No other twelve months in Scottsdale’s modern history landed as many permanent institutions as this one. In a single span the city gained the Mayo Clinic’s third campus, and its second outside Minnesota, its own supply of Colorado River water, and the stadium golf course that would host the biggest tournament crowd on earth. Each would have headlined a decade on its own; together they made 1987 the city’s great institutional vintage.
The Mayo opening — June 29, chosen for the 126th anniversary of Dr. Will Mayo’s birth — capped years of civic courtship and anchored a medical economy that grew to rival tourism itself. It has a day page of its own.
The water and the golf
The least photogenic 1987 story aged the best. The city’s CAP treatment plant came online, delivering Central Arizona Project water lifted from the Colorado River and diversifying supply beyond the Salt River Project and groundwater. Few noticed at the time; decades later, when the river’s shortages arrived, that early hedge — paired with conservation — was the reason Scottsdale held steady.
The loudest story was golf. On January 22 the Phoenix Open teed off at the new TPC Scottsdale Stadium Course (its own page), purpose-built beside the site of the Princess resort for galleries measured in the hundreds of thousands. The January tournament would grow into “The People’s Open” — the best-attended event in the sport — with its 16th hole enclosed into golf’s rowdiest room. The Princess, which the city had picked through a national search for the land beside the course, was topped off on March 3 and opened late in the year. Between Mayo, CAP, TPC, the Princess and the horse park the city had opened in 1983, the modern city’s full calendar and infrastructure snapped into place — the high-water mark of the Drinkwater decade.
City Hall spent the year rearranging how the city governed itself. On April 6 the council abolished the Fine Arts Commission it had created in 1967 and hired a new nonprofit, the Scottsdale Arts Council, to manage the arts, with a small city Curatorial Board kept over the collection, according to the city’s board records; the arrangement is the root of today’s Scottsdale Arts. On November 2 it sent fifteen charter amendments to the February ballot, every one its citizen review commission had proposed, at the mayor’s suggestion. Voters decided them on February 16, 1988.