The first famous act of Scottsdale’s new charter government was a refusal. The first council elected under the charter took office on April 3, 1962, and that September it adopted a comprehensive zoning ordinance and, from September 13, by the city’s own later account, stopped allowing new billboards. No record of any objection survives. The logic was simple and slightly audacious: the town’s product was the view. Desert, mountains, and a carefully staged western downtown were what brought the tourists and the new residents, and Scottsdale was not going to rent out that product’s frame to sign companies.
It was taste enacted as policy, and it stuck, though it was narrower than its legend. Billboards already standing were allowed to stay, and removing them took a sixteen-year sign fight that ended with a court loss in 1978 and the last of them coming down one redevelopment at a time. The rule became the founding precedent for everything that followed in the same spirit — the strict sign codes, the design review, the dark-sky lighting rules, eventually the desert-preservation politics of the 1990s. A city adding neighbors at a rate of roughly one every 80 minutes had decided, in its first year of self-government, that growth would have to meet an aesthetic standard. Planners still study the trick.
The same year delivered something more practical: City Hospital of Scottsdale, soon run by the Southern Baptist convention and today HonorHealth Osborn, opened on Osborn Road, and the boomtown finally had its own hospital beds. Between the sign rule and the hospital, 1962 is a fair one-year portrait of the whole decade: image and infrastructure sprinting side by side, each trying to keep pace with a population curve that had gone vertical. The full sprint is told in the 1960s chapter, and the politics in the 1960s politics chapter.