Rogue Columnist

Thank you

Rogue Columnist will mark its fourth anniversary next week, a veteran run in the blogosphere. I write and produce this blog because it offers analysis and commentary, especially for my Arizona readers, that I don't find elsewhere. I write it because, as George Smiley said, I always thought I owed. I'm indebted to Richard Silc, the honorary front page editor of Rogue, as well as others who pass along important news. My thanks go out to the regular commenters who enliven and enlighten the conversation here, and to the growing number of readers who come to the site. May you all have a happy New Year.

Central Avenue Part 2

Midtown, including the Viad Tower, left, after the big boom.

The first defining event of today's Central Avenue was the real-estate boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s. With land from Fillmore Street to Camelback Road upzoned for skyscrapers and money flowing from the deregulated savings and loan industry, the city was remade by a huge real-estate boom. Stuck with the disjointed set of highrises outside the old central business district, the city tried to put planners lipstick on the pig in the 1970s by christening the area from the railroad tracks to Camelback and Seventh Avenue to Seventh Street as the Central Corridor. As I wrote in the previous post, the visionaries of the 1960s and 1970s imagined Central would become Phoenix's version of Wilshire Boulevard. That never happened. Phoenix lacked the economy, assets and ambition of Los Angeles. But it gave a big try in the '80s and '90s.

These were the years that saw the rise of the Dial Tower at Central and Palm Lane. It was the new headquarters of the old Greyhound Corp. and remains, with its distinct deodorant container shape and copper skin the only truly arresting skyscraper on Central. Two bank highrises were built just south of Osborn, along with a little World Trade Center-style tower at Virginia, displacing the Palms Theater, and a few midrises. USWest anchored one of two skyscrapers erected on the northeast corner of Central and Thomas, where the iconic Bob's Big Boy, beloved of cruisers, stood. But this was nothing compared with what was planned. Back in the 1960s, the idea of a monorail running down Central was floated. It was revived in the '80s as part of a developer's plan to build, north of Indian School, the tallest building in the country with the monorail connecting the mammoth skyscraper to Sky Harbor.

Central Avenue in old Phoenix

Central and Monroe, around the year I was born (1956)

"The trouble with Central is that it isn't central to anything any more." So spoke a major leasing executive in 2000, over a breakfast I had been dragooned into to get my mind right about what had happened to my hometown. He was wrong. Central Avenue does much more than demarcate street numbers from east to west. It lies at the heart of a far-flung Valley metroplex. Central — original Center Street, renamed in 1910 — is the touchstone of Phoenix's history, with more stories than a hundred blog posts could tell. It remains the most interesting street in the city. And it will be the critical marker for a quality future, if the metropolitan area stands a chance of attaining one.

In the old city, Central connected the discrete parts that made Phoenix whole. Starting at South Mountain Park, the largest municipal park in the world, it crossed two-lane Baseline Road. In both directions spread out the enchanting Japanese Flower Gardens. Ahead were bands of farmland, pastures and citrus groves as it descended to the Salt River, with the skyline and far mountains arms-length clear in the distance.

After going through the tiny south Phoenix business district, you crossed one of two bridges over the river (Mill Avenue being the other). The 1911 Center Street Bridge ran 3,000 feet across the Salt River, included electric lamps, and was one of the town's proudest achievements. Before heading downtown, Central ran through neighborhoods and commercial strips.

For years, the colorful Central Liquidators was among the businesses south of the tracks. In the early days, both the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads sited their depots on Central, before moving to the new Union Station at Fourth Avenue in the 1920s. Depression public works built an underpass that for decades held four very tight lanes. Before the overpasses at Seventh avenue and street, this was the only sure way under what were then busy rail lines. Everybody honked when they drove through the concrete tunnel.

 

Phoenix rising?

By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue

Rogue Columnist readers may be surprised to learn than reading Robert Robb, editorial columnist of the Arizona Republic, is a guilty pleasure of mine. As often as I disagree with him, his arguments have a specious plausibility and level of detail that makes them worth refuting. I always learn a lot about a subject in deconstructing one of his columns — though not usually from Robb himself.

His column of December 7th, "Phoenix-area Recovery Better Than You Think" is a case in point. Not only does it elaborate Robb's longstanding thesis that "Phoenix doesn't have an economy dependent on real estate," it also argues that Phoenix's post-recession economy is doing better than that of most big cities.

This is astonishing. Even local-booster superstars like developer/economist Elliott Pollack, whose firm "currently serves as the economic department for Maricopa County" according to his company bio, and who also wrote the "Blue Chip Economic Forecast" for Phoenix appearing at ASU's W.P. Carey School of Business website, admits that "...the local economy cannot have much of a recovery without a significant increase in construction activity." Either Robb is a genius or else he's standing on his head.

America's racist sheriff

The big news is the release of a report, three years coming, about the racial profiling in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. You can download the entire report at AzCentral, Talking Points Memo and many other sites. It confirms what we already know: "America's toughest sheriff" is also America's most racist sheriff. The department has engaged in systemic racial profiling against Hispanics and "brown skinned people." This should be another nail in Joe Arpaio's coffin, but I suspect many of his constituents will merely go "Yaaaay!!"

This is only the tip of a very big iceberg. There's the hundreds of botched sex-crimes investigations, along with the many instances of abuse in the jail system. Honest police officers talk about fumbled investigations by the MCSO, including probable homicides that were tossed off as suicides. Much of the command staff has already been forced out in scandals. Does anyone doubt that the tone for this behavior was set from the top, in other words Arpaio himself? This is a department that runs by a cult of personality. As I asked in a previous post, Why isn't Joe Arpaio in jail? Yet he survives.

To be sure, departments nationwide face such probes. The Seattle Police are the target of a Justice Department investigation into excessive-force complaints. But the MCSO is different, with a longstanding pattern of bad behavior.

On the ground

I came into the new wing of terminal four at Sky Harbor. It's fancy and the terminal is still being improved. Still, it's difficult not to notice how American airports resemble malls, as if this is the defining and highest aspiration possible for an empire facing decadence and many breaking points. And on the outside, Sky Harbor is brutally ugly. I think of Cincinnati Union Terminal, one of America's most glorious art deco treasures, built to inspire, built for the ages. It's not only in Phoenix. We can't do these things any more.

It was a late flight, so it took a mad scramble to get the last light-rail train headed west at 11:25 (this is the sixth largest city in America?). Once on board, everything is delightful (we built it, you bastards). I am struck again by all the empty and underutilized land along much of the route. Oh, for some urbanism in fillers with capital, as is happening at a frenzied pace in Seattle. Still, it's wonderful to see the convention center, CityScape and downtown ASU campus. Then enfolded in the comforting spaces of my old haunts in Midtown. Central between McDowell and Osborn is the only really filled-in part of the core, with the ghastly exception of the northwest corner of Central and McDowell. Up to Thomas, it is surrounded by the real, walkable neighborhoods of the historic districts.

Here, it's impossible for me not to grow romantic, listening to the train whistles that I heard from my earliest childhood, feeling the cool wind sweep down from the High Country. And Phoenix is never sweeter than on a rainy night. More to come.

Hell on wheels

High-speed rail is dead in America. In Slate, Will Oremus does a postmortem that isn't as clueless as most of what one would find in the mainstream media. It makes some points familiar to my readers: The Obama plan wouldn't have been genuine high-speed rail, except in Florida, merely higher-speed; the funds were insufficient and dolled out helter-skelter across the country rather than focusing on corridors likely to bring success, etc. I would add that the Florida HSR was foolish from the get-go, aimed at a suburbianized, car-crazy state, rather than, say, California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor, where train travel is already popular and in demand.

In any event, this is a catastrophe for the nation.

On a general level, it is another sign that America just can't do great things any longer. It's an emphatic indication of the nihilistic paralysis of our politics, with one of our major political parties captured by extremists whose mission is pure destruction. It highlights yet another blow to the commons. It's a lost economic opportunity. High-speed rail would have created tens of thousands of jobs, for operating and not just construction. It had the potential, properly done, to seed new industries here to build the trains. It is exactly the kind of infrastructure spending that would stimulate an economy that as things stand faces years of high unemployment and stagnation. From an environmental standpoint, rail is much less destructive than cars and moves far more people with a small carbon footprint.

Phoenix 101: Wallace and Ladmo

Lad Kwiatkowski, Pat McMahon and Bill Thompson.

I went to the Muppets movie over the weekend. It was all right. I never watched Sesame Street and the heyday of the Muppets television show was when I didn't even own a TV. In any event, I am a lost demographic to such benign stuff. I grew up in Phoenix, where we had Wallace and Ladmo.

Most children watched a clown show in their cities and towns. Not us. We were brought up on the very adult humor of the Wallace show, which ran from 1954 to 1989 on KPHO. The names changed, from It's Wallace? to Wallace & Company to the Wallace and Ladmo Show. What didn't change was the show's biting humor, satire and irony, along with classic slapstick and cartoons. For the rest of our lives all we could do was feel sorry for the children who were stunted by clown shows.

The regular cast featured Bill Thompson as Wallace, Lad Kwiatkowski as Ladmo and my friend Pat McMahon. Wallace, or Wall-Boy as Ladmo called him, was the host and butt of much humor. Ladmo was the everyman or everykid, full of fun and mischief. McMahon played a host of characters, many of which gave the show its bite. Among them was Gerald the brat, the nephew of the TV station's general manager; Aunt Maud, the doddering, bad driver old coot from Sun City; biker Bobby Joe Trouble; Captain Super, a parody of assorted super heroes, and Boffo the Clown, who hated children.

Love hurts

A friend passed along a blog essay entitled "Has the Arizona Republic gone rogue?" It goes on to catalogue a variety of "negative" news stories, concluding: "It is time for a leadership change at the Republic; Publisher John Zidich of Fiesta Bowl board fame and his executive editor Randy Lovely need to go.  Let’s get someone in over there who knows and loves Arizona and wants us to become the state we are destined to become. We don’t need a daily rag of negativism and half assed reporting; I can get that from any blog out there.  We deserve better.  The Republic has gone rogue and it needs correcting."

The writer is one Charles Coughlin, who, in addition to sharing the name of the infamous demagogue "radio priest" of the Depression era, is a flack for the Real Estate Industrial Complex, the right and all-things status quo. See, reporting on such as Gov. Jan Brewer's shameful attempt to sack the head of the independent redistricting commission because it didn't skew politics even further to the right is "not loving Arizona." Payback is indeed a bitch. I was run out of the Republic by Zidich and Lovely because the paper could no longer stand the seven years of heat it had taken because my column didn't "love" Arizona enough. (When someone else talked about offering me a job, another big intervened: "Talton hates Arizona.") Now the same thugs are after Lovely and Zidich. (Funny, Father Coughlin doesn't offer his appreciation to the newspaper for unearthing the Fiesta Board scandal, which didn't really involve Zidich aside from his sitting on boards, which publishers should not do.)

Let it be said that the state's largest newspaper soft-pedals most of the pressing issues, from water resources to the economic calamity, climate change, white-right extremism, the depredations of the Badged Ego and thoroughgoing political corruption, much of which traces back to the Real Estate Industrial Complex. It pulls its punches and seeks out "positive news about the community." The editorial page is reliably right wing, with the only columnist being the "Goldwater" Institute's boy, Robert Robb (or William Bill, as he is known here). But even committing real journalism part-time, accidentally or when, well, news happens is enough that heads must roll. Imagine the fantods he would get if the state had some real kick-ass newspapers. Here is Phoenix and Arizona's pathology in a nutshell.