The last year of the boomtown era passed with a closing rather than an opening — the Jokake Inn, the painter’s tearoom that had grown into winter Scottsdale’s defining resort since 1926, wound down its hotel operations below Camelback — which is its own kind of statement: a city that had spent three decades in a permanent state of announcement now had years when the work was consolidation. The Greenbelt continued its staged build-out along Indian Bend Wash. The resort corridor kept climbing Scottsdale Road. The 1980 census stood months away from counting 88,412 people — in a place that had incorporated in 1951 with about 2,000.
The era closing with 1979 had made two wagers and won both: that a manufactured western identity could power a real economy, and that growth could be designed rather than merely endured. What came next was a test of scale — resorts the size of villages, the airpark becoming a jobs engine, and a beloved mayor whose name would end up all over the 1980s. For the full three-decade arc, see the boomtown era.
In politics, former councilman Paul Messinger won a special election to the Arizona House on September 11, succeeding the late Rep. David Kret, and served until 1985. The decade’s politics are in the 1970s politics chapter.