Roadside Rest

We Don't Call It Stopsdale Anymore

When we were young (more wiseacre than wise), we thought of Scottsdale as a joke.

Eleven miles northeast of central Phoenix amid a parched, pastel nowhere, Scottsdale seemed to sprout like an artificially green biologic spot. We just knew that mercifully and swiftly nature would nip in the bud this evolutionary experiment and hasten the healing return of the Sonoran Desert.

In those days, there were, of course, true believers in a radically different city-to-beScottsdale. They banned tall buildings and big signs, encouraged movie-set storefronts, staged the longest of all horsedrawn parades, and nicknamed their oasis "The West's Most Western Town." In fact, bucolic Scottsdale's first boosters were both the inspiration and target of our jibes.

We, who dwelt in more standard places, called Scottsdale "Stopsdale" in recognition of the crossroad's most prominent traffic control. A terrible earthquake once struck, we said, and improved 85 percent of downtown Scottsdale. During the emergency, Scottsdale rented a fire truck from Hertz. They should have named it Poke 'n' Plumb because by the time you poked your head out of the car, you were plumb out of town. And so on.

Beneath the spoofery lurked bedrock reality. Fifty years after it was founded by a born-again Army chaplain, Scottsdale was still unincorporated. Within its one-square-mile limits resided just 2,000 souls. Vacant land was offered, but not necessarily sold, at $20 an acre. A shadetree garage, a saloon with hitching posts, and an adobe grocery dominated the tiny A cluster of commercial buildings all but hidden in the irrigated cotton fields and orange groves. A curio shop sold local art only as a sideline. The one high school in 1948 graduated 32. In our state, we have indigenous communities continuously occupied for two millennia. Scottsdale achieved major urban status and unique cultural maturity in a generation.

Residents (at least as of this week) number 174,000, but with peculiar demographics. Because more than 16 percent are retirees, Scottsdale's median age hovers around 40, about a decade older than the national median. Seven of 10 Scottsdalians are college-educated. Modern Scottsdale's median income is $57,000.

Scottsdale today encircles 185 square miles, most recently stretching northward into botanically rich foothills and alluvial fans. It will be interesting to witness how Scottsdale resolves its hottest current political issue: economic growth vs. natural preservation.

Interesting, because Scottsdale, within the memory of the living, has confronted numerous tough civic choices, and more often than not took the road less traveled. Other cities might profitably study Scottsdale's journey from cowtown to the U.S. Council of Mayors "Most Liveable City" in 1993. How and why and when a convocation of citizens assumed they were chosen occupants of a special place, and acted upon that belief, is debatable. But happen it did. Maybe the crucial turn came when Frank Lloyd Wright established his winter quarters at Taliesen West. Or when Elizabeth Arden trans-planted her Maine Chance spa. Or when Eleanor Roosevelt regularly visited and wrote about Scottsdale in her syndicated newspaper column.

Whatever the inspirations, and maybe there were hundreds of others, Scottsdale indeed became a community of its own destiny. Few cities anywhere can say as much. A short list of personal impressions of the results: