How I Came to be Here

How I Came to be Here. . , Sky Harbor Airport is the eighth-busiest in the United States, with 461,989 airplanes carrying 40,591,949 passengers a year to and from the Valley. The inbound flight paths for these passengers cross above Scottsdale Road at Buckeye and those of you leaving the Valley fly over Scottsdale Road between Bethany and Shea., The Yaqui originated in the northern Mexican State of Sonora. In the 1920s, after four hundred years of conflict with the Spanish colonists, their flight path led the Yaqui to Arizona, where they settled in South Scottsdale., If you look to the west you might be able to see Hole-in-the-Rock in Papago Park. For the past fifteen million years or so its sandstone shape has been carved by wind and rain. When the Hohokam people lived here, they used the hole in the rock to track the solar solstices and equinoxes. From this perspective today you may or may not be able to see the rock, but you can track the march of change-and the rock's disappearance from view, whether because of wind or rain or from being obscured by some new building., "I was born in Israel, and as a girl watched western movies filled with fast horses and tall cacti and yearned to live in that western landscape. As a young woman I lived in Canada, where I met my husband, an architect. We wanted to move to New York City, but the U.S. immigration office told us that architects were needed in Arizona, not in New York. So we ended up in Scottsdale and I got my cactus-filled landscape.", "We lived on a ranch up in Northern Arizona and my parents drove to Scottsdale to have me.", "I came from Chicago to go to school at ASU and after I graduated I just never left.", "My sister married a doctor and they moved here so I moved here too.", "I came here because it was twenty below in Hastings, Nebraska.", SCOTTSDALE ROAD HISTORICAL HAPPENSTANCE: HOW I CAME TO BE HERE , Cast Concrete, Etched and Welded Steel, and Cast Bronze , Texts were developed by the artist through surveys, public meetings, and one-on-one interviews with the citizens of Scottsdale. , Tad Savinar (born 1950) , Commissioned by Scottsdale Public Art, 2013.005.05. ,