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Landmark day • Friday, October 11, 1968

October 11, 1968: City Hall and the Civic Center Are Dedicated

A boomtown of 60,000 gets a civic heart designed to look like nothing else in Arizona — and dedicates it with mariachis instead of speeches.

Illustrated plaque for October 11, 1968 in Scottsdale history SALOON TRADING POST MOTEL OCTOBER 11 1968 BOOMTOWN

What happened

Scottsdale dedicated its new City Hall, the Civic Center Library and the east side of the Civic Center mall on October 11, 1968. Designed by Bennie M. Gonzales after a $2.4 million bond passed two to one on September 28, 1966 (a year after a first bond failed), the complex cost about $2.55 million, with a $150,000 federal grant for the library. A parade led by a mariachi band on a flatbed truck ran down Main Street from the Hotel Valley Ho to the new buildings.

Why it matters

The Civic Center gave the fastest-growing city in Arizona a permanent, distinctive center at the moment it was deciding not to look like everywhere else — the same impulse as the 1962 billboard ban and the 1965 design review ordinance. Gonzales' kiva-inspired council chamber, sculpted white walls and open interiors set the template for the city's public architecture, and the twenty-acre mall became the site of the Center for the Arts (1975), SMoCA (1999) and the ArtWalk district.

The brief

The council’s instructions to the architect were short: the new civic center should “represent the southwestern way of life and the spirit of Scottsdale.” The city that wrote them had grown from 10,000 to more than 54,000 in five years, banned billboards in 1962, and in December 1965 created one of the country’s first design review boards under Ordinance 277. It wanted a City Hall that looked like nowhere else. It chose Bennie Gonzales, a Phoenix-born architect picked from thirty-five candidates, who “loathed public buildings whose style reflected the standards of stuffed-shirted bureaucrats,” and who planned a campus of up to nine buildings between Indian School and Osborn Roads on twenty acres cleared of houses.

Paying for it took two tries. A first bond failed in 1965; on September 28, 1966 voters approved $2.4 million by two to one. The library got a $150,000 federal grant. The final cost came to about $2.55 million.

October 11, 1968

The dedication was a Friday. A parade formed at the Hotel Valley Ho and came down Main Street to the new mall behind a mariachi band on a flatbed truck; the program had been written, the Progress noted approvingly, with “no long-winded oratory.” What the crowd walked into was unlike any government building in Arizona: a council chamber modeled on a kiva, sunk and round; sculpted white walls that read as adobe; an open interior in which, famously, only the mayor and the treasurer had office doors; stained-glass skylights by Glidden Parker’s Glassart Studios; and, between City Hall and the Civic Center Library, a lagoon and a bridge. The Fountain of Youth went in the same year, the Richard Mayer Memorial Garden the next.

What grew around it

The mall Gonzales laid out became the city’s cultural spine. The Center for the Arts opened at its south end in 1975, the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999, and the Thursday ArtWalk grew up along Main Street beside it. The Old Timers who had rallied that summer to save the Little Red Schoolhouse, a block away, got their wish partly because the new campus made the old brick school an ornament rather than an obstacle. Gonzales’ profile is here; the Civic Center guide covers the mall today; and the 1960s chapter covers the seven-fold boom that paid for it.