What it means
The Greenbelt is the long green stripe down the middle of Scottsdale, about eleven miles of parks, lakes, ballfields, golf courses and paved path along Indian Bend Wash, from the Tempe line at McKellips north past Shea Boulevard. It is where the city rides bikes, walks dogs, fishes the stocked lakes and plays softball under lights. It is also the city’s flood channel. The parks sit below street level, the road crossings are built to pass water, and a few days in a wet year the whole thing fills, connects and drains, exactly as designed. Our Greenbelt park guide covers the parks one by one; the cycling cut-throughs guide covers the ride.
Locals use two names interchangeably. “The Greenbelt” is the civic one, the name on the signs and in the engineering awards. “The Wash” is the neighborhood one, and the Wash entry explains why south Scottsdale says it more. Either way, “I was on the Greenbelt” needs no further directions.
Where you’ll meet it
On a bike, on a map of any south Scottsdale neighborhood, in every real-estate listing that says “backs to the Greenbelt,” and in the weather coverage after a monsoon storm, when the television crews go to the underpasses to film the water.
Where the word came from
The federal answer to Indian Bend Wash was concrete. Beginning in 1959 the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a trapezoidal channel about seven miles long, 125 to 170 feet wide and more than twenty feet deep, running north to south through the middle of a town that had just built its downtown. Residents called it an eyesore, and the city had no money for it in any case.
The alternative came from a landscape architect. On February 8, 1964, Bill Walton published an editorial in the Scottsdale Daily Progress, the paper that became the Scottsdale Progress, proposing what he called a “Scottsdale-style solution”: leave the wash a wash, line it with grass and parks, and let it carry water only when it rained hard enough. He had watched floods and noticed that turf and landscaped ground held up far better than bare soil. The city council appointed him to chair a task force, the task force recommended his idea, and the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt Flood Control Project became the city’s plan rather than the Corps’. The word greenbelt itself was older, a planner’s term for a ring of open land around a city, but Walton’s use, a linear park that is also a floodway, is the one Scottsdale means.
Selling it took two floods. Voters rejected flood-control bonds in 1966. The Labor Day flood of 1970 and then the storm of June 22, 1972, which dropped 3.85 inches of rain in 80 minutes, peaked at 20,000 cubic feet per second and did about $2.6 million of damage, changed their minds; in April 1973 they approved bonds by roughly seven to one (accounts give the amount as $10 million or $19 million). The American Society of Civil Engineers named the project one of the nation’s outstanding engineering accomplishments in 1974, before it was finished. Construction ran in phases through the 1970s and early 1980s, and the city dedicated the $54 million project on April 26 to 28, 1985.
What it is not
It is not a park with one name and one gate. Vista del Camino, Eldorado, Indian School and Chaparral are separate parks, with the lakes, golf courses and school fields between them; the Greenbelt is the whole chain. And it is not the Arizona Canal, which crosses it near Camelback and carries water every day on purpose.
The fine print
The engineering is the quiet kind. The floodway has more than two dozen grade-separated crossings, which is why a cyclist can ride eleven miles and meet almost no traffic and why, in a flood, the underpasses fill first. Lake Marguerite, Chaparral Lake and the Eldorado lakes are detention as well as scenery, and the golf courses are the cheapest floodplain a city can own: grass that pays rent. The whole system was designed so that the hundred-year storm passes through parkland and under bridges rather than through living rooms, and in the big years since, 1993 among them, it has.
The influence is the loud kind. The Greenbelt made Scottsdale’s reputation among planners before the Preserve did; the Arizona chapter of the American Public Works Association named it one of the state’s top ten projects of the twentieth century in 2004, and the lake-and-greenbelt master plans of McCormick Ranch and Scottsdale Ranch are private versions of the same idea, with Lake Serena doing for the McDowell runoff what Chaparral Lake does downstream. Every desert city that has turned a wash into a linear park since has copied it.
The record has small holes. Sources disagree on the 1973 bond amount and on whether construction began in 1967 or the early 1970s; Walton’s editorial is cited by date in Fudala’s history but we have not seen the page itself; and who first put the word “Greenbelt” on an official document, as opposed to in a newspaper, is not recorded. The idea’s author is not in doubt, which is rare here.