Why he matters
Tom Darlington had a hand in two of the most lasting ideas in north Valley real estate. The first was in downtown Scottsdale, where in 1946 he opened a center for working craftspeople at the corner of Main Street and Brown Avenue. It lasted four seasons, burned, and left behind the artisans who turned Fifth Avenue and Main Street into an arts district.
The second was Carefree. With his partner K.T. Palmer, he bought a goat farm in the boulder country north of Scottsdale in 1955 and sold it as a new kind of desert town, one with architectural rules to keep houses off the mountainsides and street names that made the pitch for them: Easy Street, Ho Hum Road, Lazy Lane. The resorts that later came to Carefree, the Carefree Resort in the 1960s and The Boulders in 1985, were selling the same quiet he had put on the street signs.
Where to find his mark today
The Arizona Craft Center. The guide to the lost co-op and the downtown it scattered into, in Old Town.
The Boulders. The resort’s address is on Tom Darlington Drive.
CIVANA. The wellness resort on the campus of the old Carefree Resort, the town’s first flagship.
One center, two founding dates
The site’s history pages, including the 1947 year page, date the Arizona Craft Center to 1947 and describe it as a cooperative; they do not name a founder. Joan Fudala, Scottsdale’s longtime local historian, writes that Darlington opened the Arizona Craftsmen Center in February 1946 on the southwest corner of Main Street and Brown Avenue, and that Eleanor Roosevelt visited in 1946 and 1947 and wrote about it in her My Day column. Both accounts agree that fire ended it in 1950 and that its artisans, Lloyd Kiva New among them, rebuilt along Fifth Avenue. This page follows Fudala on the founder and the 1946 date.
The full story
Tom Darlington was born in Idaho and graduated from Stanford. Before the war he worked in publicity. During it he came to Phoenix to manage a plant that AiResearch, the aircraft-parts maker, had opened at Sky Harbor Airport, and when the plant shut down at the end of the war he stayed. He was, by his friends’ accounts, outgoing and a good negotiator, and he went into Valley real estate and civic life, including serving as president of the Paradise Valley Improvement Association.
Scottsdale in the late 1940s was a farm town looking for something to sell, and Darlington’s craftsmen center gave it one: silversmiths, leather workers, painters and potters making things in view of the customers. The center drew crowds, and the town’s arts trade grew out of it even after the 1950 fire.
Around 1946, at a Kiwanis luncheon at the Adams Hotel in Phoenix, he met K.T. Palmer, a Mississippi-born lawyer who had homesteaded near Pinnacle Peak and become a broker of desert land. They talked about building an ideal Arizona town. In 1955 they did it: an office in Cave Creek, a 400-acre goat farm bought for about $44,000, and more than 2,000 acres around it. Darlington was president of the Carefree Development company. Friends at a dinner party came up with the street names, and the partners wrote rules to keep building off the hillsides and in keeping with the desert. Houses started going up in 1958, and the sundial that became the town’s emblem was built in 1959. Carefree lots cost more than comparable land in Phoenix or Scottsdale, and they sold anyway, one of the boomtown era’s early bets on scenery as a luxury.
Darlington died suddenly in 1969, while dining with friends in Carefree. The record does not give his birth year. Carefree incorporated in 1984, partly to avoid annexation by Scottsdale, and The Boulders opened on Tom Darlington Drive a year later.