The Jokake Inn developed from the 1922 Jokake Tea Room and opened as a resort in 1927, designed by architect and contractor Robert T. Evans, a proponent of adobe building in the Phoenix area. For you categorizers that's "Pueblo Revival." A handful of his expansive period houses like the Eisendrath House in Tempe, and the original adobe Old Lady of Perpetual Help in Scottsdale, are still around.

Evans was the son of artist Jessie Benton Evans, who came to the valley in 1913 from Chicago and bought 80 acres on the southern slope of Camelback.

Evans was the husband of Sylvia Gates Evans, later Sylvia Evans Brynes. Sylvia and her friend Lucy Cuthbert operated the Tea Room, offering chicken-salad sandwiches and devil's food cake called Sure Death for 50 cents. The time, the place, the overnight guests, the presence of opera singers and chicken-salad sandwiches, the phrase "Tea Room," all suggest a salon atmosphere with velvet berets and recitations and the occasional Theosophist. But that's a guess.

Evans was also incidentally the son-in-law of William Day Gates of the American Terra Cotta Company in Chicago. (By the way, one of the sources says American was "the source of all the sculpted terra cotta for Louis Sullivan buildings," which is half true. American was the fierce-competitor-sworn-enemy of the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company also in Chicago, and Northwestern was the source of most of Louis Sullivan's beautiful intricate impossible terra cotta ornament -- until 1906. Most of Sullivan's terra cotta was modeled by one Norwegian craftsman named Kristian Schneider. There wouldn't be a "Louis Sullivan" without Kristian Schneider, who worked for Northwestern from around 1885 to 1906, and for Gates from 1906 to 1930. Sullivan was almost a full-time drunk by then.)

Okay so anyway back to the Jokake Inn, early guests included Frank Lloyd Wright, who came to Arizona to stay, and John C. Lincoln, who also decided based on his experience in 1929 to move to Phoenix and operate another resort.

According to a later history Sylvia "valiantly kept open through June," serving tea and dinners on the roof to catch any possible breeze. "After we began accepting staying guests I also became head chauffeur and timed my town shopping to pick up the guests at the railway depot. Then they rode out to Jokake Inn with their feet on the cabbages, big sacks of coffee and boxed of canned goods. But no one complained, either Rockefeller or Smith."

By 1929 this improvised, added-to informal compound could serve 50 overnight guests. One hundred guests by 1943.

Random rudeness from Frank Lloyd Wright:

"One day as he sat playing piano in a deserted lounge area of Jokake Inn, I said, in an attempt to be sociable, 'My, I didn't know you played.'

"'Humph,' came the abrupt reply, 'I play as well as your mother-in-law paints, certainly.'"

Evans expanded with the Jokake School for Boys and the Jokake School for Girls, then in June 1944 his share of the inn was auctioned to his now-ex-wife Sylvia, and he established the Paradise Inn next door. Side-by-side, his-and-hers divorced resorts, separated by a fence. Guests commonly dashed back and forth.

The Jokake and the Paradise were later both bought by the same Texas hotelier, Charles Alberding. Local legend has it that on the night of the sale, guests from both resorts happily wandered out into the desert moonlight and tore down the fence.

All of this, along with the original Jessie Benton Evans villa and the site of the nearby Elizabeth Arden Maine Chance resort, all of it except for the Jokake double-tower, was obliterated in 1981 with the construction of the notorious Phoenician Resort funded by the notorious Charles Keating. The Jokake tower remains as a sort of prop, used for storage, and even in its sad isolated de-contextualized condition is the most sympathetic and humane thing about the Phoenician with its acres of cold white sinister marble.

R.I.P.