Two Scottsdales traded places this year. Along the Arizona Canal south of Fashion Square, the Waterfront towers climbed — the city’s first true high-rise condominiums, rising over the 1885 irrigation ditch that had made the town possible and then been ignored for 120 years. Calling it a waterfront was one of the great straight-faced marketing triumphs in Arizona real estate, and it worked: shops, restaurants, and a skyline where the West’s Most Western Town used to keep its plumbing.
Meanwhile Rawhide, the western theme park, packed up its gunfights and decamped south to Gila River land. The symbolism required no editorial: the cowboy version of Scottsdale was literally leaving town just as the vertical, velvet-rope version hit full stride. Old Town’s club district reached peak form around the same blocks that sold bolo ties by day, and the rebuilt spring-training stadium kept the events machine humming.
The Waterfront’s bet on the canal outlived the boom that built it. Paolo Soleri’s pedestrian bridge would cap the district in 2010, and the banks now host Canal Convergence, the city’s signature public-art festival — a straight conceptual line from the dig crews of the 1880s to light sculpture. But in 2006 the towers were mostly evidence of leverage, and the leverage had about two years left. The whole climb and fall is in the 2000s chapter.
The year’s politics ran through low-turnout elections. Only 13.93 percent of voters cast ballots on March 14, when Tony Nelssen and Wayne Ecton won council seats; Bob Littlefield beat Councilman Kevin Osterman in the May runoff. On January 22 speed cameras began operating on the Loop 101. In September voters rejected, 16,781 to 15,543, the council’s unanimous December 2005 rewrite of the sexually oriented business code, which would have banned nudity and kept dancers four feet from customers; the city’s two cabarets had forced the referendum, and the older rules stayed. The 2000s politics chapter has the rest.