History of the Desert Mallow Neighborhood

In the beginning, was the desert. When Old Main, the origin of the University of Arizona, was completed in the late 19th century the surrounding landscape was all native flora. Soon after, a homestead was established to the north by Anna Stattelman. The Jefferson Park neighborhood, where the homestead resides today, has an excellent history page if you would like to read more about it.

During the early 20th century, the area between the along what would become Speedway Boulevard begin to fill in with tents and other temporary structures as people flooded to the city to treat their tuberculous. The tent city was unpopular with the local healthy population, but soon a minister named Oliver Comstock came along and managed to build a more permanent structure for the tubercular patients: the Comstock Hospital. It later became a children's hospital, and finally was demolished in 2017 to make way for a parking lot. Refer to this article for more info on the Comstock Hospital as well as Oliver Comstock himself.

Houses also started to spring up around this time, some of which are still around, looking the same as they did more than a century ago, even as the neighborhood around them changed. Most of those places remained outside the city limits until the 1940s when the neighborhood was slowly annexed house by house. House building also accelerated during this time period. Despite the piecemeal development, the street layout and land use today are more typical of the American post-WWII development pattern. The chaos of the tent city long forgotten, today the neighborhood is characterized by many of the same features as those early suburbs: wide local streets in a grid pattern, and physically separated single story houses with ample space for a yard and car.