Rogue Columnist

How freeways remade Phoenix

The Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first, in the 1960s.

Motoring around metro Phoenix today, it's difficult to comprehend that this was not always a huge agglomeration of real-estate ventures connected by freeways. In fact, Phoenix didn't want them, would have been better off without many of them, yet couldn't avoid their eventual triumph.

In 1950, when Phoenix came in as America's 100th most populous city, it occupied a mere 17 square miles, with a population density of more than 6,200 per square mile, around what you'd find in today's Seattle or Portland. In other words, a real small city: cohesive, walkable, sustainable and scalable. Remnants of the old city exist, but much has been annihilated, not least by the freeways.

By 1960, the city of Phoenix had 439,170 people and nearly 188 square miles. It was a big city of the automobile age, the old streetcars long gone, and federally subsidized sprawl under way. Around this time, the state Highway Department adopted an ambitious freeway plan prepared by Wilbur Smith & Associates, one of the nation's leading highway transportation planning firms. It envisioned much of the system eventually built. The engineers had wanted to build freeways in Phoenix since the late 1940s. One route would have gone directly in front of the Hotel Westward Ho.

But most Phoenicians were horrified. They weren't enamored with the small Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first (it wound around at Durango Street to become the Maricopa Freeway, rammed through powerless barrios).

An urban legend persists that Eugene C. Pulliam single-handedly defeated the freeway plan in the early 1970s. Although the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette were indeed powerful in those days and not afraid to crusade (sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes not), freeways were widely resisted.

Phoenicians then didn't want to become another Los Angeles in this bad way, and they had a chance to avoid the fate. LA had shown (and Robert Moses' New York before it) that freeways didn't solve traffic congestion — they generated it through the phenomenon called induced demand. We didn't want worse smog. We didn't want to lose our views to concrete and the citrus groves to further sprawl. Of particular alarm was the 100-foot-high Papago Freeway Inner Loop planned across central Phoenix, with monstrous "helicoils" discharging traffic onto Third Avenue and Third Street. 

Passages

If my editor and publisher allow it, the new David Mapstone Mystery, South Phoenix Rules, will come out in December. I've never written a novel in, essentially, three months, but I know Mapstone fans have been without a fix for some time. Thanks to blog readers for their patience.

In Arizona, two passings. Stu Udall, who served as one of the small state's two or three congressmen, and later became the distinguished Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, died at 90. The gift of years had its pain: Seeing his beloved West become overrun with people, independent old Arizona become a hotspot of white-right extremism and the conservation ethic he embodied undone in so many ways. Roy Elson also passed away. As the powerful top aide to Sen. Carl Hayden, Elson was one of the most important players in winning the Central Arizona Project. So lacking is the Information Center in institutional knowledge or curiosity -- or a desire to be relevant -- that it failed to note Elson's death for a week after it was being discussed in Phoenix. When what should be the state's newspaper of record thinks "there's no history here," why should we expect a different attitude from the Midwesterners and inland Californians who have swarmed the place like a biblical plague? Elson was a friend of my mothers, and after I returned to the state, I vowed to trek to southern Arizona and spend time hearing of the old water-war days. I regret that I never did it.

The Kookocracy has begun to attain its goals as Arizona becomes the first state to eliminate health care to children of the working poor. This underscores the cruelty, "devil take the hindmost" and sociopathic nature of the white-right (see "The Party of Cruelty" on The Front Page). Much more is being churned out of the Legislature, including the destruction of the state park system, draconian cuts to education and Medicaid, and hundreds of other measures. They will make Arizona's dire economic situation worse. But will voters reject the Kooks? Or will the state's large number of Anglos in low-wage jobs, who have seen their living standards drop and opportunities whither because of Republican policies, be led by talk radio to vote for more of the same? It's a national question, too. And, of course, the ruling elites want you to be stupid.

Note to readers

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer. — Hunter S. Thompson

I ask your indulgence, dear readers. I must turn in the new David Mapstone Mystery by the end of the month if it stands a chance of getting to readers late this year. (My Evil Editor might hate it, so it's not all in my hands). So barring major news outside of our continuing crisis, you won't see me until April. Please enjoy the archives and comment away. (I will also be tweeting: jontalton and #PhoenixDepression on Twitter).

Plus, you can join in the wide-ranging discussion going on in the thread of this post.

Phoenix 101: Universities

The Palm Walk on ASU's Tempe campus.

Looking at Arizona State University today, with the largest student body in the United States, it's difficult to imagine that it began before statehood as the territorial "normal school," or teachers college. It didn't become a university until 1958, over the intense objections of the University of Arizona, which still considers itself The University, although ASU has eclipsed it in many ways. ASU now bills itself as "one of the premier metropolitan research universities in the nation, an institution of international scope, committed to excellence in teaching, research, and public service." The reality is somewhat different and rooted in the history of the state and the Salt River Valley.

Some sixty thousand souls resided in all of Arizona Territory when the UofA and the future ASU were established. It was frontier wilderness with the settlers scratching out a hard living in mining, ranching and farming. Aside from the occasional big copper strike -- Jerome, Bisbee -- people were poor. The railroads were only beginning to be built across the vast expanses of deserts, mountains and forests. That territorial leaders created these schools was an act of heroic vision (aided in UofA's case by the federal land-grant program). Later the Progressive state constitution would mandate that Arizona provide a college education for every qualified citizen.

But this rough country was also generally suspicious of colleges, whether from cowboys mistrusting the utility of the endeavor, to the big mining companies wanting cheap labor. Capital was scarce outside of the mines and railroads, controlled by eastern financiers only interested in extracting profit from the land. There were no Arizona Rockefellers or Carnegies who built fortunes, however ill-gotten, that would eventually fund world-class universities. People were scarce. Just before statehood, Tempe's population was little more than 1,400, fighting to make the desert bloom, sweating through summers without air conditioning. No wonder the state's elite, such as Carl Hayden, went to college in California.

Simple justice

During the Clinton impeachment trial, when I was a "right-wing columnist," I wasn't particularly concerned with his canoodling with Monica Lewinsky. Being of the Goldwater persuasion, I could care less what he did in the bedroom. It was a shame that he lacked the good sense to find a woman closer to his age who wanted to be a discreet mistress in the timeless and useful European model. I was concerned about the allegation of subornation of perjury by the nation's chief magistrate. Yes, it was a small spark, a sexual indiscretion, but the attempted cover-up seemed to carry deeper troubles. It seemed to invite a reckoning in the future. I was uneasy about the fate of a nation that produced such a situation. All this has been brought back by Ken Gormley's book, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.

Now, 11 years on and it seems so much longer, the reckoning is becoming apparent. We lived through eight years of Bush and Cheney. They reached at least within striking distance of victory in 2000 because many were disgusted with the Clinton chaos, remembered the pragmatism of the first Bush and believed the "compassionate conservative" line. Instead, they used the 9/11 attack as a pretext to embroil America in a string of endless foreign wars. The power of the executive branch was extended far beyond the despotic fears of Jefferson, far, even, beyond the "energy in the executive" intentions of Madison and Hamilton. The abuses of power were monumental, from corrupt contractors, to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian deaths, to the enshrinement of torture as American policy. We witnessed political prosecutions and election fraud at home, the rendition of innocents abroad and the mask fall away from the quiet coup of unprecedented corporate control. Much of this continues under President Obama, who refuses to push his corporate lawyer-Attorney General to pursue even justice under law, once a key American virtue. Or to explicitly renounce and outlaw the power arrogated by Cheney/Bush.

It's also clear that the Lewinsky matter was part of the broader failure of the Clinton presidency. Clinton was focused on bin Laden and warned George W. Bush. But he failed to adequately articulate this new threat to the nation, both to prepare it for a future of non-nation-state conflict, and to caution against an overreaction where the people would give up their liberties in exchange for false security. He faced a powerful Republican Congress, but much of the fault for that lies with his botched health care overreaching in 1993. And, yes, there was and is a "vast right-wing conspiracy." All this limited Bill Clinton.