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 on January 20 the committees of the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program, convened the previous November, handed the council a $14.6 million three-year program: a civic center, parks, a library, an airport, street lighting. Later rounds, into the 1980s, drafted the policies that followed, including 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.
Not everything went the city’s way. Voters turned down the first Civic Center bond. In October Congress authorized the Corps of Engineers’ concrete channel down Indian Bend Wash, the plan the city would spend the next eight years talking the Corps out of. On December 7 the council created the Design Review Board, and on December 21 Mayor Bill Clayton died in office.
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.