What it’s actually like
There is nothing to visit, and there has not been since 1950. The Arizona Craft Center existed for three years, burned, and left no building — but it left a town. Almost everything that makes downtown Scottsdale a place where art is made and sold rather than merely displayed traces back to a cooperative of craftspeople who worked together under one roof in the late 1940s and then, when the roof burned, refused to leave.
The idea was simple and, for a farm town of a few hundred people, audacious: gather the silversmiths, leather workers, potters, weavers and painters who had been drifting into the Valley since the war, give them shared workshop space with a showroom in front, and let visitors watch the craft being made before they bought it. It opened in 1947, the same year the Village Patio shops opened nearby and the Chamber of Commerce incorporated — the year the 1940s history marks as the start of the postwar boom. For three seasons it was the town’s calling card.
Then it burned. The artisans scattered into whatever cheap storefronts downtown offered, along Fifth Avenue and Main Street, and in 1955 the newly incorporated town built Craftsman Court for them. The co-op’s idea — makers first, shoppers second — is the DNA of the whole district.
What it was like inside
A working shop with the public let in. Benches and looms and a kiln in the back; cases and shelves in front; the smell of leather, solder and clay; and the craftspeople themselves at work in plain view, which was the attraction. What sold was the Southwest as an object: silver and turquoise, tooled leather, hand-thrown pots, woven blankets, paintings of the desert the visitors had driven through to get there. The pitch that Scottsdale would spend seventy years perfecting — the West’s Most Western Town, the art town in the desert — was tried out first across these counters.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The Craft Center stood in the small downtown of a Scottsdale that had not yet incorporated, when the whole commercial district was a few blocks around Brown Avenue and Main Street. Accounts differ on the exact lot, and nothing of the building survived the fire; this page follows the site’s history pages rather than guessing at a street address.
What is there now is the downtown the fire created. The Old Town western storefronts on Brown and Main, the jewelry and gallery row on Fifth Avenue, the 1955 lanes of Craftsman Court, the galleries of Marshall Way — every one of them is a descendant.
The successors worth a visit
The stores that carry the co-op’s idea forward are the ones where the maker is still in the building. Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop on Brown Avenue has been forging since 1910 and predates the Craft Center by a generation. Gilbert Ortega Galleries and Bischoff’s Shades of the West are the Native-silver and Southwestern-goods trade the co-op’s silversmiths started. And Cattle Track, the artists’ compound on the canal founded a decade before the Craft Center, is the last place in the city where the original arrangement — shared studios, work in back, sales in front — still runs every day.
How it got here
Scottsdale in 1946 was a farm town with a general store, a few hundred residents and a cotton economy that the war had just finished remaking. What it also had, thanks to the pilot-training fields and the POW camp and the hospital, was a stream of people who had seen the desert during the war and come back to it — and among the veterans and the retirees were artists. The ranches-and-war era ended with the town discovering that its most valuable crop might be the people who made things by hand.
The Craft Center was the institution that organized them. Established in 1947, it was a cooperative in the literal sense: craftspeople sharing space, tools and a showroom, splitting the costs a single silversmith or potter could never carry alone. It gave the town a destination — Phoenix day-trippers and winter visitors came to watch the work — and it gave the makers a market. Alongside it the Village Patio shops opened, the Chamber of Commerce incorporated, and a place with no particular reason to exist began marketing one.
The fire of 1950 should have ended the story. It did the opposite. The artisans, with no building and no co-op, took the cheapest storefronts they could find along Fifth Avenue and Main Street, and a town that was about to incorporate and choose its identity found that it already had one: a downtown full of people making Southwestern craft in their front windows. Incorporation came in 1951, the western-resort-village pitch followed, and in 1955 Craftsman Court was built off Fifth as the permanent home the co-op’s members had lost.
Every decade since has built on the same foundation — the galleries of the 1970s, the Native-jewelry trade, the ArtWalk, the museum. The Arizona Craft Center lasted three years and is remembered by almost no one who shops downtown. It is, nonetheless, the reason they are shopping there.