Five years, five-fold. The special census of 1965 counted 54,504 people in a city that had held 10,026 at the start of the decade — the fastest stretch of growth in Scottsdale’s history, before or since. Numbers like that usually mean a place has lost control of its own story. What makes 1965 remarkable is that this was the year Scottsdale decided, quite deliberately, to take control of it.
Two decisions did the work. The city hired Arizona architect Bennie Gonzales to design City Hall and the Civic Center — a bet that a boomtown deserved public architecture with an actual point of view, which would pay off spectacularly when his white, adobe-soft buildings opened in 1968. And the city convened the first Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program forums: annual town meetings, running through 1974, where residents drafted the wish lists that became policy — parks, arts funding, trails, and the greenbelt idea that would define the next decade. When people ask why a city that grew seven-fold in ten years didn’t dissolve into anonymous sprawl, STEP is a large part of the answer. The residents kept writing the spec.
So the year of the wildest number was also the year of the firmest grip. The census made headlines; the architect and the forums made the city. Both threads — the growth and the design of it — run through the 1960s chapter, and on into the boomtown era as a whole.