Rodeo creator's home set for demolition

As Tucson celebrates the 90th anniversary of its rodeo, plans are afoot to demolish the home of Frederick Leighton Kramer, the polo enthusiast who dreamed up the notion of La Fiesta de los Vaqueros with a few of his horse-riding buddies in 1925.

Kramers home, built in 1924, was situated on a large plot just north of where Isabella Greenway would build the Arizona Inn in 1930.

The first rodeo was held on a polo field near Kramers home.

The house, a two-story marvel with green porcelain roofing tiles, was easily the largest and most pretentious of Tucsons private residences, according to a 1925 Tucson Citizen story unearthed by John Warnock, a University of Arizona English professor who lives nearby.

Kramer died of tuberculosis in 1940.

In the 1940s, the house, dubbed Rancho Santa Catalina by Kramer, became the Potter School for Girls. Most of the acreage attached to it became the Catalina Vista development, a conclave of single-story, ranch-style homes with large lots on winding tree-lined streets.

Today, Catalina Vista, north of East Elm Street between North Campbell Avenue and North Tucson Boulevard, is a National Historic Neighborhood, although the Kramer/Potter house itself is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The house and its adjacent buildings would later become a convent and school for the Sisters of Charity. It was sold to John Greenway, then owner of the Arizona Inn, in 1971.

For a while, it was a residential compound and studios for graduate art students from the UA.

It has been fenced and boarded up since 2006. The owners of the Arizona Inn have signed a contract to sell it and its 3-acre parcel to a group of local developers.

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Rodeo creator's home set for demolition