# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdZXK0IGjwp
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70597306-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/708a99de4d.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-17T17:08:35.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

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 Depression and the fact that his luxury resort had a sheep and cattle operation for a neighbor, it was over before it started. He sold the whole thing to the Tovreas in 1931.

Edward Tovrea died about a year later.

Meanwhile Phoenix kept growing east, out toward the yards. And the wind out here blows west, which meant the stockyards and the rendering plant next to them blew straight over Sky Harbor.

Through the 1950s, people flew into Phoenix, walked down the stairs onto the tarmac in July, and got hit with it. The city was advertising itself nationally as clean dry air and endless sunshine, and the population went up more than three hundred percent that decade, and every single one of those arrivals got the feedlot first.

The pens are gone. The castle is a city landmark now, on the National Register since 1996, open for tours since 2012, with more than 5,000 cacti still on the grounds.

And the Administration Building for the feedlot is still standing on Washington as a steakhouse, with a cow on the roof.

Send us the wildest thing you’ve seen in the Valley.

#TovreaCastle #PhoenixHistory #SkyHarbor #downinnadesert

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 666
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 14

## Tags

skyharbor, tovreacastle, downinnadesert, phoenixhistory

---
Copyright (c) Gondola