Scottsdale politics and society, decade by decade

The chapters

11 of 12 written. The years before 1912 share one chapter, because the record is thin; every decade from incorporation on has its own. The rest are in research and appear here as they are finished.

1. 1888–1911

   A Colony Without a Government: Scottsdale Politics Before Statehood, 1888–1911

   Twenty-three years with no town council: a county board, a school district, a water users' association and a chaplain in the territorial House did what governing there was.

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2. 1910s

   Statehood, the Vote and the Loan Quota: Scottsdale Politics in the 1910s

   A new state voted in women, voted out liquor and sent a farm town's quotas to the war, while Scottsdale itself was run from a schoolhouse, a store and a land office.

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3. 1920s

   The Town Gets a Judge: Scottsdale Politics in the 1920s

   With cotton in free fall, a farm town that still had no government chartered a bank, organized a chamber, talked the county into giving it a court and voted itself a high school.

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4. 1930–1951

   A Town Run by a Club: Scottsdale Politics from the Depression to Incorporation, 1930–1951

   Twenty-one years without a council: a county, a school board, a justice court and, from 1947, a chamber of commerce that ran the town until it asked the county to make it one.

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5. 1950s

   A Government from Nothing: Scottsdale Politics in the 1950s

   A half-square-mile town of cafe owners and blacksmiths runs itself on charity balls and a fire contract, loses the land race to Phoenix, and votes itself a charter that a court throws out.

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6. 1960s

   Home Rule and the Race North: Scottsdale Politics in the 1960s

   A town of ten thousand becomes a city of nearly seventy thousand, writes its own rules, and asks its residents what kind of place it should be. Not everyone it asked got an answer.

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7. 1970s

   Growth on Purpose: Scottsdale Politics in the 1970s

   A city that had planned itself through the 1960s writes the plans into law, trades density for a floodway, and finds out in court where its powers end.

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8. 1980s

   Drinkwater's City: Scottsdale Politics in the 1980s

   A popular mayor, a council that turned over, and a city that took the northern desert, then had to decide what to do with it.

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9. 1990s

   The Referendum Decade: Scottsdale Politics in the 1990s

   A city that settled its arguments at the ballot box: twenty-odd elections in ten years, over mountains, density, buses, canals and a hockey arena.

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10. 2000s

    The Canvass Decade: Scottsdale Politics in the 2000s

    Mary Manross's decade at City Hall, settled at the ballot box and ended by 590 votes.

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11. 2010s

    No, No, Then Yes: Scottsdale Politics in the 2010s

    Jim Lane's decade at City Hall, when voters said no until the council asked the way they wanted.

    Read the chapter →
12. 2020s

    In research.

The arguments that keep coming back

Every argument in the chapters, filed by what it was really about, so the same fight can be followed from one decade to the next.

Campaigns and movements

The campaigns, causes and fights with enough record for a page of their own.

• Controversy · 1956–1964

  The annexation war with Phoenix

  Two cities, one desert, eight years of competing petitions

• Controversy · 1962–1978

  The sign fight

  No new billboards from 1962; a sixteen-year argument over the old ones

• Movement · 1964–1973

  The greenbelt fight

  A city talks the Army Corps of Engineers out of a concrete ditch

• Controversy · 1982–1991

  The TPC land deal

  Scottsdale built a horse park and the Phoenix Open's stadium course on federal flood-control land it paid nothing to use, and Congress asked why

• Controversy · 1992–1998

  The Salt River gaming compact

  Sixteen tribes had casino compacts; the governor refused the Community across Pima Road. It took a statewide vote and the Arizona Supreme Court

• Campaign · 1996–1999

  The Canals of Scottsdale

  A developer's plan to rebuild the empty Galleria and 27 acres of downtown around waterways and museums, backed by the mayor and defeated by the voters

• Campaign · 1998–2001

  The Los Arcos arena

  A Coyotes hockey arena on the dead Los Arcos mall in south Scottsdale won two elections in 1999, then lost its team to Glendale

• Campaign · 2002–2005

  The fire-department initiatives

  Firefighters asked Scottsdale to replace its fifty-year private fire contract with a city department. Voters said no, nearly two to one; six months later the company quit

• Campaign · 2002–2004

  The Los Arcos referendum

  After the arena left, the same developer asked for a 40-year tax share to build a Walmart, a Sam's Club and a Lowe's. The council said yes, 4 to 3; the voters said no by the widest margin of the decade

• Controversy · 2010–2018

  The Desert Discovery Center fight

  A thirty-year plan for a desert nature center at the Preserve's front door, a council that would not send it to the voters, and a petition that wrote a public vote into the charter

• Campaign · 2019–2020

  The Southbridge Two referendum

  The council approved towers up to 150 feet on the canal by 4 to 3; Old Town property owners filed 17,000 signatures; the same four members repealed their vote rather than face the ballot

The people

Everyone the chapters name, and every profile of a mayor, council member, organizer or editor, by era. A chapter’s own list says what each person did in its years.

The social history

The long-form notes on who organized, who was kept out, and the communities that built their own institutions, in the order of the years they cover.

• 1909–1930

  The Women Who Organized Early Scottsdale: Sewing Circles, the PTA, Liberty Loans and the Woman's Club

  Scottsdale's histories name the men who founded the town, ran the store and sat on the first council. The clubs that raised the money, fed the schoolchildren and kept the civic calendar full were mostly run by women. The 1909 sewing circle, the Literary Club, the 1917 Parent-Teacher Association, the wartime ladies' committee, the Woman's Club and the women who built the mission fund, with what the record shows and where it goes quiet.

• 1897–1919

  Health Seekers and the 1918 Flu: The Graves Ranch, the Sleeping Cottages, and the Winter the Sick Came to Scottsdale

  Scottsdale was sold as a cure before it was sold as a resort. Edward Graves turned a farmhouse at Scottsdale and Indian School roads into a tuberculosis retreat in 1910, and by 1918 the town's winter trade ran on sleeping cottages and dry air. Then the Spanish influenza arrived. What the town's own newspaper columns recorded, week by week, and what they leave out.

• 1928–1956

  Coronado School: The Segregated Classrooms Inside Scottsdale's Little Red Schoolhouse

  From 1928 the town's 1909 brick schoolhouse was the Coronado School, and at some point it became the school where Scottsdale sent its Mexican-American children while the new grammar school down Second Street, later Loloma, took the Anglo children. Three sources describe it three ways. What each one says, when it ended, and which records would settle the rest.

• 1926–today

  Our Lady of Perpetual Help: The Parish That Outgrew the Old Adobe Mission

  Everyone knows the 1933 adobe church on Brown Avenue. Fewer know what its congregation built next: a parish in 1949, a school staffed by Pennsylvania nuns in 1956, a Yaqui ministry on 64th Street, the Miracle of the Roses, and the 1978 church on Miller Road where the barrio's descendants still meet. The parish's history from its own records, where the accounts disagree, and how to visit.

• 1950s

  Why Scottsdale's Schools and Parks Have Native Names: Tonto, Kiva, Paiute, Apache and a 1950s School Board Rule

  Pima, Navajo, Yavapai, Kiva, Tonalea, Paiute Park, Apache Park: south Scottsdale's map reads like a roll call of Native nations and places. The usual explanation is developers looking for Western color. The better evidence points to the school board, which decided in the 1950s to give its new schools Native names, and to parks that took the names of the schools beside them. Here is what's confirmed, what's likely, and where the rest of the answer is filed.

• 1950s

  Scottsdale and the Color Line: Pumpsie Green, the 'Restricted' Resorts and the Club Built in Answer

  In the 1950s the town that sold Western hospitality also decided who got it. In 1959 the Safari Hotel turned away the Red Sox's first Black player. Camelback Inn ran a 'restricted' policy against Jewish guests until the Anti-Defamation League made it a national story. Jewish families built their own club, which is now Orange Tree. The sources, the gaps, and the places to stand.

• 1966–1975

  The Barrio Under the Civic Center: How Scottsdale Cleared Its Mexican Neighborhood, 1966–1975

  The lawn with the LOVE sculpture was a neighborhood. Scottsdale's Mexican-American families lived east of Brown Avenue from the cotton years until federal urban renewal money bought, cleared and rebuilt 18.5 acres for the Civic Center expansion. What the city's own history admits, what survived, and the questions only the archives can answer.

• 1957–today

  Jewish Scottsdale: From a Paradise Valley Living Room to the Shea Corridor

  In the 1950s the resorts turned Jewish guests away. Over the next fifty years Jewish families built their own institutions here: a Reform temple founded in a newspaper publisher's living room in 1966, the congregations that followed, a $34.5 million community campus on Scottsdale Road, and a stretch of Shea Boulevard the Progress calls 'religion row.' Dates, addresses and the parts nobody has written down.

• 1988–2024

  LGBTQ Scottsdale: BS West, the Unity Pledge and the Seven-Year Road to a Nondiscrimination Ordinance

  For 35 years an Old Town gay bar filled two floors on Fifth Avenue, and for most of that time it was legal in Scottsdale to fire someone for being gay. The 2014 Unity Pledge, the 2015 ordinance that never got a vote, Ordinance No. 4497 of April 20, 2021, the bar's last night in January 2024, and how much of the record is still missing.