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.
By now the pattern of the decade was set. Scottsdale had the charter, the billboard ban, the General Plan, the Airpark, 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.