Why she matters
Scottsdale’s resort industry did not start with a hotel company or a financier. It started with Sylvia Evans pouring tea. In 1926, with her friend Lucy Cuthbert, she began hosting tea parties in the adobe house her husband had just built below Camelback Mountain. A young Hopi visitor called the house Jokake, “mud house.” By 1927 it was a tearoom, by 1928 the guests were staying the night, and the Jokake Inn was in business.
She ran it for a quarter century. The inn grew into one of the defining winter resorts of the Camelback corridor, with adobe casitas, the American Plan, riding in the open desert and a guest register of industrial fortunes, artists and titled Europeans. The resort’s own history makes the point directly: Sylvia and Lucy Cuthbert built and ran the business at a time when the brochures, and later the histories, gave the credit to others.
Where to find her mark today
The bell towers. The inn’s 1936 bell tower building, where afternoon tea was served, stands on the lawn of The Phoenician, restored in 2019.
The tearoom story. The Jokake Inn Tea Room page tells the dining side of what she built, from the first tea parties to the guest book.
Who gets the credit
Scottsdale’s general histories, including the 1926 page, say the painter Jessie Benton Evans opened the Jokake Inn, or built it with her son. The inn’s own histories are more specific. Jessie supplied the land. Her son, Robert T. Evans, built and designed the adobe. Sylvia and Lucy Cuthbert opened the tearoom and ran the house. All of that can be true at once. But the day-to-day inn was Sylvia’s, from the first pot of tea to the sale.
It fits a pattern in early Scottsdale hospitality, where schoolmistresses, inn proprietors and ranch hostesses did much of the work and the histories named colonels and magnates. The Jokake is one of the clearest cases on the record.
The full story
Sylvia Byrnes Evans married into an artistic family. Her mother-in-law, Jessie Benton Evans, was an Italian-trained landscape painter with an estate at the foot of Camelback Mountain, and her husband, Robert, built a rambling adobe house on twelve acres of it. In 1926 Sylvia and Lucy Cuthbert began hosting tea there for the desert-touring trade. In 1927 the tea parties became a proper tearoom. By 1928 the guests were refusing to leave, and the Jokake became an inn.
Under her it grew into winter Scottsdale’s defining address. It opened November through April on the American Plan, rooms and all meals. Guests rode into the untracked desert, and the Jokake School for Girls on the campus let families spend the whole season while their daughters kept up with lessons. In 1936 the bell tower building went up as the setting for afternoon tea, and its towers became Scottsdale’s postcard image. The guest book collected Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner, Frank Lloyd Wright and members of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt families, and a 1949 Chicago Tribune profile sold the place as a complete destination.
In the 1940s she and Robert divorced, and she kept running the inn. In the early 1950s she sold it to Chicago hotelier Charles Alberding, who ran it as a well-loved relic of an older style into the late 1970s. The record does not say what she did afterward, or give her birth and death years.
The ending came after her. In the 1980s Charles Keating assembled the Jokake land for The Phoenician, which opened in 1988, and nearly everything was demolished except the bell towers. They are still there, and they are the best monument Scottsdale has to the idea she tested first: that people would pay to spend the winter in the desert if someone made them welcome in it.