On paper, the year’s landmark was just paperwork: the city approved the agreement for Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, green-lighting the Old Town project that would open its doors two years later. But the signature carried four decades of build-up. Since the gallery district first took root, Scottsdale had been a town of western art dealers without a western institution — plenty of bronzes for sale, no place charged with keeping the story. The 2013 agreement committed the city to fixing that, two blocks from the hitching posts.
The timing said as much as the deal. By 2013 the recovery was gathering real speed: home prices clawing back, the Airpark refilling with technology, finance, and healthcare employers, the bars of the Entertainment District packing Old Town’s nightlife blocks. A city that three years earlier could manage only a bridge dedication now felt flush enough to commission a museum. That combination — cultural ambition riding economic recovery — is the 2010s in miniature.
The voters were less flush. On November 5 they turned down all four bond questions, $212.1 million for 39 projects. Bob and Kathy Littlefield argued in the city pamphlet that the city already had “the highest per capita debt of any major city in the Valley,” and Councilman Guy Phillips wrote that the council wanted to “feed the pork monsters.” Supporters, including former mayors Sam Campana and Mary Manross, called many of the projects overdue.
The payoff came fast. WestWorld’s covered arenas would open in 2014, and the museum itself in January 2015, soon a Smithsonian affiliate and a perennial pick as the nation’s best of its kind.