Rogue Columnist

The Post Office

A conversation on one of the Phoenix history pages of Facebook got me thinking about the thousands of cuts that bled downtown nearly to death. It was about the old Main Post Office at Central and Fillmore, now mostly used by ASU but contained some incomplete or wrong information. Still, a useful jumping off point.

Back in 2013, I wrote a three-part series entitled "What Killed Downtown" (see here, here, and here). It's still the gold standard on the subject. But the tale of the Post Office illuminates it in microcosm.

This lovely Spanish-revival building was completed in 1936, designed by Lescher & Mahoney, the architects responsible for many of Phoenix's finest buildings. Among them are the Orpheum Theater, Brophy College Chapel, El Zariba Shrine Auditorium (former home to the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum), Phoenix Title and Trust Building (today's Orpheum Lofts), Hanny's, and the Palms Theater.

It was planned in the 1920s to replace the Post Office segment of the old Federal Building in the government block at Van Buren and First Avenue. With Sen. Carl Hayden's backing, it was originally intended to be six stories tall and closer to the central business district. But because of expensive land, the site was move north across from the new Westward Ho and the height was lowered. Building it was among the myriad federal projects that lifted Phoenix out of the Great Depression.

Best ex-President

President Carter (center) aboard the USS Los Angeles in 1977, first in its class of highly-advanced nuclear fast-attack submarines. At right is Carter's mentor, Admiral Hyman Rickover, "Father of the Nuclear Navy."

The idea of the treasonous criminal Donald Trump presiding over the funeral of Jimmy Carter is almost too much to bear. At age 94, it's a depressing possibility.

I confess to disliking Carter's presidency. But the man had real accomplishments. A Naval Academy graduate, he is the only president to have qualified in submarines. That means much more than serving in a boat — to "qualify" means an officer or enlisted person must have mastered every task aboard the sub. It's a big deal. Carter intended to make the Navy a career until the death of his father brought him back to Georgia.

With the passing of George H.W. Bush, Carter is the only living president to be a real military veteran.

Along with John Quincy Adams, Carter is the most successful and inspirational former president, from his work with Habitat for Humanity to overseeing elections around the world and carrying out numerous humanitarian and diplomatic missions. He never sought to monetize — and degrade — his office in the way most of his successors have done.

The oasis, in photos

My mother told me I was "a city kid" and a "desert rat." She was right about the first, but not the second. I was a child of the oasis, growing up in what are now the historic districts north of downtown and in the old city.

It's almost all gone now. Every time I'm back in Phoenix, I am struck my how ugly it is, especially with the proliferation of skeleton trees and heat-radiating gravel in places they should not be. If this is the price paid to accommodate ever-expanding sprawl, it's a devil's bargain, a short hustle. With the enormous numbers of newcomers and population churn, people don't even know what has been lost.

One of the most heartbreaking losses was the Japanese flower gardens along Baseline Road.(above). An agricultural trust could have prevented it. But the feral greed to replace it with faux Spanish-Tuscan crapola was too much to overcome.

A reminder: Phoenix is at or near the convergence of five rivers in the world's wettest desert. Scores of shade trees are native. With the alluvial soil of the Salt River Valley, anything will grow here.

But as on the national level (only 26,000 history majors now), the loss of memory is a dangerous thing. Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Thanks especially to the priceless McCulloch Bros. Collection at the ASU archives, we can struggle. I only wish more of these images were in color.

Here are a few views of authentic Phoenix. Click on an image for a larger view:

Present at the destruction

In 1969, Dean Acheson's memoir Present at the Creation was published, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize in History a year later. At more than 800 pages, the book remains essential reading, not least because today we are present at the destruction.

As President Truman's Secretary of State — "the clearest thinking, most effective Secretary of State of the twentieth century," as Yale's Gaddis Smith rightly said — Acheson was the lead architect of the post-World War II order. The Marshall Plan, NATO, Bretton Woods, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and more.

As Tom Ricks wrote in Foreign Policy magazine:

It’s useful to remember that the international “system” as we know it today didn’t exist before World War II and would have been unthinkable except for the cataclysm of the war, the deployment of the atom bomb, and the aggression of an implacably hostile Soviet Union.

Truman and Acheson were in unknown territory, leading a country tired of war and ready to revert to its prewar isolation. “History is written backwards but lived forwards,” Acheson says, reflecting on the United States’ leap into the unknown. American leadership was never foreordained.

More destruction...

They've been cutting down the historic shade trees that lined Cotton Lane in the far west valley, probably in anticipation of widening the road. More of authentic Phoenix...gone. Thanks to Joe Velasquez‎ for the photo.