The boom decade closed with a department store — two of them, actually. Los Arcos Mall opened in 1969 at Scottsdale and McDowell Roads, anchored by Sears and The Broadway, and gave the southern neighborhoods an enclosed, air-conditioned downtown of their own. For the subdivisions that had filled south Scottsdale since the fifties — the Motorola households, the sewer-line-and-school-bond precincts — it was arrival: the big-city retail that proved the boomtown had become a city.
It is also, in hindsight, a one-parcel history of American retail. Los Arcos held its place as south Scottsdale’s hub for three decades, then declined in the 1990s as the region’s retail gravity consolidated around an ever-expanding Fashion Square — the open-air court that had opened, modestly, back in 1961. The mall was demolished in the 2000s, and in 2008 its site was reborn as SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center. The corner went from farmland to mall to innovation campus in one long lifetime.
None of that was visible on opening day. What was visible was the scoreboard: a city of 67,841 at decade’s end, up from 10,026 in 1960 — nearly seven-fold growth, managed with a charter, a rule against new billboards, citizen planning committees, and an architect. On September 30 the city launched a second round of those committees, the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program’s long-range goals, which asked the council to strike high-rise zoning, keep freeways out, adopt an engineer’s grass-and-reservoir plan for Indian Bend Wash and seek federal money to clear the blocks west of the Civic Center and the Yaqui neighborhood of Vista del Camino. The next test was already gathering in the Indian Bend Wash, and it would arrive with the Labor Day flood of 1970. The decade that ended here is the 1960s chapter; the reckoning that followed is the 1970s.