Horses got their headquarters in 1986. Development began on WestWorld’s Horseman’s Park, the north-Scottsdale grounds that would grow into the home of the world’s largest 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 other 1986 arrival was cast in bronze. “One with the Eagle,” Pat Mathiesen’s sculpture, went up at the entrance to Scottsdale Airport — the era’s confidence in monument form, greeting the corporate jets that were making the surrounding Airpark one of Arizona’s fastest-growing job centers. Public art was spreading beyond the downtown galleries and becoming civic policy, a habit that would give the city its percent-for-art program and a national reputation.
Sandwiched between the mega-resort debuts of 1985 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.