At a glance: The 1970s are the decade Scottsdale out-stubborned the Army Corps of Engineers. A catastrophic 1970 flood proved Indian Bend Wash had to be tamed; the Corps drew a concrete channel; and Scottsdale insisted on grass, lakes, and bike paths that could flood gracefully. The result — the Greenbelt — rewrote American flood-control practice. Meanwhile a legendary horse ranch became the state’s model suburb, and the city kept stretching north and east.
Labor Day 1970: the wash collects its rent
Scottsdale had spent two boom decades building subdivisions across a dry riverbed, and over Labor Day weekend 1970 the riverbed took payment. The remnants of a tropical storm dropped historic rain across central Arizona; Indian Bend Wash became a mile-wide brown river through the middle of the city, drowning streets and yards, while the Arizona Canal overtopped. Families canoed intersections. The city was, for days, two cities separated by moving water.
Nobody could now argue the wash didn’t need engineering. The fight was over what kind.
Grass, not concrete
The Army Corps of Engineers’ answer was proven and grim: a concrete channel, Los Angeles-river style, straight through seven miles of Scottsdale. It would move the water and murder the city’s midsection — a fenced dead zone where the town’s geographic heart should be.
Scottsdale’s citizens — organized through the STEP forums, the Chamber, and a crew of insistent local advocates and planners — pushed a counter-idea that sounded almost unserious: make the floodway a park. Grade it wide and green, line it with turf, lakes, ballfields and golf, and let it flood a few days a year and host the city the other 360. After years of argument, redesigns, and bond votes, the Corps came around; construction began in 1973.
It worked beyond anyone’s blueprints. The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt — finished in stages through the 1980s — carried its floods on schedule and became the spine of everyday Scottsdale life: eleven-plus miles of connected parks (Eldorado, Vista del Camino, Chaparral) and the bike path locals treat as a car-free highway. Engineers still make pilgrimages; so do cyclists — see our field guide to the Greenbelt’s best cut-throughs.
McCormick Ranch: the suburb with a pedigree
Northeast of the wash lay 4,200 acres where Fowler McCormick — heir to both the McCormick reaper and Rockefeller fortunes — had bred some of the world’s finest Arabian horses. After his death, the land (annexed in 1967) became the canvas for one of Arizona’s first true master-planned communities. McCormick Ranch opened for sales in 1972: man-made lakes, golf fairways as common ground, greenbelt paths knitted into the wash system, and housing arranged around water in a way that felt revolutionary in the desert (and would be debated forever after).
The Arabian legacy didn’t vanish — Scottsdale’s Arabian horse show, running since the 1950s at Paradise Park and later WestWorld, remains the world’s largest — and the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, built on donated ranch land around Guy Stillman’s miniature railroad, became the city’s most beloved kids’ institution.
The rest of the decade, briefly
- Rawhide (1970): a full fake 1880s town opened up north Scottsdale Road — gunfights hourly — and became a top state attraction for 35 years.
- Scottsdale Community College (1970) opened on Salt River Pima-Maricopa land — its students voted “Artichokes” for a mascot, a protest joke that outlived the protest.
- Preservation grew teeth: the Historical Society organized (1971) and saved the Little Red Schoolhouse on a $1-a-year lease (1972).
- Culture scaled up: the Scottsdale Symphony (1974) and the Center for the Arts (opened 1975 on the Civic Center Mall) gave the resort town year-round high culture.
- The map stretched again: the 1975 ‘East Shea’ annexation pushed toward Fountain Hills; a special census that year counted 78,000 people, on the way to 88,412 by 1980.
The city that entered the 1980s had proven it could grow on its own terms. The next test was scale: resorts the size of villages, an airpark becoming a jobs engine, and a beloved mayor whose name would end up on the 1980s.