed in 1933.
A note on the record. Some tellings of the 1920s say the Sabas “were still selling western wear downtown into the 2000s,” which reads as if the store had gone. It has not: the Saba’s Western Wear flagship is still open in Old Town, and that is the version to trust. Walk the Old Town on foot route and you will pass the blocks he helped build.
The full story
The local record on E.M. Saba himself is short. He was a Syrian-born merchant, he picked Scottsdale’s Main Street for a dry-goods department store, and he opened it in 1921. It does not keep his full name, his birth or death year, or when he arrived in Arizona, and it is better to leave them blank than to guess.
What the record does keep is the timing, and the timing is the story. The Pima cotton boom that had turned Scottsdale’s fields white since 1917 blew up in 1920 and 1921, and the whole Valley’s farm economy went with it. In the middle of that, Saba opened a store and the Farmer’s State Bank opened as the town’s first bank. Two institutions were wagering the town would still need credit and clothing. The bank lasted until the Depression. Saba’s is still here.
Through the 1920s a merchant row filled in around him: E.O. Brown’s general store, Cavalliere’s blacksmith shop, Johnny Rose’s pool hall. The store dressed the farmers first. Then, late in the decade and into the 1930s, the dude ranches and winter resorts arrived, and the same store began dressing guests who had come to ride. That pivot, from dry goods to Western wear, is the whole business in one sentence.
The family carried it through every downtown cycle that followed. When Scottsdale branded itself in the 1950s, Saba’s was already a generation deep in the look the town was adopting. Later the name grew into a chain of Western stores across the Valley, while the flagship stayed in the few blocks the founder chose. A century on, Saba’s is a peer of Cavalliere’s forge and the Rusty Spur’s bank building rather than of the gift shops beside it: one of the handful of downtown names that were here before the story they now sell.