Why they matter
The corner of Main Street and Brown Avenue is the oldest commercial corner in Scottsdale, and its longest tenant is a family that arrived in the last year of the 1920s. Jew Chew Song, born in China, bought Johnny Rose’s white glazed-brick pool hall in 1929 and opened a grocery. His family lived behind the store, added a wing whose roof was meant to look like home, and in the 1950s turned the grocery into Mexican Imports, the red-fronted curio shop that his grandchildren were still running ninety years later. In a town whose merchant row was, by 1920, Anglo, Syrian, Mexican-American and Chinese-American, the Songs are the family whose store is still on the corner.
Where to find their mark today
3933 North Brown Avenue. The 1923 building — Johnny Rose’s stepped parapet in front, the Songs’ hipped roof behind — is on the Scottsdale Historic Register.
Mexican Imports. The shop itself, saints and terra cotta under the red facade.
The corner. Saba’s 1921 building next door and the Rusty Spur’s 1921 bank across the street complete the oldest block in Old Town.
Seeing it for yourself
Walk the block. The 1921 bank that became the Rusty Spur, the Sterling Drug building of the same year that became Saba’s, and the 1923 pool hall the Songs bought are within a hundred feet of each other, and the city’s register reports on all three are online. Rosann Song’s reaction when Saba’s announced it was leaving in 2019 — “I think we are just sad. We will just miss them” — is the sound of two families who had shared a corner since Hoover; Johnny Song used to give young Roger Saba free sodas while he swept. The 1920s chapter puts the merchant row together.
The full story
Johnny Rose was one of the early settlers who turned Winfield Scott’s colony into a town with a Main Street. His frame emporium at Main and Brown sold everything from ice cream to shoe repair; in 1923 he razed it and built a two-story pool hall of white glazed brick, with a basement and a stepped parapet, for “billiard, pool and silent movies.” The Little Red Schoolhouse was a block east, the Farmer’s State Bank across the street. In 1929 — the year the stock market broke, and the year the Scottsdale Bulletin’s merchant row was at its Prohibition-era fullest — Rose sold the building to Jew Chew Song.
Song had come from China in the years when the Chinese Exclusion Act made every such arrival difficult and every family’s legal footing uncertain; Chinese merchants nonetheless ran groceries, laundries and cafes in nearly every Arizona town, and Scottsdale’s was his. He converted the pool hall into a grocery and moved his family into a small house behind it. His son Jack was born in Chandler in 1929 and came to Scottsdale before he could walk; John, called Johnny, followed in 1932. In the 1930s Song tore down the house and built a two-story red-brick apartment wing with a hipped roof. He wanted, the city’s historic-register report records, to flare the eaves into the bell-cast curve of the buildings of his homeland, and no local builder knew how; the plain hipped roof was as close as Scottsdale carpentry could get, “an attempt, on his part, to bring a bit of ‘Chinatown’ to Scottsdale.” Jack Song remembered growing up as one of the only Chinese families in town.
The grocery fed the neighborhood through the Depression and the war and gave way, in the 1950s, to the western tourist trade that the boomtown invented. The family repainted the front bright red, hung a sombrero-and-cigar sign, and filled the old pool hall with Mexican curios — santos, terra cotta, guitars, maracas — as Mexican Imports, one of the first shops on the stage set that the new town was building around itself. It outlasted nearly all of them. On October 3, 2000, the city listed the building as SHR-00-06, one of the few 1920s commercial buildings left in the original townsite; in 2019, when Saba’s announced it was leaving the corner it had shared with the Songs for ninety years, granddaughter Rosann Song was behind the counter. John Song died that year. The building has its own guide, the store’s page is here, and the farm-town era is the town the family arrived in.