The year’s big build was, of all things, a roof. The Tony Nelssen Equidome upgrade gave WestWorld covered arenas, and the difference was more than shade: an events grounds that had always answered to the desert calendar became a year-round machine. Heat and weather stopped being scheduling problems, and the city’s signature spectacles — Barrett-Jackson’s collector-car auction and the Arabian horse show among them — promptly packed the new space.
It was infrastructure spending in the most Scottsdale register: not a freeway or a sewer plant but a climate-controlled venue for horses and collector cars. And it fit the mid-decade pattern. The recovery had gathered real speed, the Airpark was filling with tech and finance payrolls, and the city was reinvesting in the tourism engine that stayed foundational even as the economy diversified around it.
The covered arenas also helped set up the decade’s late-period records — spring training and the WM Phoenix Open posting attendance highs, WestWorld’s calendar running through summer. One year on, the cultural side of the ledger got its own landmark when the Museum of the West opened in Old Town.