What it’s actually like
The northeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Pinnacle Peak Road is a Safeway. It is a well-kept, well-landscaped, entirely ordinary North Scottsdale shopping center called The Pinnacle, serving the golf communities that spread around it in the 1980s and 1990s, and there is nothing on it to suggest that for two decades it was the strangest retail address in the Valley. In 1951 a man named Paul Voelker bought these 160 acres of open desert, miles beyond the edge of a town that had only just incorporated, changed his name to Don Pablo, claimed to be part Chippewa and part Flathead, and opened the House of Relics: a curio and relic shop on a corner where, in the 1950s, almost nobody came.
That was the point. The Pinnacle Peak road in that decade was a day trip out of Scottsdale, a drive north through empty desert to look at the peak and, after 1957, to eat a steak at Pinnacle Peak Patio, which would outlast the relic shop by half a century. A roadside shop selling relics and curios to that traffic, run by a self-invented desert character, was the kind of business the north country produced, and Don Pablo’s was the most colorful example of it. What exactly he sold, and where he got it, the record does not say; the relic trade of the era was long on story and short on provenance, and it is safe to assume the stories were the better half of the stock.
The family detail is the one that stops people. Voelker’s brother John wrote the bestseller ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ under the pen name Robert Traver. Two brothers, one on the bestseller lists, one in the desert selling relics under a new name. The shop belongs to the 1950s and 1960s; after that the record goes quiet, and the corner waited two more decades for the suburbs.
What it sold
Curios and relics, in the roadside sense of both words: Native and Western objects of varying age and origin, desert oddities, the kind of artifacts and souvenirs that a 1950s visitor to Arizona expected to find at a trading post on an empty road. Don Pablo’s claimed heritage was part of the pitch. Whether the relics were what he said they were is not something anyone can check now, which is a fair description of the whole genre.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The northeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Pinnacle Peak Road, now The Pinnacle shopping center anchored by a Safeway, in the Pinnacle Peak and Troon area of North Scottsdale. The 160 acres Voelker bought would cover the center and a good deal of the neighborhood behind it; no building, marker or trace of the House of Relics remains. Parking is the supermarket lot, and the peak itself is a few minutes north and east.
The corner sits at the junction of the old road out to the peak and the modern arterial, and the sites of Don Pablo’s roadside contemporaries are all a short drive east on Pinnacle Peak Road, where the desert still looks something like it did.
The successors worth a visit
The roadhouses at the end of the road were the world the House of Relics served, and they outlasted it by decades before going the same way. Pinnacle Peak Patio, the cowboy steakhouse that opened in 1957 and made the drive worth taking, closed in 2015; Reata Pass Steakhouse, the stagecoach-stop steakhouse next to it, ran from 1958 to 2012; and Greasewood Flat, the burger-and-beer bunkhouse of 1975 to 2015, is where the roadside spirit lasted longest. Pinnacle Peak Park is the view Don Pablo’s customers drove out for, still there and now with a trail, and it is the one stop that has not closed. For the retail that later replaced the relic trade, The Citadel on Pinnacle Peak Road and El Pedregal at Carefree Highway were the north country’s 1980s answer to a curio shop, Southwestern design and galleries in adobe-styled centers, and both are lost now too.
How it got here
In 1951 Scottsdale was a town of a couple of thousand people that had just voted to incorporate, and its northern edge was a long way south of Pinnacle Peak. The desert around the peak was ranch country and open range, crossed by a road that led to the mountain and not much else, and land there was cheap enough that a man could buy a quarter section, 160 acres, without being rich. Paul Voelker did, on the northeast corner of what would one day be Pinnacle Peak and Scottsdale Roads.
He then did something the desert has always encouraged: he became someone else. As Don Pablo, claiming Chippewa and Flathead ancestry, he opened the House of Relics on his land and sold curios and relics to whoever drove by. The 1950s were the decade Scottsdale sold itself as the West’s Most Western Town, and the roadside trade in Western and Native objects, real, reconstructed and invented, flourished all over Arizona. A shop on the road to the peak, run by a character with a story, fit the market exactly. When Pinnacle Peak Patio opened a few miles east in 1957 and made the drive a destination, the traffic past Don Pablo’s door can only have improved.
Back in Michigan, Voelker’s brother John was living a different life. A lawyer and later a state supreme court justice, he wrote under the name Robert Traver, and in 1958 ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ became a bestseller and, the next year, a celebrated film. The Voelker brothers are one of those pairings that history produces without explanation: the same family, one name on the spine of a famous book, another on a sign at a relic shop in the desert.
The House of Relics ran through the 1960s, and then the record thins out. The corner stayed roadside desert for another two decades while the town crept north, and it was the 1980s and 1990s, the era of Troon and the golf communities, that finally reached Pinnacle Peak Road and turned Voelker’s 160 acres into the kind of land that gets a supermarket. The Pinnacle shopping center, anchored by a Safeway, occupies the corner now. Nobody buying groceries there knows that a man who called himself Don Pablo once sold relics on the spot, which is probably how he would have wanted it, and certainly how the relic trade always worked.