Why he matters
Most of the Scottsdale a visitor sees today was built, approved or annexed while one man was mayor. Herb Drinkwater took office in 1980, when the city had 88,412 people, and left in 1996, when it had passed 190,000. In between came the northern annexations that carried the city toward Pinnacle Peak, the 1985 pair of flagship resorts, WestWorld, and the 1987 run of the Mayo Clinic, Colorado River water and the TPC. His successors finished the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, but the movement to buy it was born during his last terms.
He did it in a style the city still talks about. Drinkwater governed by retail politics of the most literal kind: he owned a liquor store, he greeted nearly everyone, he remembered names, and his dog usually came along. Voters rewarded it for sixteen years. By the end the town simply called him “Mr. Scottsdale,” and when he died in December 1997, flags dropped and thousands paid their respects.
Where to find his mark today
Drinkwater Boulevard. The road that wraps the Scottsdale Civic Center carries his name, and anyone who has parked in the free Civic Center garage has driven it.
The statue. On the Civic Center mall stands the mayor with his dog at heel, which is exactly how most residents of the era remember seeing him.
The peak. Drinkwater Peak, a 3,910-foot summit on the ridge west of McDowell Peak in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, has carried his name since the state approved it in November 2007 and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names followed in May 2008. No trail goes to the top; you see it from Bell Pass and the Windgate Pass Trail.
The Shea corner. Drinkwater’s Liquor & Cheese stood on the northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard. The family sold it around 2009 and nothing marks it now, but the corner is where the career was paid for.
The city he signed off on
Drive north on Scottsdale Road from the Civic Center and you pass through the Drinkwater build-out in order. The Shea Corridor subdivisions filled in around his store; Gainey Ranch and Scottsdale Ranch were approved during the 1981–84 annexations; the Princess and TPC went up beside each other in the mid-decade. The 1980s chapter lays out the whole decade, and the resort-metropolis era puts it in context.
The single best day to read is June 29, 1987, when the Mayo Clinic opened its Scottsdale campus, its second outside Minnesota, a prize the city’s civic leaders, the mayor among them, had courted for years. Then read December 28, 1997, the day he died, for the ledger of what his sixteen years added up to.
The full story
Herb Drinkwater was born in 1936, and his Scottsdale story starts behind a counter. He and his wife Jackie bought a package liquor store on the northwest corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard; business records date it to January 1, 1964, when that corner sat near the northern edge of a young city. It became Drinkwater’s Liquor & Cheese, known for its drive-thru window and a cheese counter unusual for the time, and the subdivisions of the 1970s filled the desert around it. Their son Mark worked there before becoming a developer.
In 1980 the city elected him mayor. Accounts call him a wine merchant as often as a liquor-store owner; either way he kept the store the whole time, and the sight of the city’s chief executive working the counter was a large part of his appeal. What he did with the office was shrewder than the handshakes suggested. Between 1981 and 1984 Scottsdale annexed huge stretches of raw desert toward Pinnacle Peak, so that the city, not the county, would decide what got built there. It courted growth that fit the brand: resorts, medicine, horses, golf and corporate aviation. In 1985 the Scottsdale Princess and the Hyatt Regency at Gainey Ranch both opened, and in 1987 the Mayo Clinic, the CAP treatment plant and the Phoenix Open at TPC Scottsdale arrived in the same twelve months.
The growth had a cost, and the city started counting it before he left. The McDowell Sonoran Land Trust formed in 1991, the council adopted the Preserve resolution on October 3, 1994, and voters approved the first preserve tax on May 23, 1995, all during his final terms. The mayor who had annexed the foothills presided over the vote to buy the mountains above them.
He retired in 1996, and Sam Kathryn Campana succeeded him, the first new mayor in sixteen years. His retirement was short. Herb Drinkwater died of cancer on December 28, 1997, at 61. Some accounts mention a Civic Center park in his name, but the memorials you can actually find are Drinkwater Boulevard, the statue with his dog and, since 2008, a federally named summit in the Preserve he helped start. The family sold the store around 2009, which leaves the boulevard as the permanent one: a liquor-store owner’s name on the road around city hall, put there by a city that saw nothing odd about it.