The decade opened with the crash still in the room. The census counted 217,385 residents — a figure that actually trailed the boom-era estimates — and the recovery, when it arrived, arrived slowly. Foreclosures were still working through the system, home prices had not begun their climb back, and the Airpark had empty desks. It was not, on paper, a year for ribbon-cuttings.
Scottsdale held one anyway, and characteristically it was for a work of art. On December 11, the city dedicated the Soleri Bridge and Plaza on the Arizona Canal — the only bridge Paolo Soleri ever saw built, completed when the Arcosanti architect was 91. Its twin pylons act as a solar calendar, casting a noon shadow that marks the solstices: the 1885 irrigation ditch that made the farm town possible, recast as an instrument for reading the sun. The bridge finished what the Waterfront had started, turned the canal bank into genuine civic space, and gave Canal Convergence — the city’s signature public-art festival — its stage.
City Hall’s year was spent at the ballot box. In March voters raised the hotel bed tax from 3% to 5% and approved five charter amendments, one of them changing how a candidate wins in the first round. In November they turned down two modest bond questions that no one had argued against in the city pamphlet, a first sign of the skepticism that would run through the decade.
Everything else the decade would be known for still lay ahead: the boom in Old Town’s bar blocks, the museum, the tech payrolls, the Preserve’s last great vote. But the bridge made a fitting overture. A city that had spent the 2000s building a waterfront on a work canal opened its recovery decade by making the canal beautiful on purpose. The whole arc is in the 2010s chapter.