Few years in the archive carry this much freight. 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. 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 city and the ASU Foundation struck the deal that would finally solve south Scottsdale’s Los Arcos problem: the dead mall site at Scottsdale and McDowell Roads would become an innovation campus. 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.