The first big act of Scottsdale’s new charter government was a refusal. In 1962 the charter council — seated after the Halloween election of 1961 — banned billboards, over the loud objection of the outdoor-advertising industry. 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. The ban never fell, and it 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: Scottsdale Baptist Hospital — today’s HonorHealth Osborn — opened, and the boomtown finally had its own hospital beds. Between the ban 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.