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July 31, 2007 - 6:25AM
Valley senior helped dad build Tovrea Castle
Daryl James, Tribune
Marion “Muck” Powers slaps himself on the back of the head when details from the past don’t come quickly to his mind.
VIDEO: Take a tour of Tovrea Castle and see the view from the top
VIDEO: 89-year-old talks about his life at the Tovrea Castle site
Names and dates sometimes slip from his memory. But the 89-year-old Phoenix resident speaks with clarity about the hilltop castle and cactus garden that rise above Loop 202 near Papago Park.
As far as Powers knows, he’s the last person alive who helped build Tovrea Castle and the surrounding Carraro Cactus Garden in the late 1920s.
“Everybody else is dead,” he says. “I’m the last one.”
Powers stands from his chair and shuffles slowly to a back room in his house. “I hope I don’t fall,” he jokes as he moves down the hallway. “The stop when I hit the ground would be sudden.”
A short time later, he returns with a stack of old photographs. The largest shows his father and older brother working as stone masons on the castle’s perimeter wall in 1928.
Before joining the castle construction project, his dad worked on the railroad in Maryland until a doctor told him to go west for his health in 1927, Powers says.
Muck was just 10 when work began on the castle. But the boy did his share of mixing mortar and hauling rocks from the Salt River and surrounding desert for the garden walls and castle basement.
He also did his share of playing at the castle with Leo, the son of Italian immigrant Alessio Carraro.
The sheet metal tycoon made his fortune in San Francisco before moving to Phoenix, where he purchased several acres for an estate that eventually included a yellow stucco castle, machine shop, well house, aviary, gas station and 140-foot-deep well.
Powers remembers tunnels under the complex sturdy enough for cars to drive over, and a basement ceiling covered in plaster spikes “like stalactites or lemon meringue pie.”
He also remembers a large basement vault acquired from the First Bank of Phoenix.
One time, he says, somebody got trapped inside. Carraro was in San Francisco on business and had to give the lock combination over the phone.
Powers says he and Leo climbed to the castle’s top balcony hundreds of times. In those days, he says, guests could look out over the entire Valley and see miles of pristine desert.
“Anybody who can get to the top of that castle, it would be worth every penny,” he says. “They would get a heck of a view.”
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