What it’s actually like
Most of Old Town’s turquoise is sold by the yard. Waddell Gallery sells it by the pedigree. The room on Main Street west of Scottsdale Road is quiet, well lit and unhurried, with cases that mix vintage Navajo silver from the pawn-and-trading-post era with contemporary work by living masters and a few emerging names the Waddells believe in. Nothing is stacked; everything has a story, and someone in the room can tell it.
The family behind the counter is the reason. Gene Waddell and his son Mike are the current generations of a business that traces itself three generations back to a small family-owned trading post in Gallup, New Mexico, in the 1930s — the railroad town on the edge of the Navajo Nation. They have also owned the Lone Mountain turquoise mine in Nevada since 1979, which means the gallery works with one of the most respected American stones straight from the source rather than through a chain of dealers. Ask about a stone here and you may be talking to the person who owns the hole in the ground it came from.
That depth shows in who borrows from them. Pieces from the gallery have been lent to museum exhibitions including Glittering World: Navajo Jewelry and the Yazzie Family at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York and Totems to Turquoise at the American Museum of Natural History. In a district where every shop claims authenticity, museum loans are the proof that settles the argument.
What to buy
A Lone Mountain turquoise piece. The house stone, from the family mine. Have them walk you through the matrix and the color; it is a short education in why some turquoise costs what it does.
A vintage Navajo bracelet or concho belt. The older silver, often from the trading-post era the family grew up in, is where the gallery’s roots show most clearly.
A contemporary master’s work. The Waddells carry living artists at the top of the field alongside the emerging names they are betting on, which is how a collection gets started rather than just decorated.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Waddell sits on Main Street in the Main Street Arts District, the gallery row west of Scottsdale Road. Street parking on Main is scarce and short-term; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a five-minute walk and the sensible default, and the Old Town on foot note maps the loop from there through the Old Town blocks.
Come in gallery season. January through April is when the winter residents and the serious buyers are in town, the stock is deepest and the Waddells are most likely to have something new from the mine. Thursday night’s ArtWalk runs the length of Main Street and Marshall Way and is the best time to see the room busy; a weekday afternoon is the best time to have a long conversation at the case. Summer keeps daytime hours, so go before the heat.
Set aside real time and, ideally, a budget you have thought about. This is a gallery for buying one right thing, not a place to pick up a gift on the way to dinner.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is a few doors along Main and has fed the gallery crowd since 1987. A block north on First Avenue, Arcadia Farms Cafe has done the farm-fresh lunch since 1990. The Rusty Spur Saloon, in a 1921 bank across Scottsdale Road on the Western block of Main, is the period-appropriate chaser with live country and no cover, and Craft 64 at the far west end of the street does wood-fired pizza and Arizona beer for a casual finish.
How it got here
Gallup, New Mexico, the railroad town on the edge of the Navajo Nation, is where the Waddell family entered the Native jewelry trade in the 1930s with a small family-owned trading post, and three generations later they are still in it. A trading-post upbringing teaches what old silver looks like and what it is worth; that education is the foundation of everything in the Main Street cases.
The turning point was 1979, when the family acquired the Lone Mountain turquoise mine in Nevada. Owning a mine changed the family’s position from buyer to source and gave the gallery access to top stones; Lone Mountain turquoise became its signature and the reason serious collectors seek it out.
Scottsdale’s Main Street was, by the 1980s and 1990s, shifting from Western curios to galleries, and a family dealer with a mine and a trading-post pedigree fit the new district. Sources do not pin down the year the Waddells opened on Main Street, so this page does not either; what is clear is that the business evolved from trading post to gallery and settled among the art rooms west of Scottsdale Road.
The museum loans came as the collection deepened. When the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian mounted Glittering World, its survey of Navajo jewelry through the Yazzie family, and when the American Museum of Natural History staged Totems to Turquoise, pieces from Waddell Gallery went to New York for the shows. That is the tier the gallery operates at, and it is the same tier as Faust Gallery and Territorial Indian Arts further along the street — the collector’s Main Street, as opposed to the souvenir one. Gene and Mike Waddell run it today as the family has run the trade for ninety years: from the ground up.