Half a square mile. A couple of thousand people (the city says 2,032; the Historical Society says the town itself held about 1,200). A cafe owner for mayor. Scottsdale’s founding statistics read like a tall tale, and the paperwork was almost as compact: more than 300 of fewer than 400 eligible taxpayers signed the Chamber’s petitions, and the county supervisors approved incorporation without an election on June 25, 1951. The five councilmen they appointed were seated on July 2, and the next day the council chose Malcolm White — owner of Whitey’s cafe, builder of the town’s first movie theater, and its loudest booster — as first mayor. The council met at first in businesses, homes and the high school; in January 1952, the city’s historic context says, the town’s offices moved into the new Rural Fire hall at Brown and Second.
The push had been building since the census counted 2,032 in the area the year before. Sixty-three years after Winfield Scott’s land filing, the community was still legally nothing: fire protection by private subscription, everything else by the county, the school board, and social pressure. Meanwhile Phoenix was annexing hungrily, and a settlement without a government had no way to say no. Incorporation was part declaration of identity, part legal fence.
The identity came pre-installed. White and the Chamber had already coined “The West’s Most Western Town,” and the merchants had already dressed downtown in hitching posts, board sidewalks and false fronts, voluntarily; the new town appointed an Architectural Board to keep it that way in 1953. By the saloon’s count the Rusty Spur opened that year inside the failed Farmer’s State Bank on Main Street (the Historical Society says 1953), and on November 17 the Chamber and the Scottsdale Riding Club rode the first Sunshine Festival parade down Scottsdale Road, the ritual the Jaycees would rename the Parada del Sol two years later. The half-square-mile town would spend the rest of the decade growing five-fold while Phoenix won most of the fights over the land between them, on its way to a first charter in 1960 that a court voided and the city charter of 1961. Incorporation day has its own page; the decade’s arc is in the 1950s chapter.