Fowler McCormick — grandson of both Cyrus McCormick and John D. Rockefeller — and his wife Anne had bred some of the world’s finest Arabian horses on 4,236 acres northeast of town, land Scottsdale annexed in 1967. After Anne’s death in 1969 the ranch was sold to Kaiser-Aetna in the summer of 1970 for $12.1 million and handed to planners. On March 16, 1972 the Palm Course opened and the result went on sale: McCormick Ranch, one of Arizona’s first true master-planned communities.
The pitch was startling for a desert town: man-made lakes, golf fairways as common ground, greenbelt paths knitted into the wash system, housing arranged around water. It felt revolutionary in 1972 and would be debated forever after, but it set the template — planned, amenitized, green — that Scottsdale’s later growth would follow. The first residents, Pat and Ted Stump, moved in on Via del Futuro on January 12, 1973, to a neighborhood with no mail delivery, no garbage pickup and no phones. The ranch’s pedigree survived the subdivision, too: donated ranch land around Guy Stillman’s miniature railroad became the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, and the Arabian horse legacy carried on in the show that remains the world’s largest.
The year’s decisive event came from the sky. On June 22 a storm dropped nearly four inches of rain in eighty minutes and Indian Bend Wash tore through south Scottsdale, destroying seventeen homes — the “seventy-year flood” that ended the argument between the Army Corps’ concrete channel and the citizens’ grass one. The next April voters approved the $10 million Greenbelt bond, seven to one by the city’s own account; the day has its own page. Downtown, a smaller transaction mattered nearly as much: the Chamber of Commerce took the Little Red Schoolhouse on a 25-year, $1-a-year lease, securing the rescue the Old Timers had begun in 1968. In the same twelve months, Scottsdale committed to inventing its future and keeping its past — which is a fair summary of the whole boomtown era.
At City Hall the year’s big document was Alternate Futures for the City of Scottsdale, the published record of seminars the council held with the Brookings Institution. Mayor Bud Tims wrote in it that some citizens wanted “artificial limits” on growth but that the city was unlikely to stop growing and “must responsibly prepare for its consequences”; the conferees proposed no more than three homes per undeveloped acre. The city also annexed the Taliesin West area that spring, the city’s historic context says. The politics are in the 1970s politics chapter.