A resort town can rent culture by the evening; a real city commissions its own. In 1974 the Scottsdale Symphony formed under Irving Fleming, giving a city closing in on the 78,000 residents the next year’s special census would count a resident orchestra to set beside its galleries and its rodeo.
The symphony was one piece of a broader cultural scaling-up at mid-decade. The Civic Center campus Bennie Gonzales had designed in the 1960s was becoming a genuine cultural district: the Center for the Arts would open there in 1975, giving the new orchestra and much else a purpose-built home. For a town whose brand ran to gunfights and stagecoach rides, the pivot mattered — year-round high culture for the people who lived there, not just entertainment for the people passing through.
Beyond the concert hall, the decade’s main project ground on. Greenbelt construction, begun in 1973, was working its way along Indian Bend Wash, and McCormick Ranch was filling with rooftops. And 1974 marked the wind-down of the STEP citizen forums, running since 1965 — fittingly, since their wish lists (parks, the greenbelt, arts funding) had by now largely become the city’s to-do list.