The record keeps few individual milestones for 1964 — a specialist bookshop, Guidon Books, opened its doors on Western Americana and the Civil War — which mostly means the boom had become routine. Scottsdale was somewhere on the steep slope between the 10,026 people of the 1960 census and the 54,504 the special census would count in 1965 — adding neighbors, streets, and classrooms at a pace the town could watch but barely tally. By this year the sewer lines had finally reached the southern neighborhoods, closing out the 1962–64 infrastructure push that growth had forced.
The politics of the year were anything but routine. In January the city and Phoenix fixed Scottsdale Road as their boundary. In February a landscape architect, Bill Walton, proposed in the Progress that the city buy Indian Bend Wash and build the planned concrete flood channel as a park instead, the start of the greenbelt fight. A new zoning amendment, Ordinance 209, allowed 120-foot buildings, the city’s historic context says. Mayor John Woudenberg, elected in April, resigned in September, and the council appointed Bill Clayton. And in November the city invited residents to plan it: the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program, whose committees reported in January 1965. It was the moment the boomtown started writing its own spec. The 1960s politics chapter tells the rest. The decade’s full arc is in the 1960s chapter.