What was Legend City?
Disneyland opened in 1955, and within a few years a Mesa-born artist named Louis E. Crandall wanted one for the Valley. He was 28 and ran an advertising agency. He named the park after his own initials, Legend City. He sold stock to the public, some of it at fifty cents a share, hired Six Flags’ designer Randall Duell, and built on 87 acres near 56th and Washington streets, on the Phoenix–Tempe line beside Papago Park.
It opened on June 29, 1963, to more than 28,000 people. For $3 an adult and $2.25 a child, all rides included, you got six themed lands, a Lost Dutchman Mine ride, a River of Legends, an Iron Horse narrow-gauge railroad, and a Golden Palace Saloon show sponsored by Coca-Cola. Nearly every weekend for twenty years, Wallace and Ladmo, the Valley’s kids’ TV comedians, played the lagoon amphitheater.
It was never quite big enough. It drew about half a million people the first year, half what Crandall projected, and went bankrupt within two years. U-Haul’s Sam Shoen rescued it in 1968, three more owners followed, and on September 4, 1983, it closed so the Salt River Project could build its headquarters on the land.
Twenty years, five owners
The Crandall years, 1963–1966. The $5 million park, built in eighteen months, opened big and then struggled. Investors took it to bankruptcy court; Crandall was out by late 1964. It reopened in May 1965, closed again in September 1966, and a court ordered it liquidated.
The Shoen years, 1968–1973. Sam Shoen, of the U-Haul family, bought it for under a million dollars and reopened it in 1969. By most accounts these were its best years: the Satellite Sky Ride gondolas came from California’s closed Pacific Ocean Park, and the park was cleaned up and filled up.
The later owners, 1973–1983. A Japanese-owned ride maker, Continental Recreation, bought it in 1973, and the Capell family, carnival operators, in 1975. They added the Sidewinder coaster in 1978 and, from 1979, leased 30 acres at the front to Jess and Gene Nicks, Stevie Nicks’s father and uncle, for Compton Terrace, a 20,000-seat amphitheater. The park itself was aging. A 12-year-old girl died on the Zipper in 1977, her family won $1.3 million, and in April 1982 the Tempe fire department declared the park a fire hazard.
The end. In June 1983 SRP announced it would buy the land for its new headquarters, for $21.5 million by New Times’s account. The last day was September 4. The rides were sold off and the site was paved for the Papago Park Center campus.
What it meant to Scottsdale
For a generation of Scottsdale kids, Legend City was the big trip: fifteen minutes down Scottsdale Road and across McDowell, with Wallace and Ladmo at the end. It was also part of the same business Scottsdale was in. The Valley sold the Old West to tourists in Old Town’s false fronts, on Cudia City’s movie lot, at Rawhide, and at Legend City’s Ghost Town. Of those, Rawhide is the one that’s still operating, after a move to the Gila River reservation.
The sources, and the disagreements
The best single source is Benjamin Leatherman’s oral history of the park in Phoenix New Times (2022), with historian John Bueker, whose Arcadia book Images of America: Legend City and archive are the park’s main record. Wikipedia’s article and Images Arizona’s “The Ballad of Legend City” fill in the rest.
Where they disagree:
- Acreage. 87 acres (New Times, Images Arizona); 83 and “30 acres” also appear in summaries.
- When SRP bought it. Wikipedia says 1982; New Times dates the announcement to June 1983. We say SRP agreed to buy it in 1983.
- The 1973 buyer. New Times says Continental Recreation, a Japanese-owned ride maker; Wikipedia says Mitsubishi. They may be the same owner.
- The river ride’s new name. “Cochise’s Stronghold” (Images Arizona, Wikipedia); New Times prints “Stranglehold.”
- The cost in today’s money. New Times gives “about $9 million in today’s dollars” for the $5 million build, which can’t be right; we don’t repeat it.
Why it matters
Legend City was the Valley’s biggest bet on the Western theme, and it lost. It shows the limits of the formula Scottsdale was building on. The theme drew tourists to a small downtown full of shops, but a park needed year-round crowds, and in a 1960s metro area of under a million, with 110-degree summers, it never got them. The land ended up more valuable as offices, the same thing that happened to the guest ranches and the cotton gin.