Why it matters
Scottsdale built a library before it could afford one. In the summer of 1955, four years after the town incorporated, volunteers opened a reading room in the Adobe House on Second Street, a community center with no air conditioning. They had about 300 donated books, and the doors were open two hours a morning, two mornings a week. Wikipedia names the women who started it as Lou Ann Noel and Beth Fielder. Within six years the town had taken the library over, and within thirteen it had a white sculptural building by Bennie Gonzales facing City Hall across a lagoon, the other half of the Civic Center.
The library also matters because it holds Scottsdale’s memory. In 1973 it opened a Southwest Room to collect local and regional history. That room became the Scottsdale Room and, since 2019, the Scottsdale Heritage Connection: the Scottsdale Progress, photographs, yearbooks and recorded interviews. Nearly every hard question about the old town, from who lived on the blocks the Civic Center replaced to what the school board decided in 1955, ends up there.
Where to find it today
Four locations. The main Civic Center Library is at 3839 N. Drinkwater Blvd. in Old Town. Mustang is at Shea Boulevard and 90th Street, Arabian on McDowell Mountain Ranch Road, and Appaloosa at Scottsdale and Pinnacle Peak roads, on ground that was Rawhide. There are also 24-hour pickup lockers at the Granite Reef Senior Center and Appaloosa. The original Adobe House is gone. The Little Red Schoolhouse, the library’s second home, is now the Scottsdale Historical Museum.
How it started
The town that incorporated in 1951 had about 2,000 people, less than a square mile and almost no staff. It kept its offices in the Rural Fire Company’s hall at first, then from 1955 in the 1909 schoolhouse on Main Street. A library was not on the town’s list, so residents did it themselves. The Adobe House at 315 E. Second Street (the address under the old numbering) served as a community center, and that summer it became a library too. The house later burned, and the city’s records don’t say when.
The volunteers organized the Friends of the Scottsdale Public Library around the turn of 1959, with Virg Hill as first president, to raise money, gather books and push for a real building. The town moved quickly. In 1960 it took responsibility for the library and hired a professionally trained librarian, and when the town offices left the Little Red Schoolhouse for the Triangle Building on Indian School Road that year, the library moved into the old school. In April 1961, as Scottsdale was becoming a charter city, the council passed an ordinance establishing a public library and taking over its financing. Volunteers, the city’s history notes, “continued to be important to its operation.”
The decisions that locked it in
The town takes it over, 1960–61. The library could have stayed a volunteer reading room. Putting it on the town budget made it permanent, with its future set by council votes every year.
The Civic Center, 1965–68. In January 1965 the citizen STEP committees made their first recommendations, and building a library was among them, alongside a civic center, an airport and more parks. The city hired Bennie Gonzales, and voters approved the $2.4 million Civic Center bond two to one on September 28, 1966. The library went up as City Hall’s twin, both buildings white and modeled on adobe, with stained-glass skylights by Glidden Parker’s Glassart Studios, a lagoon and a bridge between them. They were dedicated together on October 11, 1968. The library opened to the public on November 26 with about 37,000 square feet. The year-old Fine Arts Commission began hanging exhibits on its mezzanine while it campaigned for a city art museum. Renovations in 1987 and 1995, by Salt River Stories’ account, took it to 103,000 square feet.
Local history, 1973. On May 15, 1973, the Southwest Room was dedicated. The Historical Society, then only a few years old, had saved one building. The library took on the paper: clippings, photographs, books and maps. For decades the collection could be seen only by appointment. In 2017 the re-formed Friends launched a $500,000 campaign to give it a permanent public home, and the Scottsdale Heritage Connection opened in 2019.
Branches, 1987–2009. As the city spread north, the library followed with branches named for horse breeds. Mustang opened June 13, 1987, and was then the largest branch library in the state. Palomino (1995) and Arabian (1996) opened as shared libraries on Scottsdale Unified school campuses. Arabian got its own building, designed to recall a slot canyon, on September 20, 2007, and Architectural Digest later listed it among the world’s most futuristic libraries. Appaloosa opened November 4, 2009, on part of the old Rawhide site, LEED Gold certified. Palomino went back to being a school-only library in 2020.
The years it nearly ended
Honestly, none that we found. The library has never faced a documented threat of closure. Its crises were about who would carry it. The volunteers carried it until about 1960, when it became too much for them, and the town took it on. The first Friends group dissolved in 1970, after the new building opened, “feeling its goals had been achieved,” and for fifteen years the library had no independent fundraising arm. The Friends came back in 1985 as a nonprofit. Since then they have paid for things the city budget doesn’t: the Knowasis teen center, from a $500,000 campaign begun in 2003 that opened in 2006, and the Heritage Connection. The shared-use branches were the one arrangement that came apart. Palomino depended on an agreement with the school district, and when that was phased out in May 2020, the public lost the branch.
The library’s moves left damage behind elsewhere. When it left the Little Red Schoolhouse in 1968, the empty building went onto the demolition list for the Civic Center expansion. It survived only because the new Scottsdale Historical Society raised the money to save it and the Chamber of Commerce agreed to move in.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
In 1955 the purpose was simple: lend donated books to a town with no library. In 2026 the library describes itself as fostering “learning, discovery and skill enhancement” through collections, programs, online resources and technology: a makerspace, computers, culture passes, a seed library and drive-up windows at the branches. That is a long way from 300 books, but it has moved with what residents asked for, and the core of lending books and offering a public room has held. The library has adapted rather than drifted. The real addition is the archive. Since 1973 it has taken on the job of remembering the town, a job no one assigned it in 1955.
Who the record leaves out
The women who started it. The volunteers of 1955 appear in the record only as “volunteers” in the city’s history. Their names, Lou Ann Noel and Beth Fielder, appear only in an uncited encyclopedia entry. The Friends’ list of presidents from 1959 to 1970 includes “Mrs. H.D. Multer” and “Mrs. Larry Levenberg,” women recorded under their husbands’ names, which is how the town’s civic work of that era was credited.
The neighbors who made room. The Civic Center Library stands on a twenty-acre site where, as the city’s own historic context puts it, “existing homes or other prior development… were demolished.” The 1970s expansion of the mall went through the town’s Mexican-American neighborhood. In 2019 a descendant of those families described the outcome in one sentence: “Born and raised, and were here until they tore their houses down and put up the City Hall, library and everything. The neighborhood was gone.” The barrio note tells that story. The irony is that the families’ photographs and the Progress clippings about their relocation are now kept in the library that was built on their old neighborhood, and the library has made them easier to find than ever.
The staff. The first professional librarian, hired around 1960, isn’t named in any source we found, and neither are the directors between then and now.
What it didn’t have to become
The library didn’t have to become Scottsdale’s archive. A town that formed a historical society in 1968 could have left the past to that society and its museum in the schoolhouse. Instead, from 1973 on, the public library collected the newspapers, photographs and yearbooks, and it now makes them available to anyone who walks in. Most of the open questions on this site, including how the barrio was cleared, when the school board chose its Native school names, and how Scottsdale High lost its fight with the wrecking ball, will be answered from that collection if they are answered at all.