Why he matters
Scottsdale likes to date its resort economy to the 1950s, to the Valley Ho and the Safari and the neon along Scottsdale Road. The idea is older, and it belongs to Jack Stewart. In December 1936, with the country deep in the Depression and the desert north of Camelback Mountain still empty, he opened a pueblo-style inn with about seventy rooms and a slogan he meant as a promise: Where Time Stands Still.
What Stewart sold was the Southwest itself: the mountain, the light, the dry winter. The Arizona Biltmore sold golf and ballrooms. Stewart sold patios. His guests slept in low adobe casitas scattered across the desert, each with its own view, and they came back every winter. That is the formula every Scottsdale-area resort has used since, from the Phoenician’s casita wings to the Boulders.
The Inn itself sits in what became Paradise Valley, not Scottsdale. The lesson landed in Scottsdale anyway. A full-service resort on cheap desert could pay in winter, and a farm town with more desert than it knew what to do with could build an economy on that fact.
Where to find his mark today
JW Marriott Camelback Inn. The hotel he opened is still open, still in casitas, still using his slogan, with 453 rooms and nearly ninety seasons behind it.
The Lincoln Drive corridor. The strip of resorts and dinner houses that grew up around the Inn is covered in the Camelback Corridor guide. Most of the Inn’s neighbors have closed, burned or been rebuilt. It has not.
The town he opened next to
In 1936 Scottsdale was an unincorporated farm town of a few thousand people, three years past a bank failure, getting by on dude ranches, health seekers and the artists the Depression had oddly delivered. Its one real resort was the Jokake Inn, a painter’s tearoom that had grown casita by casita below the mountain. The December 15, 1936 opening added a second, far more ambitious idea, and the rest of the 1930s belonged to guest ranches and winter visitors.
The payoff came after the war. When Malcolm White and the Chamber of Commerce started selling “The West’s Most Western Town” in the late 1940s, the customers they had in mind were the ones Stewart had already taught to cross the country. Scottsdale’s incorporation in 1951 put a town government behind that pitch.
The full story
The site’s own accounts describe Jack Stewart two ways: a “young hotelier” on the resort page, and a sportswriter and publicist from Fargo, North Dakota on the page for the opening day. The second is the more specific and better-supported version, and it explains a lot. Stewart was a promoter before he was an innkeeper, and the Camelback Inn was, from the start, a very good piece of promotion.
He needed money, and he found it in John C. Lincoln, the Cleveland industrialist who had come to the Valley for his wife’s health and stayed to invest in it. (The resort page calls Lincoln a Phoenix electrical magnate. He was both an Ohio manufacturer and a Valley investor, depending on which decade you ask about.) Together they built on the saddle of desert between Camelback and Mummy mountains, several miles northwest of the Scottsdale townsite, and on December 15, 1936, the Camelback Inn opened with about seventy rooms.
It worked immediately. Industrialists, politicians and film people booked the winter; the American Plan dining room became where the Valley’s winter society met; and casitas kept multiplying across the desert through the 1940s and 1950s. Building a luxury resort on roadless desert in 1936 looked reckless. It turned out to be timing: the American rich were trading steamships to Europe for winters in the Southwest, and Stewart was waiting for them.
Stewart ran the place for three decades. In 1967 the Marriott family bought it, their first resort, and the company learned the leisure business there. The Inn later became a flagship of the JW Marriott brand. The expansions came, including convention space, a spa and golf, but the casita fabric and the 1936 scale of hospitality survived.
The site’s records say nothing about Stewart’s life before Fargo or after the sale, and this page won’t guess. What they do record is enough. One man with a slogan and a financier opened a hotel that has never closed, and taught a farm town down the road what it could sell.