Two years into official existence, Scottsdale gave its brand a ceremony. The town’s young Junior Chamber of Commerce took over the annual Sunshine Festival and staged it that November as the Parada del Sol — “parade of the sun” — sending riders, wagons, stagecoaches, and school bands down Scottsdale Road, with rodeo events to follow. “The West’s Most Western Town” had been a slogan and a set of storefront rules; now it was a performance the whole town starred in, once a year, at street level.
Nobody involved could have known how durable the invention would prove. The parade later moved from November to the cooler glamour of February and grew into one of the largest horse-drawn parades in the world — the city’s longest-running tradition, still riding through Old Town every winter more than seventy years on.
The same year delivered a smaller, thirstier institution. The Rusty Spur Saloon opened inside the old Farmer’s State Bank building — the failed bank’s vault still in the wall — and began its long run as Old Town’s honky-tonk time capsule. Between the parade and the saloon, 1953 minted more lasting Scottsdale iconography than any year until the Valley Ho opened in 1956. The first ride down Scottsdale Road has its own page.