The record keeps no single headline for 1976, which rather suits a year the whole country spent looking backward. The Bicentennial found Scottsdale — a city built on a manufactured 1880s image — better rehearsed at celebrating frontier history than most places with more of it.
The work of the decade rolled on regardless. Greenbelt construction, begun in 1973, was advancing along Indian Bend Wash section by section; McCormick Ranch, selling since 1972, was filling its lakeside lots; and the resort corridor kept thickening along Scottsdale Road toward the Camelback and Mummy Mountain foothills. The special census of 1975 had counted 78,000 people, and the arrow still pointed up.
For the shape of what all this settling-in became, see the 1970s chapter.