Scottsdale built two stages in 1955 and waited for the performers. The first was the original Scottsdale Stadium, a wooden ballpark raised by a town of a few thousand betting it could bolt big-league baseball onto the winter-visitor economy. The bet paid off almost immediately: the Baltimore Orioles arrived for spring training in early 1956, opening a Cactus League tradition that has run nearly continuously since.
The second stage was Craftsman Court, purpose-built lanes downtown for the artisans who had colonized Fifth Avenue and Main Street after the 1950 Craft Center fire. Five years earlier they were refugees from a burned building; now the town was constructing real estate around them. The shopping district’s evolution from souvenir row to genuine arts marketplace was under way, and the galleries would keep multiplying for decades.
Both projects ran on the same logic that defined the decade: build the venue and the attraction will come. It worked with ballplayers and it worked with art buyers — and the next year it would work spectacularly with hotel guests, when the Valley Ho opened downtown. See the 1950s chapter for the full arc.