Scottsdale had been a resort town since the guest-ranch days; in 1986 it started becoming a resort metropolis. The Hyatt Regency at Gainey Ranch opened on the old Gainey Arabian horse ranch — white architecture, 27 holes of golf, and a 2.5-acre “water playground” with a white-sand beach and a three-story clock-tower slide. It was not an inn in any sense the old Scottsdale would have recognized: a self-contained village with its own conference economy. The Scottsdale Princess, its rival for the title of flagship, would open the following year, and together the two changed the hospitality industry’s weight class.
Horses got their headquarters the same year. The city leased Horseman’s Park, the horse park it had opened in 1983 on federal land beside the CAP canal, to a private operator, the K-Lin Corporation, which built the covered Equidome. The grounds would grow into WestWorld, the home of the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, an event with local roots running back to the 1950s and the McCormick breeding ranch — and, later, the Barrett-Jackson collector-car auction. For a city whose two ruling obsessions were horses and spectacle, WestWorld was less a new idea than a permanent address for an old one.
The year’s last arrival was the one that would draw the biggest crowds. In December the TPC Scottsdale Stadium Course opened on federal land the city held, in the empty desert north of Bell Road, purpose-built with mounded galleries for a hundred thousand spectators; the Phoenix Open would tee off there in January 1987. (Pat Mathiesen’s bronze “One with the Eagle” at the Airpark entrance came later: Scottsdale Public Art, which owns it, gives its completion as 1989.) The politics turned over too. On March 25 voters threw out all three council incumbents on the ballot, Jean Black, Diane Cusack and Billie Gentry, by nearly two to one, and seated Sam Campana, Bill Soderquist and Myron Deibel. The council went from three women to one, and the one, Campana, would be mayor a decade later. In February voters had approved $38 million in bonds to buy the Phoenix water lines inside the city, and in August the council named a citizen commission to rewrite the charter, the start of the 1988 term-limits vote. The 1980s politics chapter has the decade’s elections.
Sandwiched between the resort debut and the institutional windfall to come, 1986 reads like a staging year: the events calendar under construction, the resorts filling, the city assembling the pieces. Then came the trifecta of 1987.