If the 1960s had a championship year, this was it. Three years after the 1964 truce with Phoenix had left the desert east of Scottsdale Road to Scottsdale, the city landed a trifecta: it annexed McCormick Ranch, the great Arabian horse ranch to the northeast; it opened Scottsdale Municipal Airport on June 16 on the old Thunderbird II airfield, seeding the Airpark, whose first tenant broke ground the next year; and in July 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 and a half years after the STEP citizen committees 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 early 1960s the city raced Phoenix toward the McDowells, and the 1964 truce left the ground north of it to Scottsdale. A town that had been half a square mile at incorporation in 1951 was assembling the long desert city of today.
The politics of the year were busy too. In July residents petitioned against a commercial rezoning at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln Drive, a fight the Arizona Supreme Court settled for the landowners the next March, and on November 7 voters approved six charter amendments that gave the city four-year staggered terms and the power to designate floodways and adopt a general plan. The whole campaign is charted in the 1960s chapter and the 1960s politics chapter.