The census takers came through early and counted 67,841 people — a city that had been about 2,000 at incorporation nineteen years before. The year opened on that confident note and kept adding to it: Scottsdale Community College welcomed its first students on Salt River Pima-Maricopa land (they would vote in the “Artichokes” as mascot, a protest joke that outlived the protest), and up Scottsdale Road, Rawhide swung open its doors — a full re-created 1880s town, gunfights hourly, that would rank among Arizona’s top attractions for 35 years. The West’s Most Western Town now had a purpose-built western town to prove it.
Then came September. Over Labor Day weekend, the remnants of a tropical storm dropped record rain on central Arizona, and Indian Bend Wash — the dry riverbed two boom decades of subdivisions had been built across — ran as a mile-wide brown river through the middle of the city. The Arizona Canal overtopped. Families canoed intersections. For days, Scottsdale was two cities separated by moving water.
The flood ended one argument and started another. Nobody could now claim the wash didn’t need engineering; the fight was over what kind. The Army Corps of Engineers held its proven answer — a concrete channel through seven miles of town — while citizens organized through the STEP forums pushed a counter-idea that sounded almost unserious: make the floodway a park. That fight, and the green thing Scottsdale built instead of a ditch, is the story of the 1970s chapter.