No east-west street was more important to early Phoenix than the one named after our first president. It carried streetcars, was the heart of the business district, held important buildings, and was movie-theater row. Washington remains the north-south dividing line for street addresses (Central is east-west). Let's take a tour through time.
1901: A dusty road with horses and mule-drawn streetcars.
1904: The Indian and Cowboy Carnival Parade.
1905: At First Street looking west.
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Data centers becoming dominant force in Mesa," reads the headline on a recent East Valley Tribune story. The lede: "It may never rival Silicon Valley, but Mesa is fast becoming Data Center Alley."
This "Alley" isn't transforming struggling west Mesa and it's nowhere near the light-rail line. Instead, it's centered on the "Elliott Avenue Technology Corridor" in far southeast Mesa, the location of agriculture, desert, and the former Williams Air Force Base. Now, with abundant concrete, gravel, and asphalt, it will expand the increasingly dangerous Phoenix urban heat island. The "Corridor" is entirely car dependent.
Data centers are lowest on the ladder of the tech economy: necessary, but bringing few jobs — much less high-end jobs — and several headaches. This is why they are usually found in rural areas desperate to replace their lost millwork, manufacturing, or railroad jobs. States and localities shell out huge incentives and disappointment follows.
But to see the proliferation of data centers in a city the size of Mesa (518,000 in 2019), in the 10th most populous metropolitan area in the nation, is curious.
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The news from my old 'hood is the pending demise of the Duke Photography building on the southwest corner of Seventh Street and Thomas. The Arizona Republic reported the building is set to be demolished and a Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers drive-thru built on the site. Duke is moving to the First Federal Building on Central in Midtown, taking its sign with it.
This is wrong for so many reasons, no wonder nearby neighborhood associations are opposing it ahead of a June 17th virtual public hearing. One big concern is increased traffic, including dangerous turns on Seventh, which has been widened and had "suicide lanes" added for rush hour. A Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-thru on the northwest corner already causes collisions.
Beyond that, while the building is modest it fits into the remaining fabric of the streetscape. The Raising Cane would be another soulless off-the-shelf building, made for cars not for pedestrians. If the company really wanted to be a good neighbor, as it claims, it would build something appropriate to the nearby historic districts. Too many losses have already been allowed, notably the replacement of John Sing Tang's iconic Helsing's at Central and Osborn — right up to the street — by a Walgreens, set back by a surface parking lot and surrounded by a low wall, gravel, and rocks.
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Between the long series of civic missteps that murdered downtown Phoenix and its recent rebirth of sorts, the 1970s loom large. As the decade began — shown in the photo above — much of corporate Arizona and the energy of the city had shifted to Midtown.
The city opened the brutalist Phoenix Civic Plaza (so named because the Phoenix Civic Center was at Central and McDowell with the library, art museum, and "little theater"). The new complex offered a convention center, Symphony Hall, and sun-blasted open space. It was intended to revive downtown, but its "super blocks" destroyed the fine-grained, human-scale of the old urban fabric, including much of the Deuce. That fabric was characterized by eight or nine steps between doorways to shops or offices shaded by awnings.
Walter Bimson of Valley National Bank gave downtown a vote of confidence, insisting the new headquarters tower be build there rather than at Central and Osborn. The other big banks followed. Two new hotels were also built. But it was a catastrophic 10 years for historic preservation. The gallery below tells some of the story. Click on a photo for a larger image.
A rendering of Phoenix Civic Plaza. The shade trees in the foreground of Symphony Hall never happened, leaving an uninviting frying pan. It did show the concert hall's signature lobby chandeliers to advantage, lost now to the new Convention Center.
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Carl Muecke illustration
If you've been following the daily links here on Phoenix and Arizona news (left), you know the GOP-controlled state Senate is conducting an "audit" of Maricopa County's 2020 presidential votes. It was here that President Biden pulled out his narrow victory.
As the Washington Post reported, the review "has been undertaken using an opaque, often inscrutable process, outside of the close view of objective third parties and with the assistance of obviously motivated actors, such as a former legislator who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6." Republicans now say 40,000 ballots were flown in, including from Asia written on bamboo. I am not making this up.
The most obvious insular lesson is that Arizona's status as a blue or purple state is unsettled as long as the Republicans control the Legislature, the most powerful branch of state government.
But what's happening here has profound national implications, too. Amid a push in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and other states to suppress voting, Arizona is taking it a step further. If an election's outcome is not what the GOP apparatchiks desire, the Legislature will intervene post facto. The goal is to overturn the result or, failing that, sow doubt about the election's legitimacy. Never mind that this was the election that put these lawmakers in office, too. Meanwhile, the GOP raises money and keeps the base ginned up for the critical 2022 mid-terms.
We can't have a functioning experiment in self-governance if the losing side refuses to accept the results of elections. John Adams was angry over the 1800 election but he peacefully transferred power to his bitter rival (and former and later dear friend) Thomas Jefferson. This path leads to civil war. Discuss.
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One of the most interesting sources of information on early Phoenix can be found on the Library of Congress' Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. The Sanborn Map Co. produced detailed maps of 12,000 U.S. cities and towns, detailing not only buildings but in many their construction materials so insurers could assess their risks.
Below I have some views of Phoenix, one in 1911 and the remainder from 1949, focused on Union Station and the Warehouse District. Click for a larger image.
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In 1940, photographer Russell Lee visited Phoenix. His main task was taking pictures of Farm Security Administration projects in the city. He joined such distinguished federal photographers as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein.
The FSA was created in 1937 to help ease rural poverty. Among its signature Phoenix operations were Camelback Farms, northeast of downtown and intended to create a stable environment for displaced farm families, and the United Producers and Consumers Cooperative, with about 12,000 members, mostly farmers.
But the trip yielded much more, including some iconic images of Phoenix as the Great Depression was loosening its grip and war was looming. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1903, Lee died in Austin in 1986.
I've written about Phoenix in the 1940s here. Below is some of his work from the Library of Congress. Click on an image for a larger view.
Welcome sign outside of town, with the meeting days, times, and places of service clubs.
Central and Washington, with Lerner Shops, movie theaters, and streetcar tracks.
The famous saguaro streetlamp across from the Hotel Westward Ho. Only one was made, outside the Chamber of Commerce.
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This is the name for a new campaign to reduce pedestrian and bicyclist deaths on the streets of metropolitan Phoenix. As KTAR reported, “ 'See Me AZ' aims to educate people on research that indicates most crashes occur when drivers, cyclists or pedestrians don’t see each other."
I'm not hopeful.
However it's counted, Phoenix and Arizona rank high among the most deadly places for pedestrians. Fifth worst in the nation in 2018, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Deaths totaled 106 for the first six months of 2020 (Colorado 39; Washington 47). The federal Traffic Safety Administration ranked us fourth worst in 2018. A compilation by the Arizona Republic found a stunning 1,202 pedestrians killed by motorists between 2014 and 2019.
From the late 1940s onward, Phoenix streets were widened, especially to move vehicles quickly out of downtown (collateral damage was the loss of thousands of real shade trees). McDowell Road, shown above in the 1960s, is now two lanes or wider. This remains one of the scariest avenues for pedestrians or watchful drivers, especially between 56th Street and 24th Street, where the night swallows the inadequate illumination from too few street lamps.
The result today is that metropolitan Phoenix is a collection of real-estate ventures connected by wide highways called "city streets." Where Thomas Road crosses Central, it's about twice as wide as a major downtown street in Seattle. The "walk" signal lasts barely long enough to accommodate those wishing to cross and drivers frequently turn without looking. On any given day or hour, the Phoenix Fire online regional dispatch log shows "962 w. pedestrian" (a 962 is the radio code for auto collision with injuries).
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