The decade went out on a split screen. Downtown, in a converted cinema, the striking new Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art opened — 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.
And along the eastern edge, the future was under construction. Loop 101 Pima Freeway crews raced up the city’s flank, opening the decade’s last land rush along the corridor. When the freeway completed in 2001 it would put the Airpark, north Scottsdale, and the resort corridor minutes from the whole metro, and rewire 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.