Take a drive down Scottsdale Road, the arrow-straight north/south artery that extends for 24 miles, neatly bisecting its namesake city. Once you reach the city center—where the pavement widens and decoratively-lit fan palms line your way—you traverse a dazzling cityscape, one that’s rife with brand-new, contemporary low- and mid-rise commercial buildings and condos; a posh mall; sprawling, low-slung furniture galleries; and a dizzying array of tony retail stores, restaurants, boutiques and curios shops.
It’s an eye-popping excursion, but what boggles the mind even more is to recognize that, as recently as 1957, local ranchers herded livestock down that same—albeit then unpaved—thoroughfare, their hooves kicking up clouds of desert dust that momentarily blotted out the scenery along “The West’s Most Western Town’s” main street.
The experience of that drive conjures up questions of what U.S. Army Chaplain Winfield Scott, Scottsdale’s founder in 1894, might make of his eponymous city’s strikingly rapid, 128-year transformation. It was Scott who, 10 years earlier, purchased 640 acres in the vicinity of where Scottsdale’s charming Old Town is today.