Phoenix, 1969

I watched the Apollo 11 landing and moon walks in Phoenix with my grandmother. She was born on the frontier with horses and buggies, was alive when the Wright brothers first flew, when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic...and now this. The entire trajectory of her life had been one of American progress (sliced bread! air conditioning! paper towels!). Mine was different.

Fifty years ago, Phoenix was on the cusp of nearly 582,000 people and Maricopa County of 971,000, increases over the decade of 32 percent and 46 percent respectively. The aggressive annexation that took the city from its compact 17 square miles in 1950 to 188 square miles a decade later continued. By 1970, Phoenix would spread over 248 square miles, all the way to the two lanes of Bell Road.

Charter government was still firmly in control of City Hall with little foreshadowing that its era was coming to an end. Milt Graham was still mayor. Young and popular, Graham had helped seed Charter's demise by running for a third two-year term, breaking the promise that the Charter Government Committee put up civic stewards, not career politicians, and mayors only served two terms. Importantly for the city's future, Graham was vehemently anti-transit.

In 1969, the Salt River Valley was still heavily agriculture. Some 600,000 acres were under cultivation. One could drive for miles and never leave the citrus groves. The Japanese flower gardens ran for miles along two-lane Baseline Road. Valley produce filled long trains to help feed America with some of the best oranges, grapefruits, lemons, melons, lettuce and other produce anywhere.

Speaking of railroads, Phoenix still enjoyed intercity passenger-train service at Union Station. Although the federal government's cancelation of mail contracts had cost us the Santa Fe train to the busy main line at Williams Junction, the Southern Pacific still operated the Sunset and Golden State to Los Angeles, New Orleans and Chicago (albeit as a combined train, sometimes as long as 24 cars, attesting to SP's anti-passenger mentality). The young me still enjoyed trips to the aging depot, still called the phone number to hear the recording listing train times, hoping we would see a railroad renaissance that never came.

Downtown was at a crossroads. Park Central and other malls had hollowed out retail, although many shops still operated. Rosenzweig Center — soon to be home to Greyhound, a Fortune 500 headquarters we assumed would be the first among many — and the Mayer towers in Midtown were moving offices north on Central. But downtown received a vote of confidence when Walter Bimson persuaded the board of Valley National Bank to build its new headquarters at Van Buren and Central rather than at Osborn. First National Bank of Arizona and the Arizona Bank did the same. Greyhound and Continental Trailways kept their downtown depots. The historic Hotel Adams, Luhrs Hotel, Hotel Westward Ho, Jefferson Hotel, and Hotel San Carlos were also still open, although most were in decline. All media were locally owned and included an afternoon paper, the Phoenix Gazette.

Phoenix avoided the worst mistakes of 1960s urban renewal, a complex story that included an unlikely coalition of conservative property rights advocates and minority homeowners and Phoenix's failure to pass a city code that would satisfy the feds. The catastrophic mass teardowns of the center city were yet to come. But change was afoot. City leaders had been fretting for years about the Deuce, Phoenix's skid row, wanting to "clean it up." In 1969, they signed the agreements to build Civic Plaza in the Deuce's heart. This brutalist architecture consisted of a convention center, symphony hall and vast blazing public space. (It's not to be confused with the Civic Center at McDowell and Central, with the library, art museum, and little theater).

At the time, critics warned that bulldozing the single-room occupancy hotels of the Deuce would scatter its residents into the parks and neighborhoods nearby, which happened. Another problem, not addressed then, was that the superblock necessary for Civic Plaza wiped out huge numbers of distinctive buildings housing useful businesses at affordable leases, a walkable cityscape. The same losses happened with Patriot's Square soon after. The damage could never be undone.

Phoenix was still a heavily Anglo city in 1969. Maryvale was the safe "American Dream." Although de jure segregation ended in the early 1950s, blacks and Hispanics were still largely consigned to "south of the tracks" and south Phoenix. The Maricopa Freeway was plowed through barrios. In a few years, Sky Harbor's appetite would destroy such historic barrios as Golden Gate. These areas were starved of city services and used for heavily polluting industries.

Still, 50 years ago, Phoenix had the swagger of a city of the future — auto-centric, spread out, new. Thanks to massive federal Cold War dollars, Phoenix had a much larger "high-tech" economy proportionally than today. Boosters elided the prevalence of land fraud — Ned Warren was still working his grifts. Or the mob presence, which would turn darker in the 1970s.

No one imagined the "back to the city" movement of today or the correlation of good transit to a strong economy. The extensive freeway plan was unpopular and seemed far off, if it ever happened (this was not true in my neighborhood, where we actively feared the planned Papago Inner Loop). Climate change was barely acknowledged. The notion that we would lose the Japanese gardens and our citrus groves, that gravel would replace lush shade trees and landscaping — you would have been laughed off for even suggesting such a monstrous future.

Only about one-third of Americans today were alive in 1969 to see Apollo 11. Even fewer Phoenicians even remember that lost city, when hopes were so high, and the summers were cooler and shorter.

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My book, A Brief History of Phoenix, is available to buy or order at your local independent bookstore, or from Amazon.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[100 Octane]

"Only about one-third of Americans today were alive in 1969 to see Apollo 11"...

That never occurred to me and might explain what appeared to be a lack of interest in the anniversary.
Some great stuff on PBS though.

[Cal Lash]

1n 1950 Phoenix was a nice "town."
And the slope was 5 miles away
in the quiet desert.
But the pols changed that in 59.
http://sunnyslopehistoricalsociety.org/brief-history-of-sunnyslope/.

I drove through the Slope last night and noted that the Mountain View Market is gone. But the "Do Drop In" is still in business. The mesquite bush at 9822 N 3rd Street has since grown in the Sonoran desert soil(since 1950) to almost obscure the house.
My friends say Phoenix was a nice village in the 30's and early 40's.

[Joe Schallan]

1969. I was here.

The next year, while I was at ASU, I had a part-time job in a business at 16th Street and Thomas, and after my classes I would drive over the little pass between the Papago Buttes to go to work. That year, 1970, for the first time I saw an inversion layer trapping smog, just like in Los Angeles.

We were on the cusp of a million residents, metro area. Already too many??