An Arizona Fairy Tale
Phoenix Guards Its Castle Against Desert Sprawl
By Will Yandik | Online Only | June 20, 2001
Tovrea Castle, six miles from downtown Phoenix.
Credit: Bill Jacobson
For many visitors arriving in Phoenix from the city's Sky Harbor International Airport, Tovrea Castle is their first glimpse of something more than steel and concrete. From a hill of cacti rises the wood and stucco castle, built as a hotel in 1931.
Many Arizona residents call the mustard-yellow, three-tiered structure the "wedding cake"—but the nickname seems too delicate. With its crenellated battlements surrounded by the spike-and-corduroy clubs of hundreds of giant saguaros, the castle demands more respect.
The city of Phoenix, which owns the castle and 18 of the 43 surrounding acres, wants the structure to be the city's defining landmark—an Eiffel Tower in the desert—and they are prepared to go to war to save the castle grounds from development.
If Phoenix wins, the castle would be the nucleus for the city's plan to energize local tourism. The city hopes to build a visitor's center on the grounds that will encourage tourists to bring their families and wallets the six miles into the city's center.
Some think that the property could also serve a more symbolic function. Former mayor John Driggs hopes the castle can become the ceremonial center of the city's administration—a place where new legislation can be signed into law, a host to state balls and functions. "We don't want to restore the castle just for the sake of historic preservation," says Driggs. "We want it to play an active role in the community."
These plans may never materialize if the city can't obtain the 25 acres of castle grounds from the Tovrea family ahead of developers keen on capitalizing on the site's access to major highways and the airport. Some Tovrea family members, plagued with legal debts and property taxes according to Pheonix Parks and Recreations, are eager to unload their land even though they'd like to see the estate preserved.
Building a Sand Castle
Carraro and his castle, circa 1929.
In 1929, Alessio Carraro bought 277 acres of rugged Sonoran desert east of Phoenix. An Italian immigrant, he had made his fortune in sheet metal in San Francisco and hoped his new purchase would eventually support a posh hotel and residential development called Carraro Heights. Always a frugal man, Carraro salvaged maple from a house that was razed in downtown Phoenix for the castle's flooring and bargained for a vault from a bank to use as his wine cellar.
While Carraro was building "El Castillo," an itinerant Russian gardener (and professional eccentric) knocked on the door and offered to design an exotic cactus garden to complement the hotel. Once hired, M. Moktatchev hunted through Arizona's Verde River Valley, California, and Colorado for rare cacti and succulents. He once traveled to Mexico and returned with a truck filled with barrel and organ cacti. Motka, as he was called, worked only during the hottest summer months when the cacti had drier, firmer flesh. During the cooler, worker-friendly months, the cacti, swollen with water, would bruise and burst during transport. Unfortunately, the fruits of Motka's labor have been lost. Only the giant saguaros have endured the decades of Sonoran sunburn.
Carraro's fantasy of creating a desert oasis ended when E.A. Tovrea, the owner of an adjacent meatpacking plant, constructed sheep pens near the castle. Fearing that the ermine and pearl crowd wouldn't want to live or vacation near the bleating, malodorous bedlam of a sheep farm, Carraro sold the property. Later, he learned that the new owner, who quickly offered to buy the property, was his clever neighbor, who renamed the place Tovrea Castle.
Sands of Time
Decades of growth and sprawl have followed the castle's transfer, making the once whimsical castle a symbol of the vanishing desert. In 1993 the city bought the castle using bond money approved by voters, but the $5 million fell short of purchasing the entire estate.
Recently, the city budgeted $4.5 million to acquire the remaining land, despite some criticism that the money is badly needed to save the castle from termite damage, water exposure, and other structural weaknesses. According to Mark Lamm, the city's special program and facilities supervisor, these repairs can wait. "We have a strategy," he says. "Buy first and restore later with heritage grants and private donations. The important thing is to get the land while we still can."
Even though it is less historic than the region's rare Indian mud kivas and cattle corrals, many argue that preserving Tovrea should be the city's highest priority. Shad Kvetko, a Phoenix antiques dealer, wrote to the Arizona Republic, pleading: "It is time to wake up, Phoenix, and realize that being such a young city, structures built before World War II are just as important to our history as 200-year-old ones are back East."
As the city prepares to bid on remaining lands, opportunities vanish: 3.6 acres have been sold recently to a private developer and another 6.2 have been offered to interested buyers, leaving just 15 acres available in addition to the 18 the city currently owns. Phoenix must act quickly to save its wedding cake before developers consume the surrounding land, slice by slice.
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Comments
Submitted by Brian at: March 29, 2009
It's supposedly haunted. Ghostly footprints are seen.