What it means
The Kiva is the room where Scottsdale’s city council meets, and the word has become shorthand for the whole public side of city government. “See you at the Kiva” means see you at Tuesday’s meeting. “Taking it to the Kiva” means showing up to speak. A long night “in the Kiva” means a zoning case went past midnight.
The room itself explains the name. It sits at the center of Bennie Gonzales’ City Hall on the Civic Center: round, sunk below the main floor, lit by stained glass overhead, with no walls or doors separating it from the offices around it. The seven elected officials sit at the bottom. The public sits in tiers above them, looking down.
How the council runs its meetings, who sits where and how to get three minutes at the podium are covered in the mayor and council guide and the taking part guide. This page is about the word.
Where you’ll meet it
On every council agenda (“City Hall Kiva, 3939 N. Drinkwater Boulevard”), in local news coverage of anything contested, in campaign speeches about “the people in the Kiva,” and in the site’s charter guide, where half the arguments at the podium turn out to be about a few pages of the charter.
Where the word came from
A kiva is a ceremonial chamber of the Hopi and other Pueblo peoples, built partly or wholly underground and usually round. The word is Hopi. Archaeologists use it for the round pit rooms of ancestral Pueblo sites across the Four Corners.
Gonzales, a Phoenix-born architect who was one of the first two graduates of Arizona State’s architecture program in 1953, was hired by the city in 1965 and delivered his civic center master plan in 1966. His City Hall put a kiva-style council chamber at the building’s heart, a deliberate nod both to Native architecture and to the idea of government done in the open. City Hall and the library were dedicated on October 11, 1968, and the council has met in the round room ever since. Stained-glass skylights by Glidden Parker of Glassart Studios were part of the original building.
The word was already in the local air. When the businessmen who became the Charros were choosing a name in 1961, “Kivas” was on their list, alongside Vaqueros, Caballeros and Wranglers, before they settled on Charros. Seven years later the city gave the word a permanent address.
What it is not
It is not the Kiva Craft Center, the Fifth Avenue studio complex that the Cherokee designer Lloyd Kiva New opened in 1955. It is not a religious space, and it is worth remembering that for Hopi and Pueblo people a kiva still is one. And it is not the whole building: City Hall is the Gonzales structure; the Kiva is the chamber inside.
The fine print
The building was admired early and well. Harper’s Magazine wrote in December 1969 that the Scottsdale City Hall and Library were “a pair of the most gratifying and under publicized civic buildings in America,” and the project won three American Institute of Architects awards. The Historic American Buildings Survey later documented City Hall, including the stained-glass ceiling over the chamber, for the Library of Congress.
The symbolism has proved durable because the room enforces it. The elected officials sit low, the audience sits above them, and the offices of the city’s staff open straight onto the space. Whatever the council decides, it decides in a fishbowl.
That design is now protected. In June 2023 the council adopted a historic preservation overlay designating City Hall a landmark. No structural changes were proposed; the point, one council member said, was to protect its character so that future repairs match the original architecture. The surrounding Civic Center grounds were rebuilt in a renovation completed the same year.
One small hole in the record: we found no statement in Gonzales’ own words explaining the choice of name. The kiva reading is the one the city, preservationists and architectural writers all give, and the building makes it hard to argue with.