What it’s actually like
Stand on the northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street and look at the Western-style building that houses the Legacy Gallery. For six years, from November 5, 1959 until 1965, that building was an F.W. Woolworth, and the arrival of a five-and-dime on the town’s main corner was a bigger deal than it sounds. Scottsdale in 1959 was a town that had spent the decade selling itself as the West’s Most Western, and its downtown was a collection of locally owned stores and a lot of false fronts. Woolworth’s was one of the first national chain stores in town. It meant the place had been noticed.
The store replaced Earl’s Market, the grocery Earl Shipp had run on the corner since 1935 and one of the anchors of the farm-town downtown, so the succession itself tells the story of the decade: the local grocer gives way to the national chain, and the chain brings the one thing every Woolworth’s brought, an old-fashioned soda fountain. For a few years the town’s children had two counters to choose between, the new one at Woolworth’s and the one at the Sugar Bowl, which had opened a block north in 1958 and painted itself pink.
Then in 1965 Woolworth’s closed. The Wigwam, a Scottsdale shop that was already in business, moved into the building and stayed until about 1990 or 1991, and in the early 1990s the Legacy Gallery took the corner. The building outlived all three of its earlier lives, and it is still the most recognizable one on the block.
What it sold
Everything a Woolworth’s sold: notions and housewares, toys and school supplies, cosmetics, candy by the scoop, cheap records and cheaper goldfish, all of it laid out on the open counters that gave the five-and-dime its name. And the fountain: a long counter where a grilled cheese, a cherry Coke and a sundae could be had for pocket change while parents shopped. In a resort town it also sold the sort of small things visitors forget to pack, which made it as useful to the winter crowd as to the locals.
Where it stood and what’s there now
The northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street, at the eastern gateway of the Main Street Arts District. The building is the Legacy Gallery, and its Western styling is a survivor of the era when downtown Scottsdale dressed every storefront as a frontier town; the corner has been Earl’s Market, Woolworth’s, the Wigwam and a fine-art gallery without ever losing the look. Park at the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and walk, because there is nowhere to stop on the corner itself; the Old Town on foot note starts nearby and the Old Town guide has the rest.
The successors worth a visit
The soda fountain’s heir is a block away. The Sugar Bowl at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue opened in 1958, a year before Woolworth’s, and it is the last counter in Old Town where the five-and-dime kind of sundae is still made. Los Olivos on Second Street, feeding downtown since 1947, and the Rusty Spur Saloon on Main, in a 1921 bank, were both open through the Woolworth’s years and still are. For the drugstore end of the fountain tradition, Lute’s Pharmacy on the west side of Scottsdale Road was the other counter in town, and its story is the postwar downtown’s. Cross Main and you are in the district’s galleries; step into the Legacy Gallery itself and you are inside the building, which is the closest anyone can get to the store.
How it got here
The corner of Scottsdale Road and Main Street was the center of commercial Scottsdale from the beginning. A general store stood there when the town was a farm village, and in 1935 a young clerk named Earl Shipp bought it and made it Earl’s Market, the two-story grocery that fed downtown through the Depression, the war and the postwar boom. By the late 1950s Scottsdale had incorporated, adopted its Western theme and grown from a couple of thousand people to ten thousand, and the national chains that had ignored the little farm town began to notice the resort town it had become.
F.W. Woolworth was among the first. The chain opened on the corner on November 5, 1959, on the Earl’s Market site, with the standard Woolworth’s fit-out and the standard fountain. It was one of the first national chain stores in Scottsdale, and it arrived at the hinge of the town’s history: within two years Scottsdale would adopt a city charter and Fashion Square would open at Camelback Road with Goldwater’s as its anchor, and the 1960s would turn the town into a city.
The five-and-dime did not stay to see much of it. Woolworth’s closed in 1965, after six years, and the record does not say why; the same decade saw retail gravity shift from Main Street toward the new centers at Camelback and Scottsdale Roads, and a downtown chain store selling notions and goldfish to a town that was becoming an arts colony may simply have found itself in the wrong place. The building passed to the Wigwam, an existing Scottsdale shop, which occupied the corner for roughly twenty-five years, until about 1990 or 1991.
The gallery era followed. In the early 1990s the Legacy Gallery, run by second-generation Main Street art dealers, moved into the Western-style building and made it one of the anchors of the Arts District, which is what it remains. Three lives in one building, none of them the one it was built for, is a fair summary of how downtown Scottsdale has worked for a century; the Woolworth’s chapter was the shortest, and the one that announced the town had arrived.