If one year made Scottsdale a national brand, it was 1956. It opened with big-league baseball and closed with a movie-star hotel, and by New Year’s the town of a few thousand had a presence in the sports pages and the gossip columns alike.
In March the Baltimore Orioles opened camp at the year-old wooden Scottsdale Stadium — the first major-league club to train in town, and the start of a spring tradition that would bring the Red Sox, Cubs, A’s, and eventually the Giants through the decades. March crowds, hotel nights, and box scores datelined Scottsdale: baseball attached itself to the winter-visitor economy and never really left.
December: glass, concrete, and desert light
Then came the Hotel Valley Ho, opening downtown in December — architect Edward L. Varney’s horizontal midcentury masterpiece, blocks from the hitching posts of Main Street. With the Safari Hotel opening the same year, Scottsdale suddenly had nightlife. The Hollywood set wintered here, and the columnists did the town’s advertising for free.
The deeper story of 1956 is the doubleness. A town whose merchants had dressed Main Street in western storefronts, and whose Architectural Board now kept them that way, had just opened a defiantly modern resort, and both halves sold — rodeo romance and midcentury glamour were the same product, the desert winter, in different packaging. Day pages cover the Orioles’ first camp and opening day at the Valley Ho.