The decade opened with a headcount and a fire. Census takers counted 2,032 people — the first hard number for a community that had been guessing at its own size for decades — and before the year was out, flames destroyed the Arizona Craft Center, the cooperative workshop-showroom that had gathered silversmiths, potters, weavers, and leather workers since 1947.
The fire should have ended Scottsdale’s short career as a crafts colony. Instead the artisans did the most consequential thing anyone did all year: they stayed, scattering into cheap storefronts along Fifth Avenue and Main Street. One burned building became a browsable district, and the accidental arrangement — galleries and workshops mixed among the cafes and curio shops — became the template for the downtown arts economy that still defines Old Town. Craftsman Court would give the district purpose-built quarters in 1955; the galleries never left.
The other business of 1950 was talk. Incorporation talk, specifically, and it was getting serious. The town still had no municipal government at all — fire protection came from Lou Witzman’s private Rural Metro brigade, and everything else from the county, the school board, and social pressure. With Phoenix annexing hungrily and the postwar migration filling the old farm tracts with veterans’ families, doing nothing was becoming untenable. Within a year the question would be settled: see 1951, or the whole arc in the 1950s chapter.