Rogue Columnist

The rise of Margaret Hance

(Michael Ging photo)

When Margaret Hance was elected mayor of Phoenix in November 1975, she was not, as is often claimed, the first woman to lead a major city. That marker goes to Bertha Knight Landes, elected mayor of Seattle in 1926. Patience Latting was elected mayor or Oklahoma City in 1971. Hance was third.

Hance's tenure was far more consequential, as we shall see. Still, she and Landes are twined in dissonances.

Landes, who ran advocating "municipal housecleaning," has been "honored" by Seattle naming its misbegotten tunnel boring machine after her. Hance is memorialized by a park in the heart of the city, a place she did little to help and much to harm.

Margaret Taylor Hance was almost a native, being brought from Iowa to Mesa at age three, in 1926. Her father went to work for Valley Bank, where became an executive vice president. Despite the onset of the Depression, the family moved to what is now Willo. (I am told they lived in the same house on Cypress Street in the 1930s where I grew up in the 1960s. In the '30s, unlike the '60s, it was a high-end neighborhood on the streetcar.)

Although she attended the University of Arizona, she transferred to the elite Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., from whence she graduated. In 1945, she married Robert Hance, who had trained as an Army Air Forces pilot in the Valley during World War II. Her brother, Glen Taylor, went on to become news editor at the Phoenix Gazette, retiring as assistant managing editor in 1983.

She settled into the comfortable and predictable life of an upper-middle-class Republican Phoenix woman. Robert went to work for Valley National Insurance and rose. The couple had three children. Margaret — known as Marge or Margie — volunteered for numerous organizations and joined the Junior League.

Train of tomorrow, for a day

For Throwback Thursday we travel to 1971, when the TurboTrain visited Phoenix Union Station on a demonstration tour.

I rode it up from Tucson with two buddies — but we almost didn't get on. Amtrak promised free tickets and drastically underestimated the demand. Americans loved trains then and love them now.

Made by United Aircraft, the Turbo was supposed to be a leap forward for passenger trains. The young me imagined them zipping along at 100 miles-per-hour or more and restoring more rail passenger service to Phoenix. In fact, the trainsets served only a few years in the Northeast and Canada, although some of their concepts today inform the low-center-of-gravity and other features on trains such as the Amtrak Cascades that operate out of Seattle.

Note that Union Station is still a working railroad depot (baggage wagon, multiple tracks). Amtrak's Sunset, a shadow of Southern Pacific's crack Sunset Limited, came through every other day. As recently as 1967, Phoenix had been served by as many as eight passenger trains a day from two railroads.

When the state refused to partner with SP on upkeep of the line to Yuma, passenger train service to Phoenix ceased in 1996. Phoenix is by far the largest American city with no Amtrak service.

Read more Phoenix history on Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.

Confederacy of dunces

So we're agreed that the Confederate battle flag is an outrage and no small contributor to...what happened again?

Oh, yes, the monstrous act of domestic terrorism that resulted in nine martyrs at one of the nation's most historic, and consequential, African-American churches.

Sorry to offend, but from my Twitter and Facebook feeds, heavily populated by liberals ("progressives"), I might think the chief problem is the Confederate battle flag. The reality is more troubling.

The two elections of Barack Obama to the White House brought out something momentously ugly in parts of America. The radical right has proved more dangerous than jihadists, but the Southern Poverty Law Center focused on the "lone wolf" phenomenon of both in a prescient April report.

Beyond the assassins are the effective racist dog whistles that have sounded for the past six years, especially on talk radio and Fox "News." As recently as this year, a poll showed 34 percent of Republicans think it is "likely" Mr. Obama is not a U.S. citizen. This polarization has also been paid for by the wealthy oligarchs and corporate "persons."

I hesitate to say that the GOP and the tea party have the blood of Charleston on their hands. But even in the aftermath of the attack, Republican officials couldn't state the obvious: This was a deliberate attack on black people by a white racist.

#tbt Downtown 'mall'

With a proposal being floated for a new arena plus a mall in downtown Phoenix, here are some photos that show retail in downtown's heyday, when it was the largest retail center in Arizona:

Note the features: Stores right up on the sidewalk facing the street; shade awnings; a mix of local and national retailers; life on the street, and every few steps a new doorway beckons to shoppers. This is what downtown Phoenix once had and let get away.

It represents a totally different experience from a suburban mall, and that's what draws shoppers to the downtowns such as Seattle and San Francisco that kept their retail.

Arizona Center, built facing in and away from the street, is the cautionary tale. Too suburban. People will choose to stay in the real suburbs.

Cities that lost their downtown retail almost never get it back. One example is Charlotte, for all its prosperity and workers and residents downtown. San Diego is the exception and it involved a mall. But Horton Plaza was wedged into the edge of the dense Gaslamp Quarter and became an organic part of a walking downtown, where more retail was added in refurbished buildings.

 

Glendale's gambles

My Seattle Times colleague Geoff Baker has an insightful column about Glendale's NHL arena disaster. Sometimes one needs to be at a distance — and a distance from advertiser and fan pressure — to see things clearly.

The situation remains very much in play. Mayor Jerry Weiers may back down in the face of a lawsuit from the team formerly and rightly known as the Phoenix Coyotes. Or the courts could rule against the city's attempt to break its lease. Then the team can socialize its losses until the contract allows it to leave in three years.

But some aspects of what Baker calls "the Glendale fiasco" require Homey's distinctive local touch. Which I will proceed to attempt.

As with almost everything in Arizona today, Glendale's misery began with a real-estate hustle and taking an asset away from Phoenix, trying to make it the hole in the donut.

#tbt The 'Town' of Sunnyslope

This week's Throwback Thursday shows the Pix Theater on Dunlap in 'downtown' Sunnyslope in 1948.

Of all the 518 square miles annexed to create today's City of Phoenix, Sunnyslope was the closest thing to a real town that could have incorporated and become its own municipal entity.

It had (and has) a distinct identity from old Phoenix: desert vs. oasis, foothills vs. alluvial valley, north of the Arizona Canal vs. south of it, and many of the trappings of community. These included a business district, public pool and high school. The proud 'Slopers' on this blog enrich it with their perspective.

Sunnyslope had its origins with "health-seekers" — often suffering from tuberculosis and poor. John C. Lincoln established the Desert Mission clinic there, which grew into the major hospital that bears his name.

But after World War II, Sunnyslope began to attract developers of good housing and the middle class. From 1948 to 1955, voters rejected incorporation four times, swayed by fears of higher taxes.

In 1958, Phoenix Mayor Jack Williams pushed to include Sunnyslope in the city. 'Slope voters were given one last chance to separately incorporate and refused. Phoenix finally annexed Sunnyslope in 1959 as part of a 43-square-mile northern expansion. 

Sunnyslope today. (Cal Lash photo)

 

Architectural disasters

In retrospect, it was foolhardy of me to promise on Facebook that I would write about Phoenix's worst architectural disasters and ... could they be fixed? Then to ask for nominations by Facebook friends.

There's just too much bad architecture out there (and no, not only in Phoenix). Now it's too late, a promise is a promise, so here are my top (or bottom) three worst buildings in Phoenix.

1. Phoenix Police Headquarters. Check out the seamless intertwining of Brutalist architecture, 1960s fortress mentality, and everything from the sides of the building to the abundant, heat-radiating concrete surrounding the structure screaming "bleak!" 

It is an almost perfect example of sterile, dehumanizing, soul-killing, boring hack-work. It even lacks the authority projected by the 1929 City Hall/County Courthouse. Instead, the taxpayers financed a block of ugly that has stood through some 45(!) years of indifference and civic malpractice.

2. The Arizona Executive Office Tower. Yes, this is Gov. Roscoe's aerie.

Built in 1974, only about four years after the building above, this mishap has the same dreary "pour boiling oil on the invaders" upper-story rampart as its cousin.

Yet its transgression goes further because it is attached to the charming territorial capitol building and addition. The top of the tower overpowers the modest copper dome of the capitol. The two buildings clash like a Chevy Vega front on a Rolls Royce.

#tbt High-tech Phoenix

For Throwback Thursday, this photo shows the Sperry Flight Systems plant at 19th Avenue and Rose Garden Lane in far north Phoenix, 1966.

This was an era when the density of Phoenix's technology economy reached its apogee. City leaders, starting in the 1940s, had attracted such companies as AiResearch, Goodyear Aircraft, Kaiser, General Electric, Honeywell, Digital, GTE, Western Electric, and Motorola.

Lawyer Frank Snell was especially effective as a recruiter; his goal was "clean industry" that provided well-paying jobs for the growing population. The effort was helped by immense defense spending in the Cold War. Motorola was the most important — even in the 1990s, it employed 20,000.

Although Intel arrived in 1979 and Phoenix sold itself as a semiconductor hub, it never again reached this level of intensity. Motorola largely withered. The metro area was not even a finalist for the coveted Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. in 1983, or for Sematech — both went to Austin. Most of the "legacy" companies closed or slimmed down, and Phoenix never again competed as a major center for tech companies.

Not surprisingly, Phoenix's income levels began trailing competing cities after 1980.

Read more of Phoenix's surprising, inspiring, and mad history on Rogue's Phoenix 101 archive.

 

That seventies show

Over the weekend, I posted this comment on Facebook:

Jimmy Carter, at 90, was in the area to attend the change of command of the attack submarine USS Jimmy Carter.

He was a failed president. I remember him as the holier-than-thou Baptist. He frustrated even his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, who later became my friend. But along with John Quincy Adams, he has been our best former president.

He was the only president to graduate from the Naval Academy, was a protege of Admiral Hyman Rickover, and intended to make the Navy his career until his father died. He was also the only president to "qualify in submarines."

Only years later did I understand what an achievement this was. Sailors and officers (like Carter) were trained before being assigned to subs. But to "qualify" meant learning every job, skill and task aboard a submarine. So it's a huge accomplishment and the mastery that makes a submariner special.

So no chickenhawk has standing to criticize Carter.

Now, I was simply trying to say something nice about the man. But as is often the case with "social media" — god, I hate the 21st century — it didn't end there.