What is the Civic Center Library?
It’s the other half of the Civic Center. City Hall gets the attention, the kiva and the photographs. The library across the lagoon is the building people actually use, and it has better art.
Bennie Gonzales designed both buildings together. They were dedicated on October 11, 1968, and the library opened to the public on November 26. A Salt River Stories history of the building calls it a “contemporary interpretation of local forms and materials”: double-thick walls, deeply recessed windows and a pale exterior, built of cement block under a white mortar wash. Inside, the plan was almost entirely open, with areas divided naturally rather than walled off. It opened at about 37,000 square feet. The same history puts the library it replaced, in the Little Red Schoolhouse, at 2,400. After renovations in 1987 and 1995 it covers about 103,000.
Three things make it worth a visit even if you don’t need a book. First, the public art built into the building: Larry Kirkland’s swift-shaped opening in the entrance roof and 20-foot gilded feather, Mags Harries’s five sun-driven columns in the reading room, and a wall drawing by Norman Rockwell’s son. Second, the Scottsdale Heritage Connection, the city’s local-history collection, open to walk-in visitors since 2019. Third, in an Arizona summer, it’s free and cool and right in the middle of Old Town.
How to visit
Hours. As of fall 2026, the building is open Monday–Thursday 9 a.m.–7 p.m., Friday 10 a.m.–6 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday 1–5 p.m. All city libraries close on library holidays and staff days, which are listed on the library’s locations page. It’s free. There are 73 public computers.
Parking. Curbside hold-pickup spaces are east of the building on North 75th Street, just north of East Second Street. For anything longer, park in the free Old Town garages and walk. The Civic Center grounds are the better way in anyway.
See the art in this order.
- Imagination Gives Us Wings (Larry Kirkland, 1994), at the entrance. A swift is cut into the roof as an oculus. As the sun moves, the bird’s shadow crosses the entry walls and looks like it’s flying. Below it hangs a 20-foot gilded feather, falling toward a granite inkwell on the lower level. The inkwell carries a line that Scottsdale Public Art attributes to Emily Dickinson: “So many possibilities; let imagination give us wings.” Kirkland’s other commissions include Penn Station in New York and Kansai International Airport in Osaka. Come on a sunny morning.
- Pillars of Thought (Mags Harries, 1994), in the main reading room. Five large columns run down the central aisle, each topped by a face in silhouette. They project light and shadow onto rounded screens in the clerestories, using sunlight sent through water- and wind-driven reflectors. The patterns stand for different ways of thinking, structured or random, focused or divergent. Harries designed them to move slowly enough that a reader is aware of them without being distracted. Harries, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, also made Arizona Falls in Phoenix with Lajos Héder.
- TODOS (Jarvis Rockwell, 2007), a wall drawing. The title is Spanish for “everything.” Rockwell, Norman Rockwell’s son, started making wall drawings in his kitchen in North Adams, Massachusetts, after a cancer diagnosis. He drew this one during a five-month Scottsdale residency that began with MAYA II, a pyramid covered in toys from his collection, shown at the Center for the Performing Arts from November 2006 to March 2007. When it was made, Scottsdale Public Art said it was only the third publicly accessible Rockwell drawing in the country. The lines are fine and the colors pale, so stand close.
- Freedom (Robert Winslow, 1977), outside at the northwest corner. Alabama limestone carved with only a hammer and chisel. The Dunlap family gave it in honor of their three children, Robin, Lily and Holly. It went into storage during the Civic Center renovation and is back.
Our Civic Center sculpture field guide covers the rest of the campus, piece by piece.
Use the archive. The Scottsdale Heritage Connection sits next to the Knowasis teen center. It holds the Scottsdale Progress, city and historical-society photographs, school yearbooks and recorded interviews. Until 2019 you needed an appointment. Now you can walk in, but go on a weekday, bring one specific question, and call 480-312-READ first.
Pair it. The Little Red Schoolhouse, the library’s home before 1968, is a few minutes west across the grounds. For the library system’s history and its branches, see the Scottsdale Public Library guide. Its showpiece branch is the Arabian Library in the north.
Why a town of 10,000 built a library this size
In 1960 Scottsdale had about 10,000 people inside city limits. Its library was a volunteer project that the town had just taken over and moved into the old schoolhouse. In January 1965 the citizen STEP committees, the Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program, made their first recommendations to the city. A new library was among them, along with a civic center, more parks and a municipal airport. The city commissioned a feasibility study and chose Bennie Gonzales from among 35 other architects. The council told him the design should “represent the southwestern way of life and the spirit of Scottsdale.”
His master plan was bigger than what got built. It had as many as nine buildings, including an auditorium, an art museum and a music center, running from Indian School Road to Osborn Road. The city used his model in the bond campaigns. The first, in 1965, failed. The second, a $2.4 million bond, passed two to one on September 28, 1966. Salt River Stories gives the cost of City Hall and the library together as $2.55 million, with a $150,000 federal grant for the library covering the difference. The same source says Gonzales wanted City Hall in real adobe and couldn’t get it past federal (FHA) rules. Both buildings ended up as masonry and concrete shaped to read as adobe.
The library opened with stained-glass skylights by Glidden Parker of Glassart Studios, the same as City Hall. The city’s 2012 historic context suggests those skylights “may have been the start of the city’s public art collection.” In 1968 the year-old Fine Arts Commission began hanging exhibits on the library’s mezzanine while it pushed for a city art museum. The city didn’t get one until SMoCA opened at the end of the 1990s. The city’s context says that for several years the library and City Hall also served as venues for performances and exhibits.
The building grows, and the art comes with it
The 37,000-square-foot building filled up as the city did. Salt River Stories dates the major renovations to 1987 and 1995. Scottsdale Public Art’s description of its statue of Mayor Herb Drinkwater says voters in his years approved a bond to build a new Scottsdale Stadium and expand the Civic Center Library. A 1995 photo of library staff in the city’s digital collection, reproduced by Salt River Stories, is captioned as the “major 1995 renovations.” The library system’s own history pages don’t give the expansion dates. The city’s building records would settle exactly when each wing was built and who designed it.
The two 1994 commissions belong to that expansion. They’re the reason this library is more than a pleasant 1968 building. Kirkland’s swift and Harries’s pillars both depend on the sun. The art changes with the time of day and the season. The Glass Scrim Wall at SMoCA (1999), a block away, uses light the same way. The public art program behind all of these is now run by Scottsdale Arts. Rockwell’s 2007 drawing works the opposite way: it’s small and quiet, and you have to stand close to it.
The archive, and the neighborhood under it
On May 15, 1973 the library dedicated a Southwest Room for Scottsdale and regional history. It became the Scottsdale Room and, in 2019, after a $500,000 campaign by the Friends of the Library, the Scottsdale Heritage Connection. Nearly every page on this site that says “the record would settle it” is pointing here.
That includes the record of the ground under the building. The city’s own 2012 context says that after the 1966 vote, the city bought land on the Civic Center site and “existing homes or other prior development on the 20-acre site were demolished.” The Civic Center Mall’s later expansion went through the town’s Mexican-American neighborhood. Our barrio note tells that story. Nearby was the Adobe House (1897–1970), where volunteers opened Scottsdale’s first library in 1955 and on whose grounds the Stagebrush Theatre stood. Historian Joan Fudala places its site under what is now the Civic Center Library’s parking garage. The city’s history says only that the house burned, without a date. The photographs and Progress clippings that record the cleared neighborhood are kept in the library built on it, and the library has made them easier to find than ever.
Why it matters
Gonzales believed, Salt River Stories says, that a library should be easy to reach and close to where people live, a community center as much as a book room. Fifty-eight years later, that’s how the building is used. It has seen two expansions, three major art commissions, a teen center and a local-history archive, and it’s still Gonzales’s white building across the water from City Hall. It also holds the records of the town that built it, including the parts that town would rather forget.