After the trifecta of 1987, a year of digestion. In 1988 the Mayo Clinic worked through its first full year of Scottsdale patients, Colorado River water ran through the new CAP plant, and the Phoenix Open played its stadium course by the Princess — three brand-new institutions settling into being simply how the city worked.
The background hum was growth itself. The Airpark around Scottsdale Airport was becoming one of Arizona’s fastest-growing job centers, construction pushed on up the McDowell foothills across the desert annexed earlier in the decade, and downtown’s gallery district kept its Thursday-night ArtWalk rhythm. The population was climbing toward the 130,069 the next census would record. The decade’s last flourishes — bronze Arabians on 5th Avenue among them — arrived in 1989.