Rogue Columnist

The Friday saloon

Just remember, if it's 118 degrees, that's in the shade at Sky Harbor. The pavement temp is closer to 140. Memo to transplant fools: Don't go hiking (and don't reach into holes or beneath scrub in the desert). Better yet, go back "home." There's no shortage of conversation starters for the week: The Supreme Court engages in astonishing over-reach and activism in gutting the Voting Rights Act, then does the right thing on marriage equality. We have a one-justice court: Anthony Kennedy. Obama made his climate-change speech. Phoenix lost another big company to the suburbs. Take it from here, or browse the many archives and link aggregations on the site.

 

Midtown blues

Midtown Phoenix runs from Fillmore Street north to Indian School and from Seventh Avenue to Seventh Street. It's a big, diverse district that contains some of the city's finest assets: The Roosevelt, Willo and Alvarado historic districts; central library, Phoenix Art Museum and Heard Museum; the deck park and the boundary with Steele Indian School Park; a dozen skyscrapers, and the spine of the Metro light rail. And much of it is in trouble.

The Phoenix Corporate Center is facing foreclosure after its anchor tenant, Fennemore Craig, left for new space at 24th Street and Camelback. It was originally the Mayer Central Plaza, then the First Federal Savings Building, the tallest in the city when it opened in the early 1960s and featuring an outside elevator. The Midtown office vacancy rate at the end of last year was 28 percent vs. downtown's 15 percent. Most of the towers are now considered less-desirable B-class and C-class office space. Like much of the Central Corridor, it also suffers from large blighted empty lots, such as the northwest corner of McDowell and Central and the east side of Central north of the punch card building and south of McDonald's. Only the mile between McDowell and Thomas is filled in, and shows it as an appealing urban space. What should be a prime location, the northwest corner of Central and Thomas, is a billboard behind which the homeless camp (much like the astoundingly empty space on the southwest corner of Central and Camelback).

This is not just another story of the ongoing linear slum-ization of the nation's sixth-largest city. For one thing, it's happening in the heart of the city. Second, it is the prime example of the failure of light rail transit-oriented development. Finally, it shows how City Hall is not paying attention to jobs and private investment, both of which are moving to the suburbs.

The Friday saloon

Our weekly open thread, seeded by Rogue's Front Page Editor and Director of Competitive Intelligence. (His printable comments are in parentheses). Join in on the comments. Conversation starters:

• Proposed changes to Social Security would make a majority of seniors 'economically vulnerable' || Economic Policy Institute

• Booz Allen — the world's most profitable spy organization || BusinessWeek

• Paul Krugman: How are these times different? || NY Times

• In Syrian chemical weapons claim, criticism of lack of transparency || Washington Post (Niger yellow cake?)

More vines, please

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. — Frank Lloyd Wright

The most depressing part of Star Trek Into Darkness is not the many liberties that the filmmaker takes with some of the foundational conceits and tropes of the franchise. Only trekkers will notice (for example, a starship is not built to enter a planet's atmosphere, much less hide in the ocean, etc. etc.). No, what really bummed me out was the architecture. I mean, this is the 23rd century and we're stuck with taller versions of the insipid buildings of today? At least Blade Runner has some variety and gigantic Japanese-style electronic billboards in its vision of the future. We've got interstellar travel, transporters, phasers — and civilization is stuck with the progeny of John Portman, David Childs and Cesar Pelli. And that's if we're lucky. No art deco revival? No reinterpretations of the Chicago school? Gah! If this is the future, no wonder they want to leave the planet.

That's just movie fantasy. In the real world, there's no shortage of lists of the world's ugliest buildings (see here and here), along with Jim Kunstler's cringeworthy-but-must-see Eyesore of the Month. And to be sure, I'm treading into matters of taste, where many valid viewpoints must be considered. Still, architecture matters a great deal. It is the most important physical testimony about a civilization and its trajectory. It constitutes the built environment that at its best informs, inspires or defines so much of our lives. At its worst, it is, as Kunstler says, a landscape not worth caring about. And unfortunately a stupendous amount of our total buildings have been put up in recent decades, with most exercises in copycat banality or starchitect sculptures with little to offer humans or the surrounding streetscape.

The lives of others

[UPDATED] Rogue's Front Page Editor and Director of Competitive Intelligence has filled my in-box with some of the best stories about the extent of our national security state. We learn about the private companies that profit from analyzing your personal data. Our outsourced spy force is enormous. Not only that, but the National Security Agency, building a huge secret data farm in Utah, is recruiting a new generation of Stasi geeks. The administration's constitutional amnesia. How members of Congress are not outraged about the invasion of your privacy, but instead are turning on leaker Edward Snowden. How what was intended as a "transformational presidency" has turned into a soiled presidency instead: George W. Obama. Pro Publica offers the five things we still don't know about NSA snooping. One of the most on-point comments came from Tom Ricks, the former military correspondent for the Washington Post:

As for the assurances of intelligence officials that we should not worry because they will be careful: I don't buy them. The intelligence community has not come clean about the torture of captives, so why should it have credibility on this? At any rate, the health of our Bill of Rights should not be dependent upon the constitutional interpretations and tender mercies of secret policemen and their staff lawyers.

And yet, I have heard people say variations of words spoken in 1930s Germany and the Soviet Union: "I don't mind this if it keeps us safer. I haven't done anything wrong, so I don't have anything to fear." According to a poll from the highly respected Pew Research Center, 56 percent of those surveyed say the government spying is acceptable. So-called conservatives unfurl their protest banners over slight attempts to limit assault weapons or raise adequate revenue for the commons. Most are silent in this very real reach into tyranny. Liberals are so marginalized as to be out of the public square, not least with President Obama.

Barry Goldwater

Barry Goldwater in 1941.

Phoenix would benefit from some heroic statues to enrich the downtown streetscape. It's not as if we're lacking in heroes and audacious history. Instead, we get a bronze of Barry Goldwater in Paradise Valley, unreachable by pedestrians but with an adjacent parking lot. Then there's terminal four at Sky Harbor named after Goldwater. And a street in Scottsdale. A newcomer might think the only history worth remembering, if badly painted, concerns the long-serving senator and 1964 presidential candidate.

Readers of this blog know better. But understanding Goldwater's place in Arizona is a daunting challenge. The magisterial biography remains to be written. And for most of his public career, Goldwater was a national figure. We must also contend with a good deal of nostalgia and hagiography concerning the hero. An example of the latter was a recent article in National Review about how Barry was a leader in Phoenix's school desegregation before the Brown decision. The former goes something like this: Barry was no Kook, he fought the religious right and one shouldn't conflate today's conservatism with that of Goldwater. Even I have been guilty. But the reality is more complex and interesting.