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Landmark day • Thursday, October 23, 1975

October 23, 1975: The Center for the Arts Opens

A cowboy-town city council opens a purpose-built performing-arts hall on the lawn beside City Hall — and the West's Most Western Town becomes a town with a stage.

Illustrated plaque for October 23, 1975 in Scottsdale history SALOON TRADING POST MOTEL OCTOBER 23 1975 BOOMTOWN

What happened

The Scottsdale Center for the Arts (today the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts) opened its doors on the southeastern edge of the Civic Center with a concert by Roger Miller. Designed by Bennie Gonzales, whose City Hall and library had opened on the same campus in 1968, the building's sculptural white-stucco forms wrapped an 800-seat theater, galleries, and a cinema. A businessmen's group formed in 1978 to raise money for it, the Scottsdale Men's League, would launch the Scottsdale Culinary Festival.

Why it matters

The Center gave the year-old Scottsdale Symphony and the town's whole arts ambition a permanent home, and it made the Civic Center a cultural campus rather than a government one. Scottsdale's later identity as an arts city — the galleries, SMoCA, the Museum of the West — descends from this building.

Finishing Gonzales’s campus

When the city hired Bennie Gonzales in 1965 to design a civic center, the plan was always for more than a city hall. Gonzales’s 1966 master plan laid out a mall — lawns, fountains, and low sculptural buildings in white stucco and adobe-inflected forms — with government at one end and culture at the other. The City Hall and library opened first, in 1968, and became instant icons. The arts building waited seven years for money and momentum; both arrived in the early 1970s, as McCormick Ranch sold, the Greenbelt rose, and the town’s cultural boosters organized a symphony with no hall to play in.

On October 23, 1975, the Center for the Arts opened on the southeastern edge of the mall. Gonzales gave it the same vocabulary as City Hall — thick sculpted walls, deep-set openings, forms that read as both modern and Southwestern — around an 800-seat theater, gallery space, and a small cinema. The opening act was Roger Miller, which was exactly right for a city that still called itself the West’s Most Western Town and was quietly becoming something more.

What the building did

The Center immediately became the town’s cultural address. The symphony had a stage; the Scottsdale Arts Festival had a lawn; touring theater and chamber music had a room that did not belong to a hotel. The Scottsdale Men’s League, formed in 1978 to raise money for it, started the food event that became the Scottsdale Culinary Festival, which the League billed as the longest-running festival of its kind and which ran until 2019. Over the following decades the campus grew around the building — SMoCA in a converted cinema next door in 1999, the renovated Civic Center in 2023 — and the arts district that spread into Old Town from here gave the city the museums and galleries it sells today.

The building was renamed the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts and remains Scottsdale Arts’ main stage. The year’s other business — the East Shea annexation and a special census of 78,000 — is at 1975, and the decade’s arc in the 1970s chapter.