Skip to content
Visiting or new to Scottsdale? Start here
Scottsdale.tips
Landmark day • Thursday, January 30, 1964

January 30, 1964: Scottsdale and Phoenix Call a Truce on the Map

Two cities racing to swallow the same desert agree on a line: Scottsdale Road, from Cactus to Jomax. Sixty years later it still holds.

Illustrated plaque for January 30, 1964 in Scottsdale history SALOON TRADING POST MOTEL JANUARY 30 1964 BOOMTOWN

What happened

Scottsdale's council adopted Resolution 308 and Phoenix's council a matching resolution on January 30, 1964, agreeing that Scottsdale Road would be the boundary between the two cities from Cactus Road north to Jomax Road. The truce followed Scottsdale's 1962–63 annexation of some 41 square miles — including the old Thunderbird II airfield — which Phoenix had challenged in court on the grounds that the annexation map was inaccurate, and lost.

Why it matters

The 1964 line explains the modern map: why Scottsdale is a long, narrow city that grew north instead of west, why the Airpark and Kierland sit on its western edge, and why Paradise Valley (incorporated in 1961 precisely to stop both cities) is a hole in the middle. Everything Scottsdale annexed afterward — East Shea in 1975, the 36 square miles of 1984 — lay north and east of a line drawn this day.

The race

Scottsdale had incorporated in 1951 on one square mile, and by the end of 1959 it covered 3.8. Then it ran. In the space of four years the council annexed in every direction the law allowed, and between late 1962 and early 1963 it passed three ordinances — Nos. 165, 168 and 169 — that swept in some 41 square miles of desert north to the McDowell foothills, including the old Thunderbird II airfield the Seventh-day Adventists were trying to sell. By December 1964 the city measured 48.5 square miles, a twelvefold leap. Phoenix, the far larger city with its own annexation appetite, had been racing for the same ground; it sued over the airfield annexation, arguing Scottsdale’s map was inaccurate, and lost. The Legislature clawed back part of the 1963 annexation, and the Arizona Supreme Court was still sorting out the rest in 1965.

Both councils could see where this ended: two cities with interlocking fingers of jurisdiction, no coherent services and a lawyer’s bill. The town of Paradise Valley had already incorporated on May 24, 1961, one house to the acre and no commerce, for the sole purpose of being annexed by neither.

The line

On January 30, 1964 the two councils adopted matching resolutions — Scottsdale’s was Resolution 308 — agreeing that Scottsdale Road would be the boundary between them from Cactus Road north to Jomax Road. West of the road was Phoenix’s to grow into; east of it was Scottsdale’s. The truce cost Scottsdale the land west of its own namesake road and gave it, in exchange, an uncontested path north.

It is the reason the city is shaped the way it is. Scottsdale could not grow east — the Salt River Reservation had fixed that line in 1879 — and after 1964 it could not grow west. So it went north: East Shea in 1975, the great annexations of 1981–84 that ended on August 1, 1984 with a city of 181.6 square miles reaching the Tonto National Forest. The Airpark, Kierland and every “Scottsdale” address whose neighbor across the road pays Phoenix taxes sit on the 1964 line. The 1960s chapter tells the rest of the boom, and the annexation guide explains how the machinery still works.