The corridor across the freeway
The aquarium was the boldest move yet in a build-out the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community had been running for years. Along its Loop 101 frontage — the freeway edge facing Scottsdale — the Community had assembled an entertainment corridor piece by piece: Talking Stick Resort, the Salt River Fields spring training complex, Butterfly Wonderland. Each addition pulled more of the Valley’s visitors to the east side of the freeway. OdySea raised the ambition an order of magnitude: a full-scale ocean attraction, opened to Labor Day weekend crowds, in one of the driest metropolitan areas in the country.
The neighbors’ economies had been entangled from the start — the relationship runs back to the wagon era, when trade wagons tied up at Pima Plaza in the young town. What the 101 corridor did was formalize the entanglement at metropolitan scale. Scottsdale’s resorts and its tourism machine delivered the visitors; the Community’s corridor gave them somewhere new to spend the afternoon; the freeway that legally divides the two governments functioned, in practice, as their shared main street.
What followed
The corridor kept growing after opening day — Great Wolf Lodge joined the lineup — and the aquarium settled in as one of the region’s steadiest draws, the kind of attraction that fills the hot months when golf and patios go quiet. For Scottsdale, the lesson of September 3 was that its destination economy no longer stopped at the city line, and had no reason to want it to.
There was also something fitting in the symbolism. Scottsdale exists because of water moved through the desert — the 1885 canal that made the farm town possible — and its neighbor now ran two million gallons of it as pure spectacle. The desert metropolis had come a long way from irrigation ditches. The rest of the year is at 2016, and the decade’s arc is in the 2010s chapter.