White, sculptural, and unlike any city hall in America — Bennie Gonzales’ City Hall and Civic Center Library opened in 1968, three years after the city hired him, and gave the boomtown something it had conspicuously lacked: a dignified public heart. The buildings were adobe-soft modernism, all deep shade and courtyard plazas, public architecture that looked like nowhere else and exactly like Scottsdale wanted to feel — western, modern, unhurried. The Civic Center Mall around them became the town’s living room, and stayed so; the district still anchors civic life after its 2020s renovation.
There was a nice irony in the timing. The same year the city unveiled its gleaming future, a group of old-timers founded the Scottsdale Historical Society — organized to make sure the boom, then adding tens of thousands of newcomers a decade, didn’t erase the memory of the farm town underneath. The two 1968 institutions were really one gesture from opposite ends: a city growing this fast deciding what it wanted to keep.
The houses that had stood on the Civic Center site were gone; the city had bought and cleared them after the 1966 bond, and The Barrio Under the Civic Center tells who lived there. The year’s politics also turned on the new charter: in the first election under the 1967 amendments, voters chose a mayor and six council members, half of them for the city’s first four-year terms, and in March the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that residents could not put a rezoning to an initiative vote.
By now the pattern of the decade was set. Scottsdale had the charter, the rule against new billboards, the general plan, the airport, McCormick Ranch, and a Civic Center worth the name; the population was climbing toward the 67,841 the 1970 census would record. One piece of boomtown furniture remained — the mall that opened in 1969 — before the decade closed. The full account is the 1960s chapter.