Rogue Columnist

Best ex-President

President Carter (center) aboard the USS Los Angeles in 1977, first in its class of highly-advanced nuclear fast-attack submarines. At right is Carter's mentor, Admiral Hyman Rickover, "Father of the Nuclear Navy."

The idea of the treasonous criminal Donald Trump presiding over the funeral of Jimmy Carter is almost too much to bear. At age 94, it's a depressing possibility.

I confess to disliking Carter's presidency. But the man had real accomplishments. A Naval Academy graduate, he is the only president to have qualified in submarines. That means much more than serving in a boat — to "qualify" means an officer or enlisted person must have mastered every task aboard the sub. It's a big deal. Carter intended to make the Navy a career until the death of his father brought him back to Georgia.

With the passing of George H.W. Bush, Carter is the only living president to be a real military veteran.

Along with John Quincy Adams, Carter is the most successful and inspirational former president, from his work with Habitat for Humanity to overseeing elections around the world and carrying out numerous humanitarian and diplomatic missions. He never sought to monetize — and degrade — his office in the way most of his successors have done.

The oasis, in photos I

My mother told me I was "a city kid" and a "desert rat." She was right about the first, but not the second. I was a child of the oasis, growing up in what are now the historic districts north of downtown and in the old city.

It's almost all gone now. Every time I'm back in Phoenix, I am struck my how ugly it is, especially with the proliferation of skeleton trees and heat-radiating gravel in places they should not be. If this is the price paid to accommodate ever-expanding sprawl, it's a devil's bargain, a short hustle. With the enormous numbers of newcomers and population churn, people don't even know what has been lost.

One of the most heartbreaking losses was the Japanese flower gardens along Baseline Road.(above). An agricultural trust could have prevented it. But the feral greed to replace it with faux Spanish-Tuscan crapola was too much to overcome.

A reminder: Phoenix is at or near the convergence of five rivers in the world's wettest desert. Scores of shade trees are native. With the alluvial soil of the Salt River Valley, anything will grow here.

But as on the national level (only 26,000 history majors now), the loss of memory is a dangerous thing. Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Thanks especially to the priceless McCulloch Bros. Collection at the ASU archives, we can struggle. I only wish more of these images were in color.

Here are a few views of authentic Phoenix. Click on an image for a larger view:

Present at the destruction

In 1969, Dean Acheson's memoir Present at the Creation was published, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize in History a year later. At more than 800 pages, the book remains essential reading, not least because today we are present at the destruction.

As President Truman's Secretary of State — "the clearest thinking, most effective Secretary of State of the twentieth century," as Yale's Gaddis Smith rightly said — Acheson was the lead architect of the post-World War II order. The Marshall Plan, NATO, Bretton Woods, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and more.

As Tom Ricks wrote in Foreign Policy magazine:

It’s useful to remember that the international “system” as we know it today didn’t exist before World War II and would have been unthinkable except for the cataclysm of the war, the deployment of the atom bomb, and the aggression of an implacably hostile Soviet Union.

Truman and Acheson were in unknown territory, leading a country tired of war and ready to revert to its prewar isolation. “History is written backwards but lived forwards,” Acheson says, reflecting on the United States’ leap into the unknown. American leadership was never foreordained.

More destruction...

They've been cutting down the historic shade trees that lined Cotton Lane in the far west valley, probably in anticipation of widening the road. More of authentic Phoenix...gone. Thanks to Joe Velasquez‎ for the photo.

 

 

Historic red alert

This priceless, century-old house at 7019 N. Central Ave. has a demolition permit. The Preservation Police and every citizen needs to contact their council members, planning commission, "village" poobahs — whatever it takes. This is what old Phoenix looked like — not endless red-tile-roofs, concrete, gravel, and skeleton trees.

Downtown living

Most of the historical photos on this site show the rise of a handsome small city, with commercial buildings, stores, churches, and warehouses.

But single-family houses and apartments proliferated in and near the original townsite even as monuments such as the Heard Building and Luhrs Tower rose. People were living downtown before it became desirable again in recent years. Above are the Dennis and Jacobs Mansions on Monroe between Second and Third Streets along "Millionaires Row," built in the 1890s. They were demolished in the 1950s for surface parking lots.

Rosson House, restored in Heritage Square, was designed by architect George Franklin Barber — he sold his designs by mail order. It was completed in 1895 at 139 N. Sixth Street. The Stevens-Haustgen Bungalow is nearby, also restored.

Most of the residences downtown were more modest. For example, the 1935 City Directory shows homes for Mrs. Della Jeanette at 129 S. Third Avenue, Mr. Samuel Lopez at 133 S., and Mr. Nestor Chavez at 333 S. Third Ave. Some were businesses where the owners lived on an upper floor. But others were simple, single-story houses gradually giving way to the expanding Warehouse District. The same is true along south Second Street, including parts of Chinatown, connected by Madison and Jackson streets, Gold and Paris alleys.

Phoenix and skyscrapers

Valley Center, now the Chase Tower, under construction in 1972. At 483 feet, it remains the city's tallest building.

The Republic recently ran a story to answer the question of why Phoenix lacks the skyscrapers that are one defining characteristic of other big cities. One of the problems of a place with so many newcomers is the loss of historical knowledge. So the story was, at best, incomplete.

The two big reasons given were automobile-based sprawl and a "polycentric" city with many cores. But both apply to other cities with much higher and more distinctive downtown skylines. Los Angeles comes to mind. It has "downtowns" in Century City, West LA, and Hollywood. It is a city built around the car, although it has rebuilt an extensive rail transit system.

But downtown LA, which is staging an astonishing comeback, is home to an impressive skyline. The Wilshire Grand, finished in 2017 and standing 1,100 feet with its spire is more than twice as tall as Phoenix's Chase Tower. The same is true of the U.S. Bank Tower, completed in 1989. About 28 skyscrapers there are taller than Chase.

Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte have cheaper outlying land and sprawl, but each has a much more impressive skyline than Phoenix.

One big reason downtown Phoenix lacks taller buildings is its proximity to Sky Harbor International Airport. Valley National Bank wanted its new headquarters to be even taller, but the plan was quashed by the FAA. Sky Harbor is not much closer to downtown than Logan airport to downtown Boston, but Logan's runways primarily run southwest to northeast. In Phoenix, the runways are east-to-west and airplanes usually fly directly south of downtown. Gaining altitude means expending more jet fuel, especially in summer. And Sky Harbor has enormous influence at city hall. This has prevented doable towers at a higher number of floors at Third Avenue and Van Buren and further west.

Phoenix's historic theaters

Today's Valdemar A. Cordova Municipal Court Building occupies the site of young Phoenix's first major theater, the Patton Grand, which opened in 1898. The new motion-picture industry was just getting started, so the theater hosted a variety of events such as plays and concerts.

It was also a point of pride in a town with a population of 5,544, which had made it through the national financial panics and local droughts and floods that characterized that decade. The theater sat 1,200 people. It also boasted hefty backstage spaces, based on the photo above, with room for curtains, lighting, and scenery.

E.M. Dorris, of the prominent merchant family, bought the theater at the end of 1899. It became the Dorris Opera House, the name by which most old Phoenicians and history buffs know it. Until the completion of the Phoenix Union High School Auditorium, the Dorris was the heartbeat of civic events, from traveling musicians, plays, and speakers, to political and union gatherings. It then settled in as a movie theater.

But, at Third Avenue and Washington, it was only one of many movie houses within walking distance of the city center or the streetcars. Let's take a stroll to some of them.