The decade went out on a split screen. Downtown, in a converted cinema, the striking new Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art opened in February (its own page) — a serious anchor for the arts economy that galleries and ArtWalk had been building since the 1970s, and proof the city’s cultural ambitions had outgrown cowboy kitsch without quite abandoning it. On the other screen ran the opposite arc: Los Arcos Mall, south Scottsdale’s 1969 shopping center, faded toward closure as its anchors and customers finished their migration north to Fashion Square.
The ballot had the year’s drama. In May and again in November voters backed a public financing district for a Phoenix Coyotes arena on the Los Arcos site, over opponents who called it “corporate welfare at its worst” (the plan died anyway in 2001; see the Los Arcos arena). On September 7 they approved $200 million in Preserve bonds by better than three to one and, on the same ballot, rejected the Canals of Scottsdale, a plan to rebuild downtown around waterways that Mayor Campana backed and Save Old Scottsdale called “ANOTHER CORPORATE WELFARE GIVEAWAY.”
And along the eastern edge, the future was under construction. Loop 101 Pima Freeway crews raced up the city’s flank, and the first Scottsdale stretch opened late in the year. When the last Scottsdale segment opened in April 2002 the freeway put the Airpark, north Scottsdale and the resort corridor minutes from the whole metro, and rewired the city’s geography for good.
The numbers closed the ledger on a remarkable ten years: from 130,069 people to the 202,705 the 2000 census would count — better than 55 percent growth — achieved while the city was buying its own mountains. Scottsdale entered the new millennium with a preserve, a luxury mall, a contemporary art museum, a dead mall to solve, and a freeway about to change everything. How all five played out is the 2000s chapter.