What it’s actually like
The northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street has been the center of commercial Scottsdale for as long as there has been a Scottsdale, and for the twenty-four years between the Depression and the space age it was a grocery store with a man’s first name on it. Earl’s Market was the store Earl Shipp bought in 1935 from the owner of Byer’s General Store, where he had clerked as a teenager, and it fed the town from a two-story building that stood out on a downtown of one-story storefronts. If you shopped in Scottsdale before 1959, you shopped at Earl’s.
Shipp was the kind of merchant small towns used to produce. He had graduated from Scottsdale High in 1928 wanting to go into construction, and the Depression stalled that plan; the grocery was the fallback that became a life. But the builder in him never left. Over the following decades he put up a bank, three privately owned post offices, an appliance store and a drugstore downtown, rode with the Scottsdale Sheriff’s Posse, and by 1958 had a big indexed landmark map on display at the store so that visitors to the West’s Most Western Town could find what they were looking for. Locals, by most accounts, came to call the place Earl’s Shoppers Market.
In 1959 the store closed and Woolworth’s opened on the site that November, the national chain replacing the local grocer in the way that was happening on main corners across America. The Western-style building on the corner is now the Legacy Gallery, and nothing on it says Earl’s. The corner does.
What it sold
Groceries for a farm town: staples, produce from the fields that still surrounded downtown, meat, dry goods and the household necessities a general store had always carried, sold on account to families the owner knew by name. As Scottsdale turned into a resort town in the 1950s the store served the winter visitors too, and the indexed map made it something more than a grocery, a place that told the town’s newcomers where everything was.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street, at the eastern end of the Main Street Arts District and the busiest crossing in Old Town. The two-story Earl’s building did not survive; Woolworth’s built on the site in 1959, and that Western-style building passed to the Wigwam shop in 1965 and to the Legacy Gallery in the early 1990s. Park at the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and walk the two blocks; the Old Town on foot note covers the crossing, and the Old Town guide explains the district it anchors.
The corner’s contemporaries are still around it. Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop on Brown Avenue, the oldest surviving business in town, was forging while Shipp was clerking. The Rusty Spur Saloon up Main Street occupies the 1921 bank building. Los Olivos on Second Street has fed downtown since 1947, and the Sugar Bowl, a block north, opened its pink doors in 1958, the year the map went up in Earl’s window.
The successors worth a visit
There is no grocery on the corner and has not been for sixty-five years; the downtown grocer’s role passed to the supermarkets that arrived with the 1960s, and the corner’s later lives, Woolworth’s five-and-dime and the Legacy Gallery’s Western art, tell the town’s story better than any successor could. For the Saturday market feel, the Old Town Farmers Market brings produce back downtown each week in season. For the history, the corner is the place to start a walk through the 1930s town, and the J.L. Davis general store site at Brown and Main, a block east, is where the story begins.
How it got here
Scottsdale in the 1920s was a farm village on the Arizona Canal with a main corner at Scottsdale Road and Main Street and a general store on it. Byer’s General Store was where a teenage Earl Shipp learned the trade, stocking shelves and making deliveries for a town of a few hundred people whose economy was farming and a handful of winter guests. He graduated from Scottsdale High in 1928 intending to build things, and then the Depression arrived and there was nothing to build.
In 1935 the owner of Byer’s offered him the stock. Shipp bought the store, renamed it Earl’s Market and put up a two-story building that stood out in a downtown where nothing else had a second floor. The 1930s were hard years in the Salt River Valley, but a grocery on the town’s main corner was as safe a business as existed, and Earl’s carried Scottsdale through the Depression and the 1940s, when the airfields and the war brought the first wave of newcomers who would remake the place.
The remaking happened in the 1950s, and Shipp was part of it on both sides of the counter. Scottsdale incorporated in 1951, adopted the Western theme that gave downtown its false fronts, and grew from a couple of thousand people to ten thousand by the end of the decade. Shipp, the frustrated builder, built: a bank, three privately owned post offices, an appliance store and a drugstore, all downtown, while riding with the Sheriff’s Posse that was the town’s civic club on horseback. By 1958 the store displayed a big indexed landmark map, and locals had taken to calling it Earl’s Shoppers Market. The grocery had become the town’s information desk.
It closed in 1959, the year the national chains arrived. F.W. Woolworth opened on the site on November 5, one of the first national stores in Scottsdale, and the local grocer’s corner became the five-and-dime’s, then the Wigwam’s, then in the early 1990s the Legacy Gallery’s. Shipp’s other buildings scattered through downtown are harder to trace. The corner, and the map’s idea that a visitor should be able to find their way around Scottsdale from its main crossing, are the parts of Earl’s Market that lasted.