The decade closed on a corner whose future nobody could have priced. In 1959 a shopping center went up at Scottsdale and Camelback Roads — an unremarkable act in a subdivision boom, except that this was the corner that would become Scottsdale Fashion Square. The name arrived in 1961, when the open-air center opened; the retail empire came much later. In 1959 it was simply shops following rooftops.
The year’s other arrival was Messinger’s Mortuary — the sort of institution a real town needs and a crossroads never had. It made a fitting close to a decade spent converting an unincorporated crossroads into a functioning city, fixture by fixture: a government, a slogan, a parade, a stadium, hotels, payrolls, and now a place to be buried.
The less photogenic fixture mattered more. In January the town’s sewer plant, on Miller Road south of Van Buren, went into operation, and on Sunday, October 25 it was dedicated: about $700,000 for a system meant to serve 27 square miles, far more than the town then covered, according to a city water-history timeline. The spring brought the Boston Red Sox to Scottsdale Stadium, and with them the color line in plain view, when the team’s one Black player, Pumpsie Green, was turned away at the Safari (see Scottsdale and the color line).
The scoreboard came due months later, when the 1960 census counted 10,026 residents, up from 2,032, on just 3.8 square miles while Phoenix covered 185. The 1950s politics chapter tells how the town governed that growth. The 1950s built the brand; the 1960s would multiply it nearly seven-fold.