A boomtown that grows this fast eventually notices it is bulldozing its own evidence. In 1971, twenty years after incorporation, residents formally organized the Scottsdale Historical Society and picked their first fight: saving 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.
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 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.
Around the preservationists, the decade’s main event was assembling. The city was still measuring the damage from the 1970 Labor Day flood, the Army Corps was drawing its concrete channel, 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.