A boomtown that grows this fast eventually notices it is bulldozing its own evidence. The “Old Timers” who had rallied in 1968 to save the Little Red Schoolhouse — the brick school built in 1909 for $4,500, still standing, increasingly improbably, in the middle of a downtown dressed head to toe in western-themed commerce — had incorporated as the Scottsdale Historical Society in December 1969 and been named the city’s official society in 1970. In 1971 they picked their first fight and pressed it.
The timing was not accidental. The town Scottsdale had been — the farm crossroads, the one-school settlement — was vanishing under the city Scottsdale was becoming, and an old schoolhouse on downtown land was exactly the kind of thing a boom economy misplaces. The campaign worked quickly: within a year the Chamber of Commerce held the building on a $1-a-year lease, and two decades later it would house the Scottsdale Historical Museum, the one room in town where the marketing and the actual history can be compared side by side.
The year also invented two of the city’s noisiest traditions. Tom Barrett and Russ Jackson held the first Barrett-Jackson collector-car auction, the seed of the January spectacle that now fills WestWorld; and north of town, at Scottsdale and Pinnacle Peak Roads, hotelier Jim Paul opened Rawhide (in 1971 by Joan Fudala’s account; the Historical Society says 1970), an 1880s Western town built to house his Old West collection, which sold shootouts and steaks to tourists until it rode south to Gila River land in 2005. Around all of it, the decade’s main event was assembling: the city was still measuring the damage from the 1970 Labor Day flood, the Army Corps was reconsidering the concrete channel it had planned since the early 1960s, and citizen advocates were sharpening the grass-not-concrete argument that would win out in 1973. Saving one old schoolhouse and designing a park you could flood were, at bottom, the same instinct: the conviction that a boomtown could decide what it kept.
City government grew up the same year. The city bought the Indian Bend Water Company in March, by its water department’s timeline, and began running its own water service. In July, the city’s historic context says, the council created a Planned Community District for master-planned developments, and McCormick Ranch’s first phase, approved in September, was the first to use it. In October Councilman Ken Murray resigned after the attorney general found a conflict with his state job, and in November Paul Messinger took his seat. The politics are in the 1970s politics chapter.