The decade signed off in bronze. The Bronze Horse Fountain — Arabians at full gallop — was dedicated on 5th Avenue in 1989, putting the city’s two ruling obsessions, art and horses, into a single piece of street furniture. It joined the airport’s “One with the Eagle” in a public-art collection that was spreading well beyond the gallery walls, backed by the percent-for-art funding that made Scottsdale a national model.
Downtown also got a keeper of its past: a small historical museum opened in 1989, the modest prelude to the Little Red Schoolhouse museum that would follow in 1991 — the payoff of a preservation campaign the Historical Society had been running since the early 1970s. A city built on reinvention was finally curating its originals.
The voters closed the decade with a large bond election. On November 7 they approved ten of eleven bond questions, $287 million in all, for roads, storm drains, water and sewer plants, parks and libraries, and $8.425 million to rebuild Scottsdale Stadium, which the council had put on the ballot by a 4 to 3 vote, by former councilman Charlie Smith’s account, over worries it would sink the package. It passed with 72 percent. Only Pima Road lost, by 323 votes. They also approved a 0.2 percent sales tax for transportation. At HorseWorld, soon to be renamed WestWorld, Barrett-Jackson and the Arabian Horse Show arrived, and in January the city’s Curatorial Board was dissolved, ending the 1988 argument over who picks the public art.
The numbers told the rest. Census-eve estimates put the population near 130,000, on land that annexation had stretched to about 184 square miles, with bulldozers working steadily up the McDowell bajadas. The Drinkwater build-out was complete; the question of whether the mountains themselves should be next now had an audience. Answering it — with a land trust, then ballot measures, then a checkbook — is the story of the 1990s.