According to this old 2002 New Times article, this awesome 39-foot-tall concrete proud kachina sentry was designed by sculptor Phillips Sanderson and a local engineer named Carl Ludlow. It stands at the entry to the Tonto Hills Subdivision, which is remarkable for being as far in the northeast valley you can go, before you end up in the National Forest, way northeast even of Carefree. Some sources have architect Bennie Gonzalez contributing to the design but I'm not sure that's true.

Constructed of nine blocks of concrete, the bottom three solid, the top six hollow. Commisioned as a 'gateway' piece circa 1962 by the Tonto Hills developer, E.V. Graham, and now privately held.

And for sale. For about half a million dollars. It would be great if it had some kind of tape-recorded message in a huge booming voice echoing down into the valley. It could call out the phases of the moon. My friend Nick wants to ride it like a rocket, light it up at night from underneath, and rig it for waterworks so when somebody litters on the way by it generates a gigantic tear.

He's well-maintained, although he's standing in an abandoned cactus garden with a few bleached animal bones scattered around here and there. Seriously. There was an entire rib cage the day of my visit.

Cool? Yes, in its own roadside kitschy way. White elephant? Yes very obviously. Significant? You could say so.

 

If you look at the hands, you can tell a real sculptor had something to do with it. Raymond Phillips Sanderson (1908 - 1985) was a significant figure in the local Scottsdale art scene and one of the very, very few architectural sculptors active around here. Lawrence Tenney Stevens was another.

As a young man Sanderson had apprenticed in Chicago with the coming-from-France-headed-for-Texas Raoul Josset for work at the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition. Josset would go on to work on the amazingly Deco 1936 Dallas World's Fair, but never stopped teaching Sanderson. He would always answer Sanderson's requests for technical sculpture advice with long, kind, detailed letters, with diagrams. (I wonder where those are.)

Josset and Sanderson and Stevens kept at figurative work after it was "officially outlawed" on the east coast, which was swimming upstream, and did figures that look fascist to today's eye but are definitely not. In fact Stevens might have punched you for suggesting it.

At any rate, after Chicago, bronchial problems brought Sanderson to Bisbee in 1932, where he did the nine-foot gilded miner in front of the Cochise County Court House, and did a stint as cowboy and cook at the ranch of "champion bulldogger Jack Hoxie and his pistol-shooting, trick-riding wife Dixie Starr." He eventually moved to the Phoenix area and lived in Scottsdale for 25 years. In 1937 Phillip Curtis, the then-head of the WPA program in Arizona, hired him to teach. Then from 1947 through 1953 Sanderson was a professor at ASU.

And Sanderson was a major beneficiary of Walter Bimson and the Valley National Bank.

In 1974 he delivered 14 Honduras Mahogany sculptures for the VNB executive offices, one for every Native tribe in the state in 1850, and had work in eighteen VNB branches. This includes the very architecturally-integrated Broadway VNB branch in Tucson, Arizona, signed and dated 1971, four massive Hopi wood carvings for the Winslow branch depicting seasonal dances, and the supremely odd exterior reliefs on the Christown VNB branch.

Among Sanderson's other work:

* Those Who Gave Their Lives, aka What the Hell is That, a large abstract bas-relief located on the renovated Student Union, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 1951.
* carvings at the Westward Ho Hotel, Phoenix, status unknown.
* bas-reliefs on the Adams Hotel, Phoenix, now destroyed (Sanderson tried to save them).
* work at the Mayer Central Building, now the Phoenix Professional Tower, circa 1962. Today there's no exterior work here, so it's either interior or it's been removed.

So does this sentry have historical connections in the area? Yup.

At the very least the kachina sentry is 14 tons of heavy-duty reminder that the valley was knee-deep in Native American imagery at one point.

Prime exponents of the serious kind of Native-referencing art were Jay Datus and Paul Coze, both of whom ran schools and prided themselves on ethnological accuracy and did major public art. Bank of Arizona had adopted the kachina as their logo / mascot and had examples in all of their branches. It was big news when Barry Goldwater donated his kachina collection to the Heard Museum. This sentry is in line with the less-serious-verging-into-commercial-cute-jokey stuff, the Kachina Cleaners and Kachina Travel and Kachina Cinerama Theater thing, although this statue seems completely dignified to me.

At some point around 1970 all this imagery as part of the Phoenix civic identity dried up. Your guess why is as good as mine.