Few years in the archive carry this much freight. At midnight on July 1 the new Scottsdale Fire Department took over from Rural/Metro, ending the private fire contract the town had held since the early 1950s (its own page). In December the Hotel Valley Ho reopened after a roughly $80-million restoration — a building that had spent the early 2000s as a demolition candidate. Westroc Hospitality bought the faded 1956 landmark and rebuilt it around Edward Varney’s original architecture, even adding a tower from the unbuilt original plans. The result instantly re-anchored downtown and is now counted among the country’s premier midcentury-modern hotel restorations (the reopening has its own page). For a city that had bulldozed plenty of its past, saving the 1956 icon was preservation’s best moment in decades.
The same year, the plan that would finally solve south Scottsdale’s Los Arcos problem took shape. The ASU Foundation had bought the dead mall site in May 2004 and sold it to the city, which leased it back; in 2005 the design for an innovation campus at Scottsdale and McDowell Roads was chosen and the site rezoned. SkySong would open in 2008 — into the worst economy in generations, and succeed anyway.
The number that didn’t last
A special census counted 226,395 residents in 2005 — the high-water mark of the boom. The figure captured a city mid-surge: condo towers permitted, home values climbing, construction and finance payrolls swelling alongside tourism. The 2010 census would count fewer people than this, making the 2000s the first decade in city history to end below its mid-decade peak. In 2005 nobody knew that. The Valley Ho’s neon was back on, the SkySong ink was drying, and the leverage underneath it all had three more years to run — the reckoning is in 2008.