Twenty-two days apart in October, Scottsdale acquired a mall and a constitution. The first store at Scottsdale Fashion Square held its grand opening on October 9 — an open-air court at Scottsdale and Camelback Roads, pleasant and unremarkable, with no outward sign that it would grow into the dominant luxury shopping center of the Southwest. Then, on Halloween, voters approved a home-rule city charter, the town’s second try at one, and Governor Paul Fannin signed it on November 16. The ten-year-old town of ten thousand became the charter City of Scottsdale.
Of the two events, the charter mattered more, and faster. Home rule arrived at exactly the moment the boom demanded it: population had quintupled in the fifties and would quintuple again by mid-decade, and the town had been running since early 1960 on a charter whose election a court had found three days too late (see February 23, 1960). This one was drafted by a board of freeholders and held. The council-manager government the charter created is the one Scottsdale still operates under, and its first famous act came within its first year — the 1962 rule against new billboards, the founding gesture of the city’s design-review culture.
Fashion Square’s significance took longer to compound. The corner had hosted a small center since 1959; the new name and format seemed like one more piece of boomtown retail. But the open-air court would be enclosed, expanded, and enlarged decade after decade until it anchored the city’s entire retail economy — and helped pull the energy out of the malls that came after it, Los Arcos included.
A town that got a shopping center and a charter in the same month was a town whose growth had outrun its old machinery. What the new machinery did with the decade is the 1960s chapter.