Historic Downtown

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Also Known as the Rebeil Building

With the Thrifty Block redevelopment around the corner, the Indian Village Building isn’t going anywhere.

by Donovan Durband

he Indian Village Trading Post building has been somewhat forgotten amid the public discussion about Talk of the Town and Little Café Poca Cosa, but the two-story 1897 structure has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and will be spared the demolition fate that awaits less-significant buildings to the immediate west. In fact, the development agreement between Rio Nuevo and the developers of “The Post”—so named in honor of the Indian Village Trading Post—will require that the building be restored in a manner consistent with the Secretary of the Interior’s standards for rehabilitation.

The building originally featured High Victorian brick exterior elements, including elaborate sculptured parapets and ornamental diamond-patterned frieze. It housed Rebeil’s Dry Goods Store around the turn of the 20th century, and except for a few years around World War I when it housed Brainard-Homer Hocking grocery and Chas. Goldstein clothiers, the building principally housed banks, including Merchants Bank & Trust, Tucson National Bank, and United Bank from 1909 until 1933.

By 1930 the ornamental parapet elements were removed in an effort to “modernize”, and stucco sheathing was applied to the brick. The storefront windows were modified then, and again in 1950. According to the National Register of Historic Places registration form that was completed in 2002 for the building (prepared by Janet Parkhurst), while the building’s original superficial elements were changed, the modifications represent a Southwestern Revival appearance that did not compromise the building’s integrity. The exterior alterations themselves are more than fifty years old and are part of the building’s history.

In 1936, Robert Jones, a druggist and former state senator from Pinal County, opened Jones Drug, which included a soda fountain and luncheonette counter, as well as an enterprise named Dunhill Street Movies. Dunhill photographers would take candid pictures of shoppers passing along Congress Street and Scott, giving them a numbered invitation to return to purchase their photos. Much of the known inventory of these photos became the basis for Snapped on the Street: A Community Archive of Photos and Memories from Downtown Tucson 1937-1963 (edited by Stephen Farley, Regina Kelly and Ward VI Youth History Team in 1999).

The second floor of the Rebeil Building, which was also known by its principal tenants (the “United Bank Building” and the “Litt Building”), housed a succession of professional offices for the better part of sixty years. Tenants included optometrists, dentists, accountants, insurance and real estate agents, jewelers, a detective agency, and the Federal Security Administration. But the building’s most famous second-floor tenant was the attorney Anthony J. Petrocelli, a TV character who took up a fictional office from 1974-76. The corner building was featured in the NBC show Petrocelli ‘s opening credits, and the window sign remained there for years afterward. Unfortunately, for many years pigeons have been the primary tenants of the building’s second floor, which has been otherwise vacant since Petrocelli left, and the second floor finishes reflect that.

T. Ed. Litt moved his drug store to the corner building in 1950, and in 1957, the Navajo Indian Village Trading Post era began, continuing to the present. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the drug stores and the Navajo Trading Post shared the first floor with jewelry shops (Tucson Jewelry, Field’s, Royal, Don McKenney, and Crescent), a shoe shine shop, El Chico Curios, and a gift shop. The building also served briefly as a waiting room for passengers of the new Tucson Rapid Transit bus service in 1925.

The Navajo Trading Post and Indian Village Trading Post were thriving enterprises that often brought in Native American artisans to demonstrate their craft to browsing shoppers. A spectacular neon Indian hoop dancer sign graced the corner between the store entrance and the Petrocelli window for many years, until city sign code regulations mandated its removal in the 1980s.

The Atkinson family has operated the Downtown location of their Southwest gift shops for decades, and continues to do business at the corner. While their fate is uncertain with the new development “The Post” expected to bring an eight-story loft tower next door, the Atkinsons would like to stay at their soon-to-be-renovated Congress and Scott location. After forty years of hanging in there, why leave now when better times are just around the corner?

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