For about forty years, the first thing you smelled getting off a plane in Phoenix was a feedlot. Edward Tovrea opened his stockyards in 1919 out past 48th Street and Van Buren, which at the time was nowhere. Miles from the city, miles from anything. He was a cattle baron and this was going to be the center of it. It got billed as the world’s largest feedlot. Nearly 40,000 head at a time across 200 acres of pens, with more than 300,000 cattle moving through in a year. Cattle was one of Arizona’s five C’s and Tovrea was the biggest name in it. Then in 1928 an Italian immigrant named Alessio Carraro bought the hilltop right next to it. Carraro had made money in San Francisco and wanted to build a destination resort in the desert. He blasted the top of the hill flat with dynamite, made bricks on site, and put up a white tiered building that everybody immediately started calling the wedding cake. He planted thousands of cacti around it. He never opened it as a hotel. Between the Depres...