If the annexation race with Phoenix had a championship year, this was it. All decade the two cities had been grabbing at the county land between and around them, and in 1967 Scottsdale landed the trifecta: it annexed McCormick Ranch, the great Arabian horse ranch to the northeast; it opened the Scottsdale Airpark on the old Thunderbird II airfield, a year after the municipal airport itself began operating; and it adopted its first General Plan to govern what it had just swallowed.
Each piece compounded. McCormick Ranch would become the celebrated master-planned community of the 1970s — the annexation was the down payment on that future. The Airpark grew into one of Arizona’s largest employment centers, the business half of a city the tourists only ever saw the western half of. And the General Plan, arriving two years after the STEP citizen forums began, meant the land grabs came with a spec attached: Scottsdale was annexing with intent, not just appetite.
The northern push of these years is also the plainest answer to a modern question — why is Scottsdale 31 miles long? Because in the 1960s the city raced Phoenix toward the McDowells and won the ground that mattered. A town that had been one square mile at incorporation in 1951 was assembling the long desert city of today, and 1967 was the year the map moved most. The whole campaign is charted in the 1960s chapter.