Images of the Old Mission Church is located on the east side of Brown Avenue, just south of First Street. Image -0323 is circa 1950. Image -0063 shows in the lower left background the parking garage. Image circa 1990.
Hand-built in 1933 by volunteers from Scottsdale's Hispanic immigrant families, the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Mission Church was originally constructed using some 14,000 adobe bricks and is located on the southeast corner of First Street and Brown Avenue. Prominent local architect R.T. Evans assisted with the design of the Spanish Colonial Revival style church. It served Scottsdale Catholics until a population boom in the early 1950s necessitated building a much larger Our Lady of Perpetual Help (OLPH) parish complex on Miller Road. After housing church organizations, then the Scottsdale Symphony for over 20 years, OLPH began restoration of the historic mission in 2004, now called the Old Mission Church, and currently uses the small facility for special services and events. The building is listed on the Scottsdale Historic Register.
The historic Our Lady of Perpetual Help Mission Church building is located at 3817-21 N. Brown Avenue. The design is a simple regional interpretation of the Spanish Colonial Revival style and is laid out in a one-story rectangular plan. It has a gable roof sheathed in corrugated metal with heavy rafters and a battered curvilinear parapet wall extending above the roofline on the west front façade. The walls are three adobe bricks thick and the finish is battered, white smooth stucco. A bell tower attached to the northwest corner of the structure gives the building an asymmetrical building form along its front façade. A recessed round arch defines the building’s main entry, which consists of simple, double doors. There are five single pane rectangular wood frame windows without sills or lintels. Four have the original stained glass. An arcade, added after the original structure was completed, joins the east side of the bell tower and is attached to the north side of the building. The arcade has four round arches and a gable style corrugated metal roof similar to the main roof and exposed wooden eaves flush with the wall surface.
The Catholic Church had an early presence in the Valley with a main church in downtown Phoenix and other mission churches to serve those who lived in outlying areas. For many years, the Catholic residents of Scottsdale had to travel to other locations or attend services in makeshift facilities with visiting priests. By the late 1920s, however, the parish had grown to a sufficient size to establish a mission to serve Scottsdale. Soon plans were made to build their own church building. The economic hard times brought by the Depression made the task of assembling the necessary funds a difficult task. A site was selected in Scottsdale’s original town site near the barrio where the first Hispanics settled as they migrated to the valley to work in the cotton industry. The E.O. Brown family donated a site for the building in 1927. Robert Evans, then owner of the Jokake Inn, provided the plans for the building, equipment Page 3: Our Lady of Perpetual Help Mission Church Report and tools. Donations from the Catholic community, locally and from other parts of the nation, provided funds for building materials. Volunteer crews of parishioners, primarily from the Hispanic community, constructed the building. The workers fashioned thousands of large adobe bricks, each weighing 50 pounds, for its exterior walls. The church was completed in 1933, serving as “a symbol of community togetherness, pride and hard work” as was noted by The Scottsdale Daily Progress in an October 1983 article announcing the structure’s 50th anniversary. This building was listed on the Scottsdale Historic Register April 3, 2001.
Robert T. Evans. “Adobe Bob”, was an architect and contractor. He designed and built of adobe the Jokake Inn on property owned by his mother, Jessie Benton Evans. The remains of the Inn are on the property of the Phoenician Resort on Camelback Road. He donated his time to design the Mission Church on Brown Avenue in Scottsdale. He also built the Paradise Inn.
Image #0063 donated by the Scottsdale Tribune (photo by Stephen Mounteer)
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