Rogue Columnist

Police and fire in early Phoenix

Henry Garfias, the son of a Mexican general, was elected Phoenix's first town marshal in 1881. Already famous for apprehending the stagecoach "ghost bandit" as a county deputy, Garfias (above, courtesy of Duran Lugo) was said to have shot dead several outlaws as marshal and brought order to Washington Street's Whiskey Row (16 saloons and four dance halls). Thus was born the Phoenix Police Department.

The department operated out of the old City Hall until it received a more modern space in the City-County Building in 1929. Call boxes were used throughout the city for officers to check in. Phoenix equipped its squad cars with radios in 1932. You can learn more about PPD's history from the Phoenix Police Museum, located in the 1929 Police Headquarters at 17 S. Second Avenue. My new novel, City of Dark Corners, is set in the Depression-era department.

The Phoenix Fire Department came from passage of a bond issue in 1886 to establish a volunteer fire service with modern equipment and an improved water supply. Still, two hose companies (one Anglo, one Hispanic) competed until Frank Czarnowski joined them together as the Phoenix Volunteer Fire Department in 1888. By 1922, it was a paid, full-time department.

Here are some early photos (click for a larger image):

Horse-drawn apparatus at Fire Station No. 1, First and Jefferson streets, in 1908 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Locked and loaded

Carl Muecke illustration

America's, er, national conversation follows a predictable trajectory every time some psycho shoots up a place leaving multiple innocents murdered.

From the media and everyplace to the left of center: Finally we'll get gun control! Why does anyone need a gun, much less an assault rifle?!? America is the only country where anywhere near this level of Gun Violence happens! What was the motive — white supremacy, systemic racism? Why can't we have a leader like New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, who quickly implemented strict gun control after the 2019 shootings in Christchurch?? Don't dare send 'thoughts and prayers' when we need to be passing legislation! The Second Amendment is about the states' militia, not an individual's right to own a gun!

From the right: Mostly crickets (except for this National Review broadside). And except at election time, when the prospect of Democrats "taking away their guns" makes the right vote for the likes of Donald Trump.

Then we go back to the status quo ante until the next mass murder, forget, and the cycle repeats. If we can't get even modest gun restrictions after Las Vegas (58 innocents murdered) in 2017, Orlando (49) the year before, Virginia Tech (32) in 2007, and Sandy Hook Elementary School (26, including 20 children) in 2012, it ain't gonna happen.

Toward a desert aesthetic

Once upon a time defining beauty in Phoenix was relatively easy. The old city was shady, grassy, and well landscaped. From there moved circles of citrus groves, flower fields, pastures, and farms in one of the most fertile alluvial river valleys in the world, and finally stark beauty and abundance of plant and animal life in the wettest desert in the world. No other city looked like Phoenix. It was magical and lovely.

Now this is largely gone. Even in the historic districts ahistorical desert landscaping is creeping. For most of the metropolitan area, built an acre an hour, the look is concrete, asphalt, gravel, and shadeless palo verde trees. Oh, and "shade structures" that provide little shade. Lookalike faux Tuscan tract houses in "master planned communities" offer postage-stamp lawns and wide driveways (the old driveways in Willo were two strips of concrete). Tens of thousands of shade trees have been felled, whether by diktat of the Salt River Project or to create the six-lane-plus highways called "city streets."

Curiously, these single-family houses are built on the same layout as most American homes. But with gravel instead of a lawn. No wonder the temperature has risen 10 degrees over the past 50 years and the summers last longer. When I was given a tour of Verrado — where David Brooks saw the future — the developers bragged how they had copied Palmcroft, for that was the kind of living their surveys showed buyers wanted. But it doesn't work, for this sunblasted development in Buckeye lacks the real Palmcroft's beautiful trees, grass, hedges, and flowerbeds.

Rural scenes of old Phoenix

Before "master planned communities," freeways, gravel, palo verdes, and endless pavement, Phoenix was closely surrounded by groves and farms, shade trees and virgin desert. It lasted until the 1960s and 1970s. I remember my grandmother taking me for a picnic on a dirt road surrounded by fields and beneath a cottonwood tree. Here are a few of the photos (click for a larger image):

Central and Southern avenues, 1930.

Lincoln Drive west of Scottsdale Road in 1935.

Orangewood Avenue in 1939.

Degrading by degrees

When the Republican-controlled Legislature isn't busy with voter suppression laws or bills to further the National Rifle Association wish list, it can still make time for brilliance such as this: Allowing community colleges to award four-year degrees.

Legislation to make this possible has passed the state House, the furthest it's gotten in years of being repeatedly introduced. It might pass the Senate. Moving the proposal this far required compromises with the Board of Regents. As Howard Fischer of the Capitol Media Service reported:

The colleges can’t just get into the business. Instead, it requires studies to determine if the colleges, supported largely with local tax dollars, can hire the necessary faculty and sustain the programs. There also has to be a determination that the degrees offered will meet needed fields and whether they would “unnecessarily duplicate” programs already offered elsewhere. And there’s no authority for new property taxes.

There’s an extra hurdle in HB 2523 for the colleges in Pima and Maricopa counties. They could initially offer only a limited number of four-year degrees, defined as no more than 10% of total degrees offered for the first four years and 15% for years five and beyond.

The new pintos

I operate the Arizona History Shop for journalists, amateur historians, and curious civilians — free and an email or phone call away. It's sometimes shocking how little Arizona's millions know about their (mostly adopted) state. The situation is even more startling with the East Coast media.

Today's exhibit is a story in the New Republic. Headline: "Arizona’s Democratic Senators Are Already Angering the Left." Subhed: "The activists who sent Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema to Washington aren’t happy with their early moves in office." Kelly and Sinema voted for an amendment that would prohibit undocumented immigrants from receiving pandemic stimulus checks. TNR reports:

Latino advocates aren’t happy about it. “We are extremely disappointed by the vote that they have taken to strip stimulus funds from immigrants in the Covid stimulus bill,” Hector Sanchez Barba, executive director of the Phoenix-based group Mi Familia Vota says. “So we are sending a clear message, early in the game with a new administration, that this is unacceptable. We immediately mobilized our people on the ground, we immediately reached out, but we’re going to use all the political capital that we have. We’re going to use everything that we’ve been building in terms of political power to keep all the politicians accountable.”

Mac

When today's Arizonans think about the state's most important U.S. Senators, they go to Barry Goldwater and John McCain. A few will remember Carl Hayden, one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, third in the line of succession to the White House.

Yet Goldwater, although the father of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party, had a thin layer of legislative accomplishments, and McCain did almost nothing for the state he made his home. Hayden was undeniably the most important figure in winning the Central Arizona Project in Congress.

The Arizona Senator who casts the longest shadow of accomplishments is nearly forgotten: Ernest McFarland. First elected in 1940 when he defeated incumbent Henry Fountain Ashurst, Mac was an important partner with Hayden in fighting for Arizona's share of Colorado River water. His most significant accomplishment was sponsoring the GI Bill, which provided benefits for returning benefits for returning World War II veterans, including educational benefits.

Mac was the father of the GI Bill. He also served as Senate Majority Leader from 1951 to 1953, followed by Lyndon Johnson.

Supersized

It's difficult to find another major metropolitan area where most of the suburbs are as populous as in Phoenix.

Consider: The "town" of Gilbert alone held more than 254,000 people as of 2019. It's only the fifth-largest municipality in metropolitan Phoenix, but larger than all but two cities in Los Angeles County: LA and Long Beach. Mesa is the 35th largest city in America, at more than 518,000 — larger than Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Minneapolis and a host of better-known cities.

This is very different from the pattern in most metros. Older eastern and Midwestern areas consist of large numbers of small suburbs and a large center city. That star may have dimmed, as in Detroit or St. Louis, but none of their planets are anywhere close on population. The same is true in Atlanta, with a relatively small city of 507,000 in a metro of 6 million, but no individual suburb comes close. Charlotte, the 15th most populous city in the country (886,000), essentially annexed its entire county.

Phoenix's populous suburbs weren't always this way. These were once individual towns in the Salt River Valley, separate from each other, with different histories, dependent on agriculture and railroads. Above is Main Street in Mesa 1940, when the population was 7,200. This separation was evident well into the 1960s.