The Southern Pacific depot in downtown Mesa, circa 1963, when six passenger trains a day still served the station.
I got a rare treat in the mid-'60s for a poor kid from the 'hood: Getting to see Willie Mays play in a game of the Giants vs. the Dodgers. It was spring training and we drove to the little ballpark in Mesa. The game was great. Unfortunately, we were in the family 1959 Ford Galaxie, a source of never ending trouble and built, as my mother never tired of saying, during Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's tenure as Ford president. That night the only gear that would work was reverse -- and we drove all the way home to Phoenix going backwards.
It's low-hanging fruit to grab this memory as a metaphor for what has happened to Arizona's third most populous city. A city so populous, indeed, that it is larger than St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Pittsburgh -- and has nothing to show for it. No major university (an iffy branch of ASU miles from downtown doesn't count); no major corporate headquarters; no great museums; no magical neighborhoods. City Hall looks like a low-end office building. Even the area around the Arizona Temple, Mesa's one majestic asset, has been allowed to crater. The miles of enchanting citrus groves have almost all been bulldozed (and when I asked in 2006 if there was any preservation effort for the remainder, a top city official looked at me blankly).
It's a sad, and in many way surprising outcome. But operating by Arizona's rule of "when in a hole, keep digging," Mesa shows every sign of continuing the practices that got it in what is a morass even by Phoenix standards. The Cubs are playing the city for fools, threatening to leave, shopping spring training sites around the area, including some on the rez. Mesa's response could be to plan an intimate ballpark downtown on the light-rail line. It would enhance critical mass for a walkable urban space that Mesa lacks. It would be much more pleasant that the newer spring-training parks with their endless parking lagoons amid dehumanizing sprawl. It would help prepare Mesa to prosper in the higher-cost energy future.
Not surprisingly, Mesa is scouting two sites in the middle of nowhere, but on the all mighty freeway. When in a hole, keep digging.
Mesa, of course, was settled by Mormon pioneers in the late 1870s. (The party followed another LDS group that founded Lehi, nearer the Salt River -- and well into the 1970s, Lehi, although nominally part of the city of Mesa, was distinct and rural). With Mormon beehive enterprise, irrigation from the Newlands Act and the coming of the Southern Pacific Railroad's northern main line, Mesa prospered. It was distant and distinct from Phoenix, and not only because of religion (my family farmed near Mesa, among the first gentiles there, beginning in the 1890s). Mesa was created as a little city by the Mormon planners with wide streets (before the narrow minds of the joke) and clustered infrastructure to make it an agricultural center of its own. Also, Mesa, like Tempe, was part of the "south of the Salt" constituency in the debate over how water from Roosevelt Dam would be divided. In many ways, the recurrent East Valley vs. everybody else tension today is an echo of that old water fight.
Main Street in the 1960s, before the Superstition Freeway decimated downtown.
By the mid-1960s, the old ag economy was beginning to give way to mild sprawl, but the square-mile of the original Mesa township was still quite charming and packed with local stores and businesses. Six passenger trains a day stopped at the beautiful downtown depot. Fields were still visible from the center city's streets. Mesa's population was a sustainable 50,000. It was a model of social cohesion, albeit one flavor, with the LDS backbone. Civic pride and stewardship were strong. All these strengths -- and what should have been building blocks for a great city -- would topple in the coming years.
What happened? First, the Superstition Freeway enabled sprawl and eventually took away the retail from Main Street. Second, the farmers wanted to sell off their land and make a killing; using their power in the Legislature and elsewhere, they made sure the East Valley freeway system was given priority. Third, city planning was gutted, both by a total suburban approach and by "master planned communities." Fourth, downtown never developed stewards or headquarters that could keep it thriving (the old SP depot burned down, so little did the city see a value in this jewel). As a result, Mesa Community College, the malls, county complex, tallest building in the East Valley and Desert Samaritan Hospital were built far from downtown. It is a place virtually demanding single-occupancy car trips. Phoenix runs Mesa's minimal bus system. Fifth, massive demographic change, with many Mormons moving to Gilbert; illegals moving into the linear slums that were once middle-class, suburban tract houses, and a disconnected coterie of retirees and others walled off in the far-flung "master planned communities."
It's most remarkable to compare-and-contrast Mesa (pop. 463,000) with Salt Lake City (pop. 179,000). Salt Lake has built and maintained a livable city center, a wildly successful light rail system and now a regional commuter rail system; Utah, in addition, does quite well by standards of seeding tech companies and attracting talented workers. Mesa is Mesa. It reminds me of the joke in Cincinnati when I asked, where are the German restaurants? "We got the Germans who didn't like to eat," a native responded.
But Mesa is not a joke and it's more than a tragedy or a mountainous lost opportunity. Because of the rush to profit from residential housing, Mesa gave short shrift to economic development. As a result, a majority of its workers must commute to other cities in metro Phoenix. It doesn't pull its weight as a part of the metropolitan area and is indeed a drag. It is still debilitated by reactionary politics, which in the Legislature consistently work against all Arizona cities. Only by a whisker did then Mayor Keno Hawker persuade Mesans to help build a light rail a mile inside the city. New Mayor Scott Smith impressed me when I met him earlier this year. The performing arts center is nice. But obviously the city is still dominated by sprawl thinking, from the ballpark ideas to the haphazard development of (very distant) Gateway Airport -- including a (sure) "Scottsdale-like" resort! -- to the dream of Superstition Vistas. Please, God, give me one more boom.
The future is moving in a very different direction. High energy costs and a general rise in commodity prices will make sprawl even less appealing, whether as a business model or a lifestyle. Talent and capital is congregating in a few winner cities and metros with great downtowns, walkable neighborhoods, culture, convenient transit, great universities and a business climate that offers more than low taxes (and their repercussions). More ominously, in America the crash is locking the winners and losers in place as the world sprints ahead. Environmental damage, whether local warming and smog, or the growing consequences of climate change will be extremely disruptive to the Southwest. Mesa has lost both its sustainable size and local food supply -- as the world enters a period of deep instability and competition for resources. Even if Mesa were to embrace urban solutions to its urban problems, such as lots of light rail and commuter rail, the crippled local and state government probably couldn't implement them. And Mesa will be fighting for water just to slake its existing urban footprint -- forget about Superstition Vistas.
Is it too late? It's never too late. But Mesa is living in a moment of history -- the 1970s -- that can't be maintained. Despite the warning of the OPEC embargo, that moment was predicated on cheap gasoline and driven, so to speak, by an abandonment of any humanity in civic planning. Freeways and far-flung subdivisions would save us. It produced much ugliness and little of value except for more liberal views of sexuality. Mesa latched onto the former, alas.
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My book, A Brief History of Phoenix, is available to buy or order at your local independent bookstore, or from Amazon.
Read more Phoenix history in Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.
It's a shame, really.
If you look at the original square mile, it's still charming and green. But it's starting to look somewhat shabby around the edges - and how could it not? The ring of suburban development that sprung up in the 1970s (think Fiesta Mall) has become a festering wasteland of nearly-abandoned strip malls and car-centric development. The cotton fields that turned into cookie cutter subdivisions are now slums, for all intents and purposes.
Many LDS folks saw this coming (not surprising, actually) and fled to Gilbert before the big slide.
I spent the '80s working in Mesa, and up until about 2004, desperately wanted to move back. No longer.
Hard to believe the light rail line isn't the focus of the ballpark redevelopment. Perhaps the only city solons left are the ones that didn't scoot when the getting was good - i.e. the not-so-smart ones.
It's a pity. Thanks for making us look at it, Jon.
Gary O'Brien
Charlotte NC
Posted by: Gary O'Brien | October 12, 2009 at 10:23 AM
This is one of the most brilliant things I've read about how things are here.
Posted by: Dogo Barry Graham | October 12, 2009 at 11:09 AM
Considering what a wasteland the light rail goes thru in Mesa, you would think a stadium right off the main line would be a no brainer. I would guess the right people won't profit from it.
Posted by: eclecticdog | October 12, 2009 at 11:43 AM
"When in a hole, keep digging."
Maybe they'll reach China.
http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2009/10/11/20091011biz-china1012.html
This quote from Peoria Mayor Bob Barrett is amazing:
"My honest goal is try to intrigue them enough so that we can get a Chinese company to take an honest look at the Valley," Barrett said. "Anything we can do to boost the Valley's economy, the ripple effect will go across the Valley regardless of where it is located - Peoria or Chandler."
It's amazing for two reasons:
(1) Valley cities are so devoid of inspiration, planning, and resources, that they are literally going to China (rather than their own communities) to seek investment.
(2) It's China! I guess that if Nixon can go there, so can the Kookocracy, but let's not forget that Nixon was only trying to widen the split between China and the Soviet Union. Somehow, now that China has embraced foreign investment, the totalitarian nature of their government, and the rampant human rights abuses -- both once perennial subjects for Republican rhetoric -- are no longer subjects for concern, much less censure, despite the fact that none of that has gone away.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | October 13, 2009 at 08:01 PM
I live in Brooklyn now. When my friends talk about where they're from, I just say "They blew up my home planet."
As a kid growing up in Mesa, I was puzzled by real estate developments. Farmed fields and orange groves raised products that got sold out of state and thus brought in money. The housing developments and strip malls that replaced them cost money, and then people spent more money on them, but they didn't make money. How was this prosperity?
Decades later, I got my answer: it was a giant long-running Ponzi scheme. People who moved to the Valley from out of state sold up back home and brought their money with them. They bought houses further and further out into the desert because they could get more house for less money out there, and they believed their property would keep increasing in value because more people would keep moving in from out of state.
The market collapsed, of course. Speculative markets always do.
Now there are millions of people living in a desert that can't sustain that level of population. The date and citrus trees are gone. The cheap boxy little houses are uninhabitable without energy-intensive air conditioning. Neighborhoods are unreachable and unlivable without cars that run on increasingly expensive fuel. Water travels insane distances and tastes like crap. What the inhabitants get for their trouble is an ugly, unlovable, incoherently sprawling city.
It didn't have to be that way.
Posted by: Teresa Nielsen Hayden | October 02, 2012 at 09:54 PM
@Teresa - a fine summary of the state of things. Canaries in a coal mine, these cities, to boot.
Posted by: Petro | October 03, 2012 at 10:05 AM
@Teresa, nice post, your website looks interesting too.
Posted by: eclecticdog | October 03, 2012 at 10:34 AM
Excellent post TNH.
I have to go back and forth to your web site as it takes me a while to take it all in, lots of good stuff.
While I spent a few days in Acrosanti, I heard Rover may have found water on Mars.
Clifford Simak may have been right about the dogs and the planet earth in his book "City"
Posted by: cal Lash | October 03, 2012 at 11:00 AM
Interesting commentary on the TSA at your website, Teresa.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | October 03, 2012 at 02:02 PM