During the week of December 4, 1905, heavy rainstorms forced state officials to reschedule Arizona’s first territorial fair. Weeks later, on Christmas Day, the fair opened its doors. Governor Joseph H. Kibbey made a few opening remarks to more than 2,000 Arizonans who had arrived by train to partake in the festivities. Throughout the week, horse racing took place along with competitive company drills and other military exercises.

Beginning in 1905, the Arizona State Fairgrounds--located at McDowell Road and 17th Street--have changed dramatically. Once a rural outpost at the edge of Phoenix, the fairgrounds were eventually surrounded by housing and suburban sprawl and located in the central core of the Phoenix region. Likewise, the facilities have expanded their usage beyond being a centerpiece of the region's agricultural economy; eventually hosting concerts, movies, and other various forms of entertainment. In the 1930s, when state officials suspended the state fair during the Great Depression, the fairgrounds became home to the state's efforts to spur recovery during the New Deal. The fairgrounds housed the Works Progress Administration (WPA) office.

In the early 1930s, Arizona Governor Benjamin Moeur convinced FDR and the federal government to allocate funds for public works projects in the state during the Great Depression. The WPA eventually opened its state headquarters at the south end of the State Fairgrounds and funded a variety of projects throughout the state between 1938 to 1943. The WPA funded hundreds of projects with the intent of putting Americans back to work and improving the country’s infrastructure. Between 1935 and 1942, the WPA put 8.5 million Americans back to work and spent more than $10 million during the Great Depression. The agency funded numerous public works projects that included roads, bridges, schools, libraries, botanical gardens, memorials, and city halls.

In Phoenix, for example, the agency widened and resurfaced over 1,000 blocks of city streets, including five miles of Central Avenue from the Salt River Bridge to South Mountain Park. Throughout the city, workers excavated twenty-eight miles of ditches along roadways, fifty-eight miles of curbs, eighty miles of sidewalks, and five miles of gutters. The agency also planted hundreds of palm and orange trees along Van Buren Street between Phoenix and the Tempe bridge. In Arizona, the agency constructed 690 miles of highway and around 475 miles of miscellaneous city streets. By 1935, the federal government had become the largest employer in Maricopa County, putting $10 million annually into the local economy. Children around the state benefited greatly from the public works projects of the WPA. The WPA built 38 new schools in Arizona, providing the state’s children with better educational facilities. The agency gave Arizona kids 21 new parks and playgrounds to enjoy.

The benefits were equally impressive across Arizona more broadly. The federal government built twelve WPA work camps in Arizona between 1938 and 1943. The WPA placed over 16,000 Arizonans on its rolls and, depending on their job skills, paid them $15 to $25 per week. The agency also improved the state’s highway system. In just five years, the WPA provided funds for 1,714 miles of highway throughout the state of Arizona. Arizona’s population grew substantially in the 1920s and 1930s, which meant the state needed additional methods of transportation in order to attract labor and capital. The WPA also funded several cultural projects in Arizona. The Federal Writers program produced a high-quality State Guide, which gave a detailed description of Arizona’s history, its major cities and towns, and other notable locations of historical significance. During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers Project hired over 6,000 writers to create pamphlets and books that highlight the history of a given state. The Federal Music Project hired musicians from branches of music to perform in concerts for the public to enjoy. This program within the WPA ultimately produced 1,250 free concerts during the Great Depression. In 1936, between January 1 and September 15, over 32 million Americans attended a concert put on by the Federal Music Project. The project hosted a wide range of venues with numerous reputable individual musicians and singing groups, including the Federal Philharmonic Orchestra.

The WPA funded public works projects at the State Fairgrounds. In March of 1936, WPA workers started building the Grandstand with the hopes of completing it by the end of year. The WPA installed nearly 5,000 different seats on the Grandstand, replacing the old wooden seats that had burned down. The structure itself stood at fifty feet long with an adobe wall on three sides. It featured bas-relief medallions, funded by the Federal Artists Project, that feature scenes of everyday life in Arizona. WPA workers also built a new horse racing track inside the Grandstand. Once the WPA finished the project in 1937, the Grandstand hosted numerous types of events, including horse races, rodeos, demolition derbies, and even mud bog spectaculars.

In the second half of the 20th century, the state  fairgrounds remained vital, as the state continued to reimagine the fairgrounds for many different purposes. For example, in 1955, Marilyn Monroe filmed a scene from the movie “Bus Stop” on the state fairgrounds. In 1987, while on a trip to Arizona, Pope John Paul II gave a speech at the fairgrounds. Fair officials converted the WPA building into a haunted house, a gem and mineral exhibit, and the base of the Phoenix Roadrunners hockey team.

In 2014, the Arizona Preservation Foundation and other historical preservation groups led an effort to stop the Arizona State Fair and Exposition from demolishing the building. After obtaining a temporary restraining order to prevent the buildings from being razed, preservationists raised public awareness, working with city and state officials to identify opportunities to save the buildings through rehabilitating and reusing them. By 2016, that effort succeeded when the state government committed to returning the structures to their former glory with a $120,000 worth of funding that was matched by the City of Phoenix. Private sources of funding brought to the table by the preservationists, including both foundation gifts and contributions from small donors, contributed more than $120,000 in additional money toward the project. In 2018, the Arizona Exposition & State Fair's Board of Directors held a charrette that explored the future possibilities for the fairgrounds.

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William Hartranft founded Encanto Park in 1934, seeking to create a park for Phoenix that was like San Francisco's Golden Gate Park or San Diego's Balboa Park. William Hartranft emulated parks inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of Central Park, whose plan shaped urban parks across the United States, including Golden Gate Park. Hartranft's inspiration tells us how Americans living in the 1920s imagined what a park should look like. Olmsted imagined parks as public places where men could escape the dirt and noise of the city and find natural, uplifting spaces. Olmsted romanticized nature and sought to improve it by designing viewsheds, hills, and lakes. His vision permeated San Francisco's planning for Golden Gate Park. However, he recommended a different location and a design more in keeping with California's unique landscapes. Olmsted argued for a similar park to promote civility and grant a meeting place for all classes in San Francisco. Likewise, New Yorkers wanted Central Park opened to all classes of society. Hartranft duplicated that inclusiveness with family-oriented recreational areas for all ages. Such ideals influenced parks across the United States, including those in Encanto, Golden Gate, and Central Park.  Early designs for Encanto Park promoted a naturalistic style that drew upon both the design and organic materials used on the East coast. Not surprisingly, this preference for lawns and shade trees proliferated in Phoenix as it grew in the desert. Photographs and drawings demonstrate how Phoenix's early residents replaced the natural Sonoran Desert with lawns and trees, though often with palm and other desert-hardy trees, such as willows.  If claims about the public good motivated Hatranft's rhetoric, his motives surely included the desire to build an amenity that would enhance his own economic interests. Hartranft and business partner Dwight Heard began to develop property in the nearby Palmcroft plat in 1927. They sought to build a neighborhood that would appeal to well-heeled middle-class residents and planned amenities accordingly. These eventually included Encanto Park, complete with a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, and a swimming pool.  The Park's orientation toward elite residents (and new development) was evident in its location. In fact, residents originally called Encanto Park Dorris-Norton Park, with a nod to the nearby residents and developers who sold the land to Phoenix for the Park. James C. Norton and James W. Dorris had large estates on the land. The impressive Norton House abutted Encanto Park, as did Dorris's estate, Casa de Rojas (which later became Encanto Community Church). In the context of Phoenix's development, locating Encanto Park at the lightly populated northern edge of the city, where city elites lived and/or were moving, indicates that Hartranft and his peers imagined an amenity that would serve the well-heeled residents of the Encanto Palmcroft district. And more broadly, Phoenix remained a primarily agricultural settlement, except for its multi-ethnic neighborhoods immediately south of the central business district. Moreover, prior to the city's purchase, the land for Encanto Park had been vacant property primarily for agriculture, especially grazing animals. In letters to nearby property owners after the sale, the Phoenix City Manager informed them that "you are herewith notified that in allowing stock to graze on this land you are trespassing upon Private Property, and unless you immediately cease this trespass the City of Phoenix proposes to take the necessary legal steps to evict you."  Over time the relationship between the Park and its surrounding community changed, growing increasingly contentious as the years wore on. After World War II, the connections between the Park and the nearby neighborhood remained close, and families continued to flock to the Encanto-Palmcroft neighborhood. In 1946, Kiddieland opened on an island in the Park's lagoon. The new addition drew neighborhood children and tourists to its eleven amusement park rides, including a now-famous carousel. However, the community gradually became more middle class, adopting the inexpensive ranch-style houses often characteristic of the post-war American West. This was partly related to cost; creating custom homes became cost prohibitive, and the ranch style emerged as an affordable and respectable style of architecture. Still, the Encanto-Palmcroft neighborhood remained relatively exclusive. Its post-war housing boom was characterized by more elaborate and sometimes custom-built, rambling ranch-style homes.  By the 1960s, however, tensions emerged between the users of Encanto Park and its neighbors, setting off a twenty-five-year struggle over the soul of the Park. Though newspapers reported almost daily on the positive activities happening in the Park, those news reports were sprinkled with concerns by the latter half of the decade. Through the summer of 1968, the Arizona Republic reported on the lagoon's pollution and overgrown weeds, confirmed by the operators of Kiddieland. At the same time, the Arizona Republic noted that a "cold war erupted this week into open battle" between 'hippies' and the police who were defending "adult society." The newspaper opined on the importance of "law and order" and worried that Phoenix "won't remain a choice place if Encanto Park is made into a Western version of Central Park in New York." By the mid-1980s, park leaders in Phoenix sought to restore Encanto Park's aging infrastructure and update its amenities, including Kiddieland. A public debate ensued on a variety of park features: the future of Kiddieland (it was closed) and the fate of its carousel (a citizens' group preserved it), whether to buy "natural" boulders for the lagoon or manufacture them from concrete and how to best preserve public safety. The bandshell was lost to fire in 1987, though planners had intended to demolish it anyway. Civic leaders claimed that removing the bandshell was a safety issue as its construction was substandard. Still, one wonders whether evening concerts had produced too much tension between residents and park users over the years. By 1991, the Park had been rehabilitated, now serving a neighborhood that had become less exclusive from Phoenix and its surrounding communities.   Even so, the Park itself remained an expression of the same park ideas that shaped the growth of urban parks throughout the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It reflected the romantic ideals of 19th-century landscape designers with its open spaces, artificial lagoons, and use of grass and trees to frame views and experience. In some respects, it may have become even more important as an oasis from the vicissitudes of urban life as Phoenix expanded around it. At the same time, the continued emphasis on amenities--whether in the form of golf, swimming, tennis, or the amusements of Kiddieland--suited the more rationalistic urban planners of the 20th century. They wanted to create functional spaces that drew visitors not just for contemplation but for recreation, especially children and families. Like other American parks, Encanto Park combined romantic and rationalistic perspectives. It had broad landscapes to complement romantics and unique attractions to suit more rational planners.

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The Great Depression had a profound impact on the United States as well as greater Phoenix. In an effort to confront the economic and social costs of the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued for a New Deal in which the federal government sought to put Americans back to work through building infrastructure and other vitally needed public projects. Among the programs he created was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The immensely popular program created jobs as recruits built facilities, roads, and other structures in hundreds of parks nationwide. This included both state and National Parks. In Phoenix, the CCC constructed buildings, performed landscaping, and excavated rocks at South Mountain leaving a visible imprint of the New Deal in the landscape.

Established in 1933 the CCC sought to put Americans back to work and to improve the health and morale of poor young men by taking them out to the countryside to do work. Over its nine years of existence, the CCC employed more than 3 million men, approximately 5 percent of the total U.S. male population. Recruits were 17 to 24 years old; they earned 30 dollars a month and served for 6-month intervals. Corps members worked for a maximum of two years. Young men earned a decent paycheck, learned valuable life lessons, and reshaped the American landscape in the process. In particular, the CCC made large contributions to National Parks.

In Phoenix, the CCC played a significant role in building the infrastructure in South Mountain Park, which is located along the city's southern boundary. South Mountain Park was established in 1924 when the City of Phoenix purchased an area known as the Salt River Mountains. The city’s primary goal in setting aside the 14,500-acre parcel was to save the land from private development.

From 1933 through 1940, more than 4,000 men worked at two camps in the park. The camps generated about $5,000 in money for the local economy, as most of the materials and supplies were purchased locally. Also, most of the young recruits spent their $5 allowance in the city. The CCC made the park accessible to Phoenicians; they built some 40 miles of hiking and horse trails, 26 miles of road, scores of fire pits, and more than 30 buildings, ramadas, and other features--including a museum building in 1934. Like the Park's other buildings, the building was designed collaboratively by the National Park Service and the City Parks Supervisor. The South Mountain Park entry complex was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014, some 70 years after it was built.

Former enrollees of the CCC formed a national alumni organization in 1977. In 1981, an Arizona chapter was established, which went on to dedicate three monuments to their efforts in Arizona. Statues were erected at Colossal Cave Mountain Park in 2008 and in South Mountain Park in 2009. The chapter also placed a granite monument with a plaque to the CCC's efforts in Wesley Bolin Plaza in 1990.

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Among President Franklin Roosevelt's many "Alphabet Soup" New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was perhaps the most successful in reducing unemployment among America's youth. The highly regimented program brought benefit not only to young men seeking a steady, albeit meager, income in return for their labor but also to the many areas to which the CCC enlistees were dispatched.

Many communities in Arizona gained new infrastructure and other improvements at the hands of CCC workers, including Phoenix's own Papago Park. Imagine for a moment an out-of-state recruit's likely reaction to the park's striking rock formations and prickly indigenous flora. What must have been running through the mind of a young program participant who, until being shipped out with his CCC company, had likely never traveled far beyond his hometown? How might a CCC enrollee react to the quasi-military structure of the organization and the reality of being assigned physically arduous tasks to be carried out alongside a group of complete strangers in a seemingly inhospitable land?

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Breadlines, street corner apple vendors, and families traveling cross-country in jalopies looking for employment are phenomena unknown to most alive today. As those who lived through the Great Depression continue to fall by the wayside, memories of that severe economic crisis become ever more blurred. In addition to slowly erasing the pain and suffering brought about by the worldwide economic collapse of the 1930s, the passage of time also obscures the specifics of the overwhelming federal reaction to the Depression.

While many are familiar with President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal initiative, the bevy of "Alphabet Soup" programs implemented under FDR's leadership are less widely known. Programs such as the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) are but a handful of the myriad federal agencies created during the Depression. One New Deal program of great importance to Arizona, and the Papago Park region, in particular, was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

What was the CCC? Simply put, it was a government employment effort designed to provide young, unmarried men a reliable paycheck in exchange for sometimes backbreaking physical labor such as clearing trails or erecting buildings in local, state, and federal parks. CCC efforts visible in Papago Park include several ramadas built in the "NPS Rustic" style - similar to many of the federally-constructed Depression-era projects in Phoenix's South Mountain Park. Although the Corps existed for just nine years, the legacy of this Keynesian undertaking remains in many parks, forests, and important pieces of infrastructure found across the nation to this day.

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Scottsdale, Arizona—and much of the American Southwest—would not be the same without its Mexican-Spanish heritage and culture. From its earliest days, Scottsdale enveloped a mélange of peoples and cultures, with Anglos coexisting alongside Pima and Apache peoples, Mexicans, and other adventurers who stumbled into the growing town. The cultural contours of Scottsdale owe a great debt to its Mexican settlers who added to the distinctive Southwestern flavor of the region. Indicative of their lasting imprint is Scottsdale’s first Catholic mission church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

Built in 1933 on the corner of First Street and Brown Avenue, this old adobe mission was the culmination of years of Mexican community-building in the Scottsdale area. Years of political and social unrest in Mexico, particularly the years surrounding the Mexican Revolution of 1910, brought thousands of Mexicans across the border, seeking new opportunities and a better life. Halfway across the globe, the advent of World War I and the high demand for Arizona’s fine but strong, long-staple Pima cotton created a steady stream of cotton work. After 1916, newspapers like the Arizona Republican reported that Scottsdale’s cotton fields were attracting wagonloads of Mexican workers each day. Many workers eventually sent for their families and set down roots, bringing their language, culture, and customs along with them.

Mexicans were builders, and within a short time, a barrio of bright, colorful pink- and blue-hued homes shot up in the area between Main and Second Streets, east of Brown Avenue. Following the church-building impulse already started by congregants of a Baptist Church in 1918 and a Methodist Church in 1929, Scottsdale’s Catholic parishioners sought a permanent home in the late 1920s. Hispanic leaders wanted a church to bind their community together through shared Catholic beliefs and traditions. Key church organizers included the Corral family who followed the trail of cotton work from Sonora to Scottsdale over a decade earlier. Emilio Corral, with his English-speaking brother Jesus, supervised the construction of the adobe-brick edifice.

Today, this adobe church is a lasting symbol of Scottsdale’s early Mexican-American’s sense of cultural pride and identity. Our Lady of Perpetual Help embraced with open arms Scottsdale’s Mexican families, children, elders, workers, leaders, and friends to the Catholic faith. Its builders and early congregants may have left their homeland, but they held on to their culture and traditions, crafting their own niche in the American frontier town of Scottsdale.

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Scottsdale's first Catholic church had somewhat of a miraculous delivery. Initially conceived in the late 1920s, the construction plans for the old adobe mission church hit a major roadblock in 1929 when the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression hit. During its six-year building project, constant aid in the form of favorable sponsors, hard-working volunteers, steady commitment, and donations paved the way for the church's completion in 1933.

The mission church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, earned every bit of its name. The scarcity and economic uncertainty of the Depression era challenged fundraising efforts in the early 1930s. Still, local and distant calls for help were answered. Scottsdale businessman Robert Evans supplied the building designs, equipment, and tools. Donations from Catholic communities in Scottsdale, Tempe, and even as far away as Chicago provided building materials. Teams of volunteer parishioners and Yaqui neighbors crafted adobe bricks and erected the church walls. Adobe construction, formed of natural materials, was relatively inexpensive and practical. Still, at fifty pounds per brick, it made for back-breaking work. Scottsdale tinsmith Bernabe Herrera added the finishing touch: stained-glass windows that retold the Miracle of the Roses story, an inspiration for the church project.

Nothing short of a minor miracle, Our Lady of Perpetual Help is a structural reminder of the incredible feats a community can accomplish when it comes together, even in the face of insurmountable difficulties. Local Anglo and Hispanic businessmen, Hispanic and Yaqui workers, and Catholic parishioners near and far played meaningful roles in the local labor of love that built Scottsdale's first mission church.

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Prior to becoming a popular watering hole and part of the set-dressing of Scottsdale’s self-conscious efforts to become “the West’s most Western town,” the building now housing the Rusty Spur Saloon was the Farmers State Bank of Scottsdale. The opening of the bank on January 22, 1921 signaled the promise of the burgeoning community.

Scottsdale was growing slowly but steadily as the power of the Salt River had been harnessed by the Roosevelt Dam. Scottsdale functioned as a market town for the numerous families engaged in cotton growing and citrus farming, which paved the way for the town’s eventual prosperity. Then, as now, uncertainty was a fact of life for those whose livelihood depended on agricultural production, but residents of the area had confidence in the town’s potential. This confidence was undoubtedly bolstered by the recently built a cotton gin, used to process the cotton grown nearby, and the arrival of electricity in Scottsdale.

The bank provided more than just a symbol of this confidence; it provided a vital service to local farmers and businessmen. The Farmers State Bank of Scottsdale allowed them to avoid the time-consuming trek to Phoenix to take care of their banking—a journey made onerous by the lack of paved roads—and enabled them to access local capital. And while E.O. Brown’s General Store next door remained the “see and be seen” hot spot, the bank was also an important community center, housing the first chamber of commerce and the lending library.

It represented the growth of the young community; but its fall in 1933 to the financial woes of the Great Depression indicates how the development of Scottsdale is tied to a larger American story of alternating prosperity and hardship. After the bank closed its doors, the community felt the pinch of its absence as residents struggled to find new ways to conduct their banking business during the lean years of the 1930s. Though it now holds liquor instead of money, they old bank vault persists as a vestige of early Scottsdale’s evolution.

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The graceful, even beautiful, lines of Scottsdale Grammar School #2 convey a sense of prosperity. Stability seems to be written right into the school’s symmetrical concrete façade. It is a testimony to the optimism of 1928, the year it was built—a year in which prosperity seemed so assured. As the nation prospered, so did the growing community of Scottsdale, which confidently passed a $50,000 bond to construct this school, the town’s second. But this was only one year before the stock market crash of 1929, an event that would leave the country in a state of financial crisis. Despite all of the growth it experienced during the 1920s, Scottsdale was not immune to the economic hardships of the Great Depression, though desperation took slightly longer to settle in here in Arizona.

In the immediate years after the crash, most of Arizona’s copper mines shut down or had to slow production, decreasing the state’s revenue from $155 million to $15 million between 1929 and 1932. Unemployed miners and Dust Bowl “Okies” were flocking to the Salt River Valley in search of work—sometimes finding employment picking cotton. Nevertheless, work was scarce. Scottsdale’s only bank closed during the 1933 “bank holiday” and never reopened. The chamber of commerce closed as well. Individuals displaced by the economic crisis threw up shantytowns in the empty desert and tried to scratch out a livelihood from the land.

These were lean years. Many parents could not afford to keep their children in shoes but had to send them to school, often on foot or by horse, wearing disintegrating vestiges of what used to pass for adequate footwear. Meager family resources instead had to go to put food on the table. An unprecedented 20% of the Valley’s population (50% of the severely disadvantaged Latino and black populations) received some kind of municipal or federal aid. As funds from local charities and emergency relief programs ran dry, the Valley was increasingly seeking aid from the federal government. But, for many, accepting aid engendered a fundamental identity crisis. Scottsdale had long held itself to embody a pioneering spirit of self-sufficiency, a quality its citizens believed was at the core of being a Scottsdalian, of being an American. Since Scottdale’s founding, it had been a keenly proud community. This meant that some citizens simply refused aid.

Nevertheless, as the struggles of the 1930s continued, the social stigma attached to accepting aid began to fade. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Policies gradually began to revive the area. By the mid-1930s, thanks to the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, the federal government was Maricopa County’s largest employer. These programs resulted in additions to Scottsdale Grammar School #2 and Scottsdale High School, improvements to the canal, and new roads. Many of these public works can still be seen across the landscape, reminders of past difficulties and the local and national efforts that sought to overcome them.

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