Recovery years do their work quietly. In 2011 Scottsdale was in the slow-motion middle of the climb back from the crash: home prices beginning to claw their way up, the Airpark’s empty offices starting to refill with the technology, finance, and healthcare employers that would define the decade’s economy, and Old Town’s nightlife packing into a few bar blocks that by 2012 residents were calling the Entertainment District.
The ribbon-cuttings were small but telling: promoters staged the first Scottsdale Polo Championships at WestWorld in November, and a wave of new rooms — Citizen Public House, Barrio Queen, Roka Akor at Scottsdale Quarter — put the recovery on Old Town’s tables before it showed in the census. The museum Old Town had spent four decades building toward was still an agreement away; the Preserve’s constitutional moment was seven years off. What these months contributed was the turn itself — the point where the numbers stopped getting worse and the shape of a more diversified city, payrolls beside resorts, started to show. The decade’s full story is in the 2010s chapter.