Some city projects open as buildings; this one opened as a thesis statement. On January 15, Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West welcomed its first visitors in Old Town — two stories and 43,000 square feet devoted to the art, culture, and history of the American West, from nineteen states to western Canada and Mexico.
The opening carried a satisfying symmetry. “The West’s Most Western Town” had been coined as pure marketing back in the 1950s — and it worked magnificently — but for sixty years the brand ran ahead of the scholarship. Western Spirit gave the slogan an institution: a serious museum two blocks from the hitching posts, capping four decades of Old Town’s evolution from souvenir row to genuine arts district. Smithsonian affiliation followed, along with perennial rankings among the nation’s best western museums.
The museum also marked where the city stood in its arc. Mid-decade Scottsdale could afford cultural ambition again: the Airpark was thick with tech and finance payrolls, WestWorld had just added its covered arenas, and the next year would put the Southwest’s largest aquarium on the corridor next door — the story of 2016. The recovery decade had found its confident middle, and it chose to spend the confidence on the West.