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 numbers told the rest. Census-eve estimates put the population near 130,000, on land that annexation had stretched to roughly 185 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.