What was the Kiami Lodge?
In 1937 a nurse from Chicago built a guest lodge in a ten-acre citrus grove on Scottsdale Road, north of what was still a small farm town. That’s nearly all the City of Scottsdale’s 2004 historic context on tourism says about the Kiami Lodge, but it’s revealing. The lodge was a winter guest home, and in summer it was an “air cooled home for convalescents.” Its architecture was “described as Indian and this motif was also used in the decorations and furniture.”
That makes the Kiami two kinds of Scottsdale business at once. In winter it was a resort, like the Jokake Inn and the new Camelback Inn. In summer it served the town’s oldest trade, the health seekers who had come for the air since the Graves Ranch of 1910, now with air conditioning.
The Scottsdale Public Library’s photographs of the lodge, published on the Arizona Memory Project, add the rest: adobe casitas, a main lodge and a swimming pool, room for about thirty guests, meals included, and a winter season. The lodge also hired a Phoenix Indian School student named Charles Loloma to paint murals on its buildings. Loloma went on to become one of the great Hopi jewelers. The Kiami operated into the 1960s and then disappears from the record.
The lodge and the town around it
The location. The city places it near Scottsdale and Chaparral roads. The library’s records put it on the west side of Scottsdale Road between Jackrabbit and Chaparral. In 1937 that was citrus and desert well north of the town, on the road to the guest ranches. The grove is long gone under the houses and resorts of the Camelback corridor.
Who ran it. The city doesn’t name the nurse who built it. A Scottsdale Public Library photo record names Muriel Oxenhandler as its first manager. We haven’t found her anywhere else, or learned whether she was the nurse.
The name. A library record summarizing an early brochure says guests stayed in detached guest houses or “hogans” of Indian adobe construction, and that the name Kiami comes from them. Like the Indian motif in the furniture, it was part of the Southwest image the resorts were selling in the 1930s.
The murals. Charles Loloma was a Hopi student at the Phoenix Indian School when the lodge hired him. He went on to work on mural reproductions for the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, served in the Army, studied ceramics, and in the 1950s ran a shop with his wife Otellie in Scottsdale’s Kiva Craft Center before his jewelry made him famous. A guest lodge on Scottsdale Road appears to have been one of his first commissions. Whether anything of his work there survived the building’s demolition is not recorded.
Where it fits. Our 1930s chapter lists the Kiami with the Jokake, the Camelback Inn and the Graves Guest Ranch among the guest houses that carried Scottsdale through the Depression. It was the smallest of them and the one most tied to health seekers.
The sources, and the gaps
What’s solid. The City of Scottsdale’s Historic Context for Scottsdale’s Development as an Arts Colony & Tourist Destination (Liz Wilson and Debbie Abele, revised 2004) gives the 1937 date, the Chicago nurse, the ten-acre citrus grove near Scottsdale and Chaparral, the winter-and-summer use and the Indian motif.
What’s less solid. Two Scottsdale Public Library photograph records on the Arizona Memory Project (“Kiami Lodge aerial view”) supply the location between Jackrabbit and Chaparral, the thirty guests, the casitas and pool, the Loloma murals, the 1960s and the name of a first manager. The Arizona Memory Project blocks automated access, so we’ve worked from consistent summaries of those records rather than the pages themselves. Treat the details only they supply as provisional until someone checks them in a browser.
What’s missing.
- The nurse’s name.
- A street address, the closing year, the last owners and what replaced the lodge.
- The murals: what Loloma painted, when, and whether any survive.
- Any newspaper record. The Arizona Republic should have the lodge’s advertisements and society notices from 1937 into the 1960s.
The lodge isn’t on the Scottsdale Historic Register, the Historical Society’s timeline or Joan Fudala’s list of lost places.
Where the answers are. The Scottsdale Heritage Connection at the Civic Center Library, which holds the original photographs; the Arizona Republic archive (search “Kiami”); Maricopa County deed records for the west side of Scottsdale Road between Jackrabbit and Chaparral; and Loloma’s biographers, starting with Martha Hopkins Struever’s Loloma: Beauty Is His Name.
Why it matters
Most of what this site records about 1930s Scottsdale is about the big names: the Jokake, the Camelback Inn, Taliesin. The Kiami is a reminder that the winter trade was also made of small places like this one, a nurse’s lodge in an orange grove taking thirty guests. It also hired a teenage Hopi painter, who became a famous jeweler and later opened a shop a few miles south.