Rogue Columnist

Tico days

When I was a little boy, I rode the bus with my grandmother. We would board around Central Avenue and Cypress Street, riding downtown to shop. Such excursions were rare, to be sure. This daughter of the frontier loved to drive as much as she adored sliced bread, paper towels, and her "stories" (soap operas) on television.

In those days, the 1960s, buses were operated by a private company as Valley Transit. The city's surprisingly extensive streetcar system was a fading memory — cutbacks began in the Depression and the last dagger was a fire at the car barn in 1947. The replacement bus system was inadequate from the start.

In 1971, the city regained control of the system. Private ownership hadn't worked. Three years later, the Tico logo appeared on festively repainted Phoenix Transit buses. The mascot showed a sunny dot wearing a smile, sunglasses, and sombrero. It remained on Phoenix buses until the late 1980s.

Phoenix in the 'teens'

In 2010, Phoenix and Arizona were stuck in the worst (by most measures) bust since the Great Depression. Unemployment peaked at 10.9% in January statewide and 10.2% in metro Phoenix. Single-family housing starts in the metro area plunged from a monthly peak of 6,000 in 2004 to 854. Construction jobs fell from 183,000 in June 2006 to 81,000 in the summer of 2010. Phoenix was a national epicenter of the housing crash.

It was an eerie time. Freeways that had been clogged with tradesmen's pickup trucks were noticeably empty.

Now, nearly a decade later, the economy has recovered. Metro Phoenix joblessness was 4.1% in October, higher than the 3.6% nationally but still a marked improvement. Building permits clawed out of the 2009 trough but are still at levels of the early 1990s.

Population — the holy of holies worshipped by the local-yokel boosters — bounced back. After falling from 2008 to 2010, it rose by 653,000 by 2018 in the metro area. A much ballyhooed snapshot had the city itself the fastest-growing in the United States from 2017 to 2018. But the percentage rate of change looks to be slower this decade than the 2000s or the record 1990s.

True, the decade doesn't officially end until a year from now. But the "twenties" begin in the popular imagination this New Year's. So let's take stock of the "teens":

When Payson was small

In 1967, my mother arranged for me, my friend Billy Warren, and my grandmother to spend much of the summer in Payson. It had not been connected to the outside world by a paved highway for even a decade. The population was around 1,500 and it was clustered around a real tiny town, the enchanting massif of the Mogollon Rim towering to the north above the forest. I was 10.

We lived in a rented house on what's now called Frontier Street, a few blocks west of Arizona 87 (the Beeline Highway). Like almost everything in town, it was built of wood. An early look around was a disappointment to this callow city kid: No trains, no chain restaurants, no easy biking to parks or soda fountains. I don't recall having television, either. Payson revolved around the two-lane highway, with logging trucks rumbling by and everything locally owned. At night, the darkness was primeval under the vault of billions of stars.

The fear of boredom didn't last more than 24 hours at most. The volunteer fire department had a new station a block south, a place to hang around, admire the apparatus, and talk to the firefighters. I got a library card and quickly became a darling of the librarians by being a bibliophile and checking out books every few days.

But the big show was outside.

Both Billy and I were in Scouts — Camp Geronimo was north of Payson — so my grandmother had no concerns about us spending most of the day wandering around the forest. And we did, armed with canteens, pocket knives and compass. She trusted our good sense and caution. In those days, child abductions were rare. Today, Arizona has 909 open cases of missing persons, many children.

St. Luke's memories

St. Luke's Hospital was built on the ruins of the dense Hohokam village called La Ciudad. It tilts at an angle because it had to fit against the original canal dug by Jack Swilling and his gang from Wickenburg. The Town Ditch or Swilling's Ditch was covered in the 1920s but Villa Street preserved the angle. Today's St. Luke's extends all the way to Van Buren Street with a ghastly spread of rocks and gravel. Yet the hospital you see above was built in the shady Montezuma Heights barrio of houses and public housing projects south of Edison Park. No gravel.

In my time on the ambulance, I spent a good amount of time at the emergency room of St. Luke's (or, as we called it with our dark humor, St. Puke's). In the New Testament, Luke the Evangelist was referred to as a physician.

Once, we heard an explosion outside and went to check what had happened. A patient had thrown himself off an upper floor and was well beyond our ministrations. On a happier note, we regularly had lunch (Code 7) at nearby Sevilla's (before it moved to McDowell), a family-owned Mexican restaurant surrounded by the 'Jects. The homeboys kept watched over our units so they wouldn't be broken into for drugs or stolen.

Off duty, I would visit my mother there, in her twice-annual stays as a patient, being treated for the emphysema that would kill her within a few years. The care was good.

I write all this because, after a century at this location, St. Luke's is closing.

Camelback through the years

No physical landmark says "Phoenix" more than Camelback Mountain. It's also a geological oddity. The camel's hump was formed in the Precambrian era, from 2 billion years ago (in Arizona) to 600 million years ago. But the camel's head came from the Tertiary period, as recently as 66 million old — it was created around the time as the Papago Buttes.

As Halka Chronic writes in Roadside Geology of Arizona, "The whole sequence of Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks that should come between the Tertiary head and the Precambrian hump is missing!" It's also the only faulted mountain in the Salt River Valley, the hump caused by the earth being lifted upward rather than volcanic activity.

President Rutherford B. Hayes included Camelback in the Pima and Maricopa Indian reservation, a move reversed by the Territorial Legislature six months later. The 1956 photo above shows the mountain was still pristine, the same iconic image seen by the Hohokam, to whom it was sacred, and the first pioneers. But preservation was tardy and by this time private interests owned the entire mountain.

By the early 1960s, houses were marching up the side, with plans to go all the way to a resort on the top. I write about the ultimately successful effort to save the mountains elsewhere. It is true that Barry Goldwater took on the cause of Camelback after his unsuccessful 1964 presidential bid. We schoolchildren collected coins for the effort. But it ultimately took federal money, thanks to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, to save the upper reaches of Camelback.

Phoenix extended Arcadia Drive north of the mountain's namesake avenue to serve the luxury homes clinging to the side. Who doesn't remember their first kiss from Valle Vista Road with the city lights reaching to the horizon. Unfortunately, recent years have also seen enormous numbers of hikers, especially tenderfoots attempting the ascent of this wilderness in the hottest weather. Their rescues put first-responders at risk and cost city money.

Let's take a visual tour of this magical mountain through the years:

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.

Phoenix at statehood

On Feb. 14th, 1912, Phoenix became the capital of the 48th state — Arizona would remain the "Baby State" until 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the union. With 11,314 people in the 1910 Census, it was still less populous than Tucson but would soon surpass the Old Pueblo, with growth of nearly 166 percent in this decade.

The new state capital was still fairly isolated. A transcontinental railroad main line wouldn't arrive until 1926. Still, in 1887 a branch from Maricopa had been completed by a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific, although it was plagued by flood wash-outs. The Santa Fe's Peavine branch had arrived from the ATSF main line at Williams via Prescott in 1895. A streetcar network was growing, too.

Phoenix was far from the powerhouse it would become. Arizona's economy was primarily driven by mining, so towns such as Bisbee and Jerome generated spectacular wealth with their copper mines. The same was true of the mining district around Globe. Railroads were also major players. All were controlled by out-of-state interests, a major reason the Progressive-era state constitution established a Corporation Commission to regulate at least rail lines (and later utilities).

Hot enough

It's not true that Phoenix has no seasons. Not even the joke that they are "hot, hotter, hottest, and hell." They just change with a sublime nuance. Or this was once the case. Leaving the delightful 70s in Seattle, I am here for 110, headed to 111. This is five to six degrees hotter for this time of year than normal. Summer temperatures have risen about 10 degrees in my lifetime, especially the overnight lows. And summer is lasting longer.

This is mostly the result of "local warming," where the farms, groves, and desert have been replaced by sprawl and gravel, along with the destruction of thousands of shade trees and the grass and landscaping that made the city more beautiful and livable. I suspect that few people know this or even notice it. For one thing, Phoenix suffers from a high rate of population churn. And many of today's residents are here for the heat, "the hotter the better." Advanced automobile air conditioning and air-conditioned houses cloak the danger of this human-made environment. So when all the asphalt, concrete, and fruit of the Arizona Rock Products Association release the accumulated heat after sunset, so what?

Consequences abound. Several large wildfires have raged. I also notice on the Phoenix Fire Department regional dispatch site a significant uptick in brush fires, requiring significant commitment of apparatus to knock down. One reason is the expanding exurban development into the desert. Fools go hiking and mountain climbing in this weather. That was once rare. Summer was the time to spend inside, especially during the day (when the nights cooled down). When I was a paramedic in the 1970s, a summer mountain rescue was extremely rare. No more. Now, multiple rescues happen every day, putting first responders at risk and the "victims" often near death.

Big preservation alert

The most precious treasure of old downtown Phoenix is in flux. This could provide the city a long-overdue opportunity. Or it could go sideways in a hurry. I'm writing, of course, about Union Station.

According to CBRE, the big real-estate services firm "has been retained as exclusive representative to offer qualified investors the opportunity to purchase fee interest in the iconic...Union Station site in downtown Phoenix at 401 W. Harrison Street." It goes on, "Depending on the vision of a new owner, the Property may be eligible for a myriad of monetary and tax advantaged programs..."

Sprint, which has used the station to house switching equipment since the late 1980s, intends to move out before the end of next year. The Union Pacific Railroad's ground lease ends in March 2023, a century after the building was completed. Now what?

One of the most popular columns on this site is my history of Union Station (with photos) — you can read it here. The Spanish revival building brought together the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads in one full-service station. Three years after its completion, the SP finished its northern main line and routed most of its passenger trains through Phoenix. The city was served by multiple intercity trains a day through the 1960s.

The last Amtrak train called here in 1996. The state refused to partner with the SP (merged with Union Pacific the same year) to maintain the west line between Phoenix and Wellton to passenger-train standards. Phoenix became the largest American city by far with no intercity rail service. Sprint — which was started by the SP — using the depot for switching equipment helped protect and save it. Being on the National Register of Historic Places wouldn't have stopped Joe Arpaio's jail-building mania and other losses in the Warehouse District. Mesa lost its lovely SP depot to arson...no one cared.

Who will care now?

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.

The oasis, in photos I

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:

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.

 

 

Downtown living

Most of the historical photos on this site show the rise of a handsome small city, with commercial buildings, stores, churches, and warehouses.

But single-family houses and apartments proliferated in and near the original townsite even as monuments such as the Heard Building and Luhrs Tower rose. People were living downtown before it became desirable again in recent years. Above are the Dennis and Jacobs Mansions on Monroe between Second and Third Streets along "Millionaires Row," built in the 1890s. They were demolished in the 1950s for surface parking lots.

Rosson House, restored in Heritage Square, was designed by architect George Franklin Barber — he sold his designs by mail order. It was completed in 1895 at 139 N. Sixth Street. The Stevens-Haustgen Bungalow is nearby, also restored.

Most of the residences downtown were more modest. For example, the 1935 City Directory shows homes for Mrs. Della Jeanette at 129 S. Third Avenue, Mr. Samuel Lopez at 133 S., and Mr. Nestor Chavez at 333 S. Third Ave. Some were businesses where the owners lived on an upper floor. But others were simple, single-story houses gradually giving way to the expanding Warehouse District. The same is true along south Second Street, including parts of Chinatown, connected by Madison and Jackson streets, Gold and Paris alleys.

Phoenix and skyscrapers

Valley Center, now the Chase Tower, under construction in 1972. At 483 feet, it remains the city's tallest building.

The Republic recently ran a story to answer the question of why Phoenix lacks the skyscrapers that are one defining characteristic of other big cities. One of the problems of a place with so many newcomers is the loss of historical knowledge. So the story was, at best, incomplete.

The two big reasons given were automobile-based sprawl and a "polycentric" city with many cores. But both apply to other cities with much higher and more distinctive downtown skylines. Los Angeles comes to mind. It has "downtowns" in Century City, West LA, and Hollywood. It is a city built around the car, although it has rebuilt an extensive rail transit system.

But downtown LA, which is staging an astonishing comeback, is home to an impressive skyline. The Wilshire Grand, finished in 2017 and standing 1,100 feet with its spire is more than twice as tall as Phoenix's Chase Tower. The same is true of the U.S. Bank Tower, completed in 1989. About 28 skyscrapers there are taller than Chase.

Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte have cheaper outlying land and sprawl, but each has a much more impressive skyline than Phoenix.

One big reason downtown Phoenix lacks taller buildings is its proximity to Sky Harbor International Airport. Valley National Bank wanted its new headquarters to be even taller, but the plan was quashed by the FAA. Sky Harbor is not much closer to downtown than Logan airport to downtown Boston, but Logan's runways primarily run southwest to northeast. In Phoenix, the runways are east-to-west and airplanes usually fly directly south of downtown. Gaining altitude means expending more jet fuel, especially in summer. And Sky Harbor has enormous influence at city hall. This has prevented doable towers at a higher number of floors at Third Avenue and Van Buren and further west.

Phoenix's historic theaters

Today's Valdemar A. Cordova Municipal Court Building occupies the site of young Phoenix's first major theater, the Patton Grand, which opened in 1898. The new motion-picture industry was just getting started, so the theater hosted a variety of events such as plays and concerts.

It was also a point of pride in a town with a population of 5,544, which had made it through the national financial panics and local droughts and floods that characterized that decade. The theater sat 1,200 people. It also boasted hefty backstage spaces, based on the photo above, with room for curtains, lighting, and scenery.

E.M. Dorris, of the prominent merchant family, bought the theater at the end of 1899. It became the Dorris Opera House, the name by which most old Phoenicians and history buffs know it. Until the completion of the Phoenix Union High School Auditorium, the Dorris was the heartbeat of civic events, from traveling musicians, plays, and speakers, to political and union gatherings. It then settled in as a movie theater.

But, at Third Avenue and Washington, it was only one of many movie houses within walking distance of the city center or the streetcars. Let's take a stroll to some of them.

Karl Eller, an appreciation

The last time I sat down with Karl Eller in his office on the Camelback Corridor, he said, "If I were 30, I'd move to China."

It was classic Eller: Ambitious, brash, optimistic, visionary. This was in the 2000s, before Xi Jinping's crackdown, when the People's Republic seemed to be an endless source of opportunity. Rather like the Phoenix of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was young.

Eller, age 90, died on Sunday. He was the last of the old Phoenix stewards — people such as Walter Bimson, Frank Snell, Eugene C. Pulliam, and John Teets who could knock heads and write checks, who saw their companies' interests as synonymous with the health of Phoenix. Those essential stewards no longer exist and Phoenix is crippled as a result.

If you grew up in that 1960s Phoenix — a new city of the future, or so it seemed — you couldn't drive down a street without seeing Eller's name on the bottom of a billboard. Eller Outdoor was his first big score, a business he bought from the outdoor advertising pioneer Foster & Kleiser, for whom he worked as a "lease man." With roots in the Northwest, F&K, by this time a division of Metropolitan Broadcasting, offered Eller the billboard business in Phoenix, Tucson, Bakersfield, and Fresno. The $5 million price seemed impossible for a young man with net worth of $50,000, but he rounded up investors and closed the deal. He turned it into his first empire.

Phoenix overhead

When the Wright brothers made their first flight in 1903, Phoenix had a population of 5,544, finally larger than Prescott but still smaller than Tucson. Construction of Theodore Roosevelt Dam began the same year.

"Aeroplanes" — and even before that balloons — give us a great vantage point to track the city's growth. Most of these photos are collected by Brad Hall. Click for a larger image:

A balloon view over Second Street and Adams in 1911.

The same year an airplane captured this shot at Washington and Second Street. Block 23 is in the near lower right. A few blocks west is another block of shade trees — that's the county courthouse. The multi-story structure with raised awnings in the mid-upper-right is the Fleming Building.

Here's the town in 1915, with a view looking south. Central Avenue is the street that goes all the way across the Salt River.

Block 23, a history

The first downtown Phoenix grocery in decades is scheduled to open in October, part of a mixed-used project that will also include 330 apartments. This will be a major test for the revived central core. I've been skeptical as to whether demand exists — Bashas' passed on the store during the Great Recession — but maybe ASU, more downtown residents, and proximity to light rail (WBIYB) will make the difference. Fry's is owned by Kroger, which wouldn't undertake such an enterprise without a good chance of success.

This is located on Block 23 of the original half-mile Phoenix townsite, laid out by William Hancock, one of the town's most influential citizens and friend of Jack Swilling, in 1870. Two parcels were set aside for public uses. One was Block 76, located between Washington and Jefferson and Cortes and Mohave streets, and Block 23 between Washington and Jefferson and Montezuma and Maricopa streets.

The former was designated for the county courthouse square. Block 23 was labeled "plaza," for municipal uses. In a turn of the 20th century renaming of streets, Cortes and Mohave became First and Second avenues. Montezuma and Maricopa became First and Second streets. In 1879, some 400 Phoenicians gathered on Block 23 to witness the hanging of two murderers.

Ten questions about light rail, answered

It's the tenth anniversary of the completion of metro Phoenix light rail (WBIYB). I'll have a history of the project in a special insert of the Arizona Capitol Times. In the meantime, some common questions and answers.

1. What decided the route of the starter line? It was a combination of demand, available right-of-way, and cost. The line follows the route of the old Red Line bus, which was at 125 percent of capacity by 2000. This ensured high ridership and a favorable outcome in federal funding (with an invaluable assist from the late Rep. Ed Pastor).

2. Why was it built at grade rather than as a subway or monorail? Cost. While both those modes — especially a subway — would have been preferable to street running, the funding was not available. The federal government once spent heavily for such subways as the D.C. Metro and Atlanta's MARTA (originally meant for Seattle), but that aid largely ended by the 1980s. Monorails also have the problem of controversy about being unsightly to some, although the Skytrain in Vancouver, B.C., part overhead and part subway, is highly successful.

3. Did Mesa almost miss out on light rail? Yes. The most conservative big city in America was especially wary of the project, and the starter line might have ended at McClintock Drive in Tempe. If so, it would have been very expensive to eventually build into Mesa. Mayor Keno Hawker played a leading role in securing city council approval of the line to Sycamore. This set the table for extending light rail deep into downtown Mesa under Mayor Scott Smith (now Valley Metro CEO). With Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa on board, this helped the metro area rise in the national competition for federal assistance.

Alleys and buses

KJZZ had a story about a pilot program unveiled at 15th Avenue and Butler Drive, making it "the first neighborhood to install gates to close their (sic) alleys to outsiders...designed to prevent criminal activity and illegal dumping."

It was spun as a "celebration," but it made me sad.

Alleys have a colorful history in early Phoenix. Many had names, such as Melinda's Alley and the vice-ridden Paris Alley downtown. As the Phoenix grew, so-called service alleys were part of the cityscape. Trash trucks used them as burly garbagemen heaved the contents of aluminum garbage cans into the back of the vehicles to be crushed and stored (in Scottsdale, it was the Refuse Wranglers). Utility crews employed the alleys for maintenance and meter-reading.

They were a delightful playground growing up in mid-century Phoenix. Alleys were the battlefield for our childhood conflicts: Flinging oranges, dirt clods, and, the highest escalation, rocks at each other. Secondary weapons included spears cut from oleanders. (Don't believe the nonsense about innocent children; of course, today we little boys being little boys would be diagnosed on a "spectrum" and heavily medicated).

I remember one battle where we were hunkered down in a makeshift fort as our opponents hurled rocks at us. One little boy named Harry kept running up within a few feet and throwing a stone into the fort. But I had a Wrist Rocket slingshot and after several close encounters with Harry, he came again, an angelic smile on his face — until I let go a decent-sized pebble into his chest at high velocity. I still feel a little guilty. But we won the rock fight.

Wealth and cities

In Seattle, I frequently encounter rich people whose family wealth can be traced back generations. Although they might be techies, bankers, lawyers, investors, or philanthropists, their great- or great-great grandparents made their fortunes from timber. It was the foundational extraction industry of the Pacific Northwest.

Timber and logging are now a small fraction of the region's economy, but they created the riches that would propel Seattle into becoming a world city. Most famous was Frederick Weyerhaeuser, a German immigrant who, with his partners, built a timber empire with help from the railroads. Although Weyerhauser's headquarters was in Tacoma for many years, then in the suburb of Federal Way, the company recently moved to Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle, the better to attract top talent. William Boeing made his money from timber before founding the aerospace company that bears his name. And so it went.

Phoenix had its start in land extraction, too. First as an agricultural empire, then as a "migropolis," attracting millions of people to hundreds of square miles of subdivisions. But there the similarity ends. Phoenix never moved beyond the extraction industry of the land economy to become an economy based on value creation.

The consequences were on sharp display in the 2000s, when an effort was made to create a metropolitan arts council that would lobby for taxes to support culture. While the enterprise failed, it produced a remarkable study. That found that Phoenix ranked around 35th nationally in giving to the arts, despite Phoenix being the fifth most populous city and the 13th largest metro area. The same holds true for book markets. Phoenix is tough ground for writers. A new study found Arizona last in charitable giving.

Phoenix was wild about Harry

Before we get out of campaign season, it's worth remembering one of the most riveting contests in American political history: Harry Truman's run for president seven decades ago.

In 1948, Truman was serving out FDR's fourth term, having become the unexpected vice president to the ailing president four years before. Roosevelt died within months of winning the election, leaving Truman to lead the nation through the conclusion of World War II. Truman was untested and, compared with the suave FDR, came off as a country bumpkin. Also, after 16 years of Democratic triumphs, Americans were ready for a change. Republicans won control of Congress in 1946. The well-regarded New York Governor Thomas Dewey, who ran well against Roosevelt in 1944, was widely expected to win the presidency in 1948.

But the GOP misjudged their opponent in the White House. A fierce partisan with a volcanic temper, Truman famously ran against the "Do Nothing" Republican Congress. Even so, he remained the underdog. Thus, Truman embarked on a 30,000-mile whistle-stop campaign, criss-crossing the nation in a special train.

Truman visited Phoenix in September, where 7,000 people crowded around the rear platform of the armored presidential railcar Magellan to hear a "Give 'em hell" speech. The 17-car presidential special traveled east on the Southern Pacific. It previously stopped in Yuma, where 6,000 heard Truman speak and Arizona dignitaries boarded for the ride to the capital and Tucson. 

Saving the mountains

Phoenix punches below its weight on almost category compared with its peers. But it has one amenity that places it above nearly every other big city: the mountain preserves and parks. They are a majestic and defining accomplishment.

The city has about 37,000 acres, or 58 square miles, of mountain preserves and parks. These range from South Mountain Park and Papago Park to the Phoenix Mountains Preserve and the Sonoran Preserve in far north Phoenix.

This also inspired suburbs, especially Scottsdale with its McDowell Sonoran Preserve. As I write, this is the subject of a big fight over Proposition 420, which would allow a tourist center — and potentially other development — to be built in this pristine land. Scottsdale preservationists are wise to be on guard. Phoenix's experience shows that saving the mountains didn't come easy — and is always at risk.

Preservation began with two federal initiatives. First was the Papago Saguaro National Monument, established by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 at the urging of Rep. Carl Hayden (Hayden actually wanted a National Park). Second came the Coolidge administration's sale of the 13,000 acres of the future South Mountain Park to the city in 1925, again with the urging of Hayden, by then a Senator. Phoenix paid $17,000 ($248,000 in today's money) for the ranges of what were then known as the Salt River Mountains and surrounding desert. 

Carolyn Warner, an appreciation

I still subscribe unfashionably to the Great Man and Great Woman school of history. But history also carries cruel contingencies. Carolyn Warner, who passed away Monday night at 88 was a towering figure who might have saved Arizona from the Kookocracy, saved Arizona from itself.

Instead, Democrats split the gubernatorial vote in 1986, giving us Evan Mecham, then Fife Symington, and, with the Big Sort bringing ever more right-wingers and the old stewards passing, the die was cast.

Along with her ex-husband Ron, Warner ran the furniture and interior design store that bore their name at 28th Street and Osborn. It was for years the fanciest furniture store in town. A native of Ardmore, Okla., she came to Arizona in 1953.

As Superintendent of Public Instruction for 12 years, Warner oversaw the last period of great public schools in Arizona, long before the shameful charter-school racket. Although a Democrat, she worked well with pragmatic Republicans such as Burton Barr, in an era of both bipartisan compromise and competition. 

Ghost railroads of Arizona

Today's railroad action in Arizona is largely confined to the Union Pacific across the southern part of the state and the BNSF Transcon across the north, along with branch lines from both to Phoenix. Long intermodal and merchandise freights power along with few stops, heading to California and the east. Classification and switching that once stood in railroad towns such as Winslow have been removed, Arizona posts some of the lowest levels of tonnage originating and being delivered in the nation.

It wasn't always that way. Railroads were essential to tapping the state's mineral wealth, especially copper, shipping produce from the Salt River Valley, and building towns that served as busy division and subdivision points.

Passenger trains ended the state's isolation, bringing new residents and tourists. Crack trains included Santa Fe's northern Arizona fleet of the Super Chief, El Capitan, Chief, San Francisco Chief, and Grand Canyon, and Southern Pacific's Sunset Limited, Golden State Limited, and Imperial among others traveling through Phoenix once the SP northern main line was completed in 1926. They delivered and picked up the mail, often sorted en route in Railway Post Office cars. Less-than-carload freight service with the Southern Pacific, Santa Fe and Railway Express Agency served scores of towns and cities, the FedEx and UPS of their day.

Railroads built Arizona.

Almost all of this is gone. But the ghosts linger. Here are a few: 

Mayors you should know

With Councilwoman Thelda Williams being a placeholder (for the second time) until a new Phoenix mayor is elected in November, it's a good time to reflect on her predecessors. Here is my admittedly subjective list of the most consequential:

John Alsap was Phoenix's first mayor, serving for a year in 1881 after incorporation. Dying five years later, age 56, Alsap, left, nevertheless compiled impressive accomplishments in the Territory. Kentucky born, Indiana raised, and a physician by training, he came to Prescott as a prospector and saloon operator. He began farming in the Salt River Valley in 1869 and was one of three commissioners who established the Phoenix townsite. In the territorial Legislature, he led the successful effort to create a new county — Maricopa — out of Yavapai County. He's buried in the old Pioneer Cemetery (now the Pioneer and Military Memorial Park, although its historic grass was removed).

Emil Ganz was the young town's first Jewish mayor and a two-term chief, serving from 1885-86 and 1899-1901. Ganz was born in Germany, emigrated to America and training as a tailor, seeing heavy action in the Civil War on the Confederate side, and moving to Phoenix in 1879. He ran the Bank Exchange Hotel, the town's first substantial hostelry. As mayor he pushed to establish a fire department and improve the water supply (his hotel burned in 1885 and the town was hit by a severe blaze a year later). 

Phoenix 101: Canals

Beneath all the concrete, asphalt, and gravel of today's metropolitan Phoenix is some of the richest soil on earth. No wonder early settlers called it the Nile River Valley of the United States, or, with more aching pathos given what's happened, American Eden. Add water and anything will grow here. Getting the water from the Salt River was the challenge — one solved with canals.

The Hohokam (750-1450 AD) built at least 500 miles of canals in the Salt River Valley. The mileage might have been in the thousands. They created the most advanced irrigation civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas.

The genius of Jack Swilling — Confederate deserter, Indian fighter, prospector, drunk, opium addict, brawler, first town postmaster and justice of the peace, adoptive father of an Apache boy, cherished friend of many — was that he understood the significance of the Hohokam canals, which laid dormant for more than 400 years. They were not mere prehistoric curiosities. They were the means of building a modern empire, where a new civilization would arise from the ashes of its predecessor. (Why would you use the amorphous word "Valley" when you have the magical and appropriate name: Phoenix). 

Phoenix confidential: Miranda

In our cultural memory, Ernesto Miranda was railroaded into a false confession by a thuggish and racist Phoenix Police Department. The wrong was rectified by the Supreme Court in the landmark Miranda v. Arizona lawsuit. This resulted in the Miranda Warning, especially its demand that suspects be told that they have the right to remain silent. Anyone who has watched cop shows, from Adam 12 to Law and Order knows it by heart.

The truth is far different — and more fascinating.

Miranda, who went by Ernie, was born in Mesa and mingled easily in the Anglo-dominated Phoenix of the early 1960s. His boss at United Produce in the Warehouse District praised his work ethic. All his brothers joined the armed forces, served honorably, and lived successful lives. But Ernie was in trouble in his teens, doing two stints at Fort Grant, once synonymous with the state Industrial School for Wayward Boys and Girls. In the 19th century, Billy the Kid worked as a ranch hand nearby for a time. Ernie joined the Army but was dishonorably discharged.

The cause was being AWOL multiple times — but also for being a peeping Tom. Miranda rationalized it to himself that the women wouldn't leave their curtains open unless they wanted to be watched. This compulsion — especially after he arrived back in Phoenix after a troubled wandering around the country — would turn him into a hard-core rapist (one crime as a teen had been "assault with intent to commit rape”).

When a light goes out

“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” — John Steinbeck

I was baptized in Central Methodist Church, so many decades ago. I remember Sunday school, attending services with my mother and grandmother. My mother had a glorious contralto and, a child prodigy trained as a concert pianist, sometimes played the immense pipe organ, with its 4 divisions, 28 stops, and 41 registers. In the 1960s, it was common for each service to see a thousand people or more, filling the sanctuary and its three balconies. Central was a prime posting for veteran ministers — only doctors of divinity reached the senior rank — and the choir was superb. I was confirmed there, age 13.

When I returned to Phoenix in 2000, I started attending Central again, this time with Susan. Getting a hundred people in the pews was a victory by that time. The quality of preaching was uneven, as individual ministers came and went (long gone from the days of a senior minister and others). But the music program was very strong under Don Morse. The core, including the corps of ushers, was committed. Important for us, Central still offered a traditional service, with the wonderful Methodist hymns. Christmas Eve could see five services in the soaring sanctuary, with luminarias in the courtyard. We continue to attend. When I lived in Charlotte, people would ask me if I had found "a church home." No — in that hotbed of religion, the question irritated the secular me. "I have a bar home," I would respond. But the truth was different. My church was here. It always was. Always will be.

But this year brought heartbreaking news. First, the music program was downgraded, with Morse and seemingly most of the choir gone. Finances were an issue; the church and Morse, who had already taken a pay freeze/cut, couldn't come to terms. But respect also seemed an issue, the lay leaders wanting to downgrade his position to "choirmaster." A botched remodel of the sanctuary was probably another cause, including the loss of the pipe organ and removal of two of the balconies. I don't claim special insight. I spent many years in United Methodist choirs, but tried to avoid church politics whenever possible. Next came word that the sanctuary would only be used for special occasions. A traditional service would be held in the small Pioneer Chapel and a contemporary one in Kendall Hall.

The kingdom and the power

The Salt River Project was recently in the news, with proposed pay increases including $251,000 a year for board President David Rousseau. The story noted that this was more than Gov. Doug Ducey ($95,000) or Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton ($88,000). SRP backed off following the news in the Arizona Republic. The real day-to-day boss in the new general manager, Mike Hummel, who will make $1.04 million. Despite the modest title, this is a position of immense influence. Former general managers include heavyweights Jack Pfister and Dick Silverman.

Phoenix lacks engaged moneyed stewards such as Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Seattle, or major headquarters such as Amazon. This only magnifies the power of SRP. It is no ordinary utility, even though it supplies electricity to the Phoenix metropolitan area along with Arizona Public Service. But much of what it does happens behind the scenes. SRP likes it that way. 

The Salt River Project is a unique entity. Unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Bonneville Power Administration, both created during the New Deal as public works to address the Great Depression, SRP is not a federal agency.

Rather, it is a hybrid private-state organization consisting of two arms. First is the Salt River Valley Water Users Association, which began in 1903. The first Newlands Act reclamation project, the association consisted of farmers and ranchers who pledged their land as collateral for low-interest bonds to pay for Theodore Roosevelt Dam. This followed the disastrous droughts on the 1890s and the failure of private enterprise to build a waterworks, notably the Arizona Canal, to match the potential of the burgeoning agricultural empire of the Salt River Valley. The dam also provided hydroelectricity. 

Phoenix 101: the nineties

The new decade came upon a Phoenix beset with crisis. Charlie Keating, the most lionized Arizona businessman of the previous dozen years, was facing federal fraud and racketeering charges. His palatial Phoenician Resort was seized by a platoon of U.S. Marshals, lawyers, regulators, and locksmiths in November 1989. American Continental Corp., flagship of Keating's complex web of businesses, was forced into Chapter 11 reorganization. Among the casualties was his ambitious Estrella Ranch project south of tiny Goodyear.

Behind much of the trouble was the savings and loan scandal and collapse, a financial crisis that cost taxpayers about $132 billion. It also took down some of the Sun Belt's biggest institutions, including Phoenix's venerable Western Savings, controlled by the Driggs family, and Merabank, a subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corp. meant to make big bucks for the holding company of Arizona Public Service. It would take the federal Resolution Trust Corp. years to sort out and dispose of all the properties and hustles. The worst of the S&L wrongdoing was the Keating Five scandal. Its U.S. Senator members, who leaned on regulators on behalf of Keating, included Arizona's Dennis DeConcini and John McCain (Disclosure: John Dougherty and I were the first to break this story at the Dayton Daily News).

The local trouble had been predicted in a December 1988, Barron's article about Phoenix's overheated real-estate market, fueled by S&L money. The headline: "Phoenix Descending: Is Boomtown USA Going Bust?" The boosters had been outraged. Barron's had been right. In an ominous foreshadowing of the future, the city hit a record 122 degrees on June 26, 1990.

For individuals, the worst was yet to come. Unemployment in Arizona rose from 5.3 percent in May 1990 to a peak of 7.8 percent in March 1992. This seems modest compared with the Great Recession (11.2 percent for the state); it was painful enough. State and city leaders committed to establishing a more diverse economy, weaning Arizona off its dependency on population growth and real estate. Economic development organizations were set up across the state for this purpose, including the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, led by the brilliant Ioanna Morfessis. It established goals to build strategic clusters around high-technology sectors with high-paying jobs.

Tragically, the effort failed. The 1990s, when the U.S. economy enjoyed its longest, strongest, most innovative economic expansion in history, saw Phoenix and Arizona double down on "growth." The state's population grew by a staggering 40 percent, 45 percent for metropolitan Phoenix. The cluster strategy lacked sustained focus. Yet none of this was obvious or inevitable as the decade began. 

Phoenix's lost gems

We spend much time on this site discussing urbanism, including the architectural losses and disasters of Phoenix. More than history or sentimentality is at stake. Much of the economic power in cities such as Seattle, Denver and even Los Angeles has come from the "back to the city" movement and restored historic masterpieces.

Phoenix was smaller and poorer at the zenith of Art Deco. But it did have a real cityscape before the post-World War II automobile era, subsidized sprawl, and municipal malpractice of massive teardowns created today's suburbanized mess. It had some saves, including the Orpheum Theater, Orpheum Lofts, San Carlos Hotel, Luhrs Tower and Luhrs Building, old Post Office, Kenilworth School and the County Courthouse/City Hall.

Thanks to Rob Spindler and the ASU archives, along with the collecting by the indefatigable Brad Hall, we're getting more photographs of the old city. I realize some of this is familiar  territory for regular readers, but the images tell more than words about what Phoenix lost (click for a larger image). They include:

The Fox Theater:

 

Phoenix 101: The great stores

Phoenix was too small and too poor to have the grand department stores that graced mostly eastern cities. But it had some beloved stores, nonetheless. They were part of a dense, walkable downtown business district that also included scores of specialty shops, as well as national chain department stores. Here are a few of the most prominent locals: 

Goldwater's: Born in Russian Poland, Michel Goldwasser traveled to Paris, then London, changing his name to Michael Goldwater and becoming a successful tailor. In 1852, "Big Mike" and his brother Joe set off for San Francisco. He eventually ended up in the mining town of Gila City, Arizona Territory., in Yuma County. He mostly worked as a peddler. After many ups, downs and wanderings, the brothers opened a store in Phoenix in 1872. It closed only three years later and the brothers focused on their store in the territorial capital of Prescott. Big Mike's son Morris was manager and the enduring slogan "The best always" was born. Morris, a Democrat, was also elected Prescott mayor.

A store returned to Phoenix in 1896, thanks to the pushing of Big Mike's younger son, Baron. As a Washington Post story said, "The Phoenix store offered not only reliable merchandise at low prices but the latest fashions from New York and Europe. Baron decided that pleasing the ladies was the way to economic success. Once he had the new store running smoothly, Baron became active in the civic life of his adopted town.

"He was soon elected a director of the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and saw the Sisters' Hospital (now St. Joseph's) through some financial difficulties. He helped establish the Phoenix Country Club, the Arizona Club and was a founder of the Valley National Bank. In his late thirties, still trim and good-looking, Baron became the town's most eligible bachelor. His parents hoped that all their children would marry in the Jewish faith, but Mike's death in 1903 followed by Sarah's death in 1905 allowed them to marry whomever they wished." Baron married Episcopalian Josephine Williams, on January 1, 1907. Barry Morris Goldwater was born two years later.

Goldwater's soon became the swankiest department store in Phoenix. For decades it was located on First Street between Washington and Adams streets in the Dorris-Heyman Building. It moved to Park Central Shopping Center, two miles north, in the late 1950s. Above is a photo from a Goldwater's display window in the 1940s, from the McCulloch Brothers collection of the ASU archives. Goldwater's eventually grew to nine stores, including locations in Scottsdale, Tucson, Las Vegas and Albuquerque. The family sold it to Associated Dry Goods in 1963, but that didn't stop Barry from being pilloried as a "department store heir" in the following year's presidential election. In a famous Herblock cartoon, Barry towers over a poor family huddled in a doorway. "If you had any initiative, you'd go out and inherit a department store," he says. The Goldwater's name endured until the late 1980s.

Diamond's: Jewish immigrants Nathan and Isaac Diamond founded this Phoenix icon as the Boston Store in 1897. A big draw in 1931 was the installation of air conditioning. It wasn't renamed until 1947. Located at Second Street and Washington, the store featured women's and men's clothing, shoes, outerwear, housewares, and much more. It, too, made the move to Park Central in 1957, with a 200,000 square foot store. Other locations followed, including Thomas Mall, Tri-City Mall, Scottsdale Fashion Square, and Metrocenter. The Diamond family were among the founders of the Phoenix Symphony. The chain was sold to Dayton-Hudson, then Dillard's.

Phoenix Confidential: OCB

The Organized Crime Bureau of the Phoenix Police Department was created in the 1974 when Chief Larry Wetzel sent Detective Sgt, Oscar Long to clean up the old Intelligence Bureau, full of place-holders and shady types compromised by the mob. His goal: Replace the old "subversive surveillance squad" with top investigating officers to dig into organized and white collar crime for prosecution purposes. The old squad just gathered names to put in the intelligence files. The new one intended to put made men and corrupt pols on the defensive in one of America's gangland playgrounds. Lt. Glenn Sparks requested a federal grant to fund the OCB and it was approved in a very short time.

OCB attracted some of the most gifted detectives and supervisors in the department, indeed in the nation, including Long, Sparks, Lonzo McCracken, Jim Kidd, Cal Lash and A.J. Edmondson. I leave out some names at the request of the detectives — safety is still an issue. Over the next several decades, the OCB was involved in the most important investigations in the state, from the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles to corruption of high city officials and the depredations of the New Mexican Mafia (New Eme). Lash went on to serve as Administrative Sergeant for two police chiefs.

In a city where, as the blurb for my new novel goes, "gangsters rubbed elbows with the city’s elite amid crosscurrents of corrupt cops, political payoffs, gambling, prostitution, and murder cloaked by the sunshine of a resort city," the Organized Crime Bureau was Phoenix's Untouchables. And this was real, not fiction.

Bruno

Everyone who was blessed to know Alan Brunacini, who passed away in October at age 80, has a Bruno story. I'll tell two about Phoenix's long-serving Fire Chief.

At the 2005 going-away party for Sheryl Sculley, the deputy city manager who was leaving for the top job in San Antonio, I was talking to Bruno when a man walked up. He was a promoter on the make and wanted me to write about his project. I stepped a quarter turn and said, "Do you know Alan Brunacini?" The guy instantly (thought he) assessed the short, unprepossessing man in the Hawaiian shirt, said, "Howya doin', Alan," and rudely turned to face to me.

I thought: You just turned your back on the most powerful man in the city of Phoenix. Needless to say, his project never happened. His lack of discernment about Bruno was a tell. On the other hand, Bruno was accustomed to such reactions from those not in the know. "Most people think Bob Khan is the fire chief," he told me once with a broad grin, speaking of his ubiquitous public affairs officer (and successor). Bruno had little ego in the game. I suspect he also understood the advantage in being underestimated, especially in the perilous landscape of municipal politics. 

Years later, after he retired and I left the Republic, Bruno and I were enjoying one of our periodic meet-ups in the shady inner courtyard of Fair Trade coffee. A gifted raconteur, he told me about a pivotal moment in his early career.

Assessing Greg Stanton

Now that he's announced he will resign as Phoenix mayor to run for Congress, it's not too early to at least make a preliminary evaluation of Greg Stanton's tenure.

Whether they like it not, all Phoenix mayors since the mid-1980s have been judged on what we could call the Goddard Scale. Terry Goddard was a transformational Phoenix leader who swept away the last of the Charter-Margaret Hance status quo, led the change to a district system of council representation, saved the historic districts, and began to salvage downtown. He was bold! He was visionary! He got cities and had a clear-eyed view of Phoenix's situation!

And this is actually true. But even Terry Goddard wasn't Terry Goddard at first, or how he would mature as a leader and urban thinker after he left office (it was a terrible loss for Arizona that he didn't become governor). So on the Goddard scale, even Terry wasn't a 10. Let's say 9.1. Give Paul Johnson a 6.5 — Goddard was a hard act to follow, and Johnson faced the worst recession in decades here, up to that point. Skip Rimsza, who served from 1994 to 2004, gets a solid 8 in my book, although some would disagree. The same for Phil Gordon, especially his more productive first term.

And Stanton, who assumed office in 2012? I'd also give him an 8. Phoenix has been fortunate in its mayors.

The Chinese Cultural Center

In the late 1990s, a couple of years before my fateful and in retrospect foolish decision to come home and write a column for the Arizona Republic, I noticed a freeway sign for the "Chinese Cultural Center" and took the exit.

The location, on 44th Street, was strange. It was far from the original locations of Phoenix's Chinatown in downtown. The central core was dead then and the only memory of Chinatown was the Sing Hi Cafe, relocated to west Madison Street from its original site in the Deuce. There was also the Sun Mercantile building, a former warehouse, beside the basketball arena. Land was plentiful and more of the warehouse district was intact. Why not put a Chinese Cultural Center here?

But, no. And although the sign was one of the brown historic markers that usually went with something public such as the Desert Botanical Gardens, the Cultural Center appeared to be a private, mixed-use real-estate development. Yes, it had some Chinese-influenced architectural features, garden, restaurants, and Asian market, but it wasn't really a museum or cultural center. Wikipedia says it was developed by the Chinese state-owned COFCO group, but I don't know if this is accurate.

Lately, the center has been in the news because of the building's purchase by a Scottsdale private-equity outfit which intends to redo it as a corporate headquarters. Most of the center is emptied out and it's surrounded by a chain-link fence. Protests from the Chinese community brought a temporary restraining order protecting the garden statues and roof — but it runs out Nov. 3rd. Then a new hearing will be held and demolition could begin. The Republic and New Times have slightly different takes on the state of play.

In all, it is so Phoenix: Disregard for history, car-dependent far from light rail (WBIYB) or the central core, and ultimately just another a real-estate play.

Big Town

Big Town was a brand of melons and vegetables shipped by MBM Farms and Zeitman Produce from the Salt River Valley in its days as American Eden. One of scores of colorful labels on wooden crates, it had a stylized version of the Phoenix skyline in the background.

But I can't help wondering if it also caught a bit of the moment in 1950, when Phoenix entered the ranks of America's 100 largest cities. It was No. 99, with 106,818 people in 17 square miles. Phoenix landed 62 people ahead of No. 100 Allentown, Pa. But it was behind Scranton, Wichita, Tulsa, Dayton — not to mention its Southwest rival El Paso, No. 76.

In 1950, the nation's fifth most populous city was Detroit. According to new Census data, Phoenix has once again surpassed Philadelphia to claim the No. 5 spot it had by estimates in 2006 but lost in the 2010 count. I'll have more to write about this later.

For now, I want to linger on that moment when the Census Bureau made it official: Phoenix had crossed 100,000. The big town was definitely a city now, if not a big one (Even now, Phoenix has many characteristics of a small town, especially in power and power relationships).

As you can tell from the geographic size of the city, this Phoenix was convenient and walkable, with a true urban fabric. At 6,714 people per square mile, it was much more dense than today's 2,798. Surrounding it were citrus groves, farms, and small towns mostly dependent on agriculture (Tempe 7,684, Mesa, 16,790, Glendale 8,179, Gilbert 1,114, Scottsdale 2,032, and Buckeye 1,932). Arizona's total population was 756,000. Phoenix boasted an abundant shade canopy from the narrow streets to the enchanting canal banks. Downtown was the busiest central business district between El Paso and Los Angeles. As many as 10 passenger trains served Union Station in the golden age of streamliners.

Phoenix 101: Maryvale begins

Through the first decades of Phoenix's history, housing was built on an almost artisanal level. Sometimes one at a time. Other times a dozen or two. Along with such fashions as the bungalow and period revival style, this is what gives the historic districts north of downtown their unique quality. It took decades, for example, for today's Willo to be filled with homes.

After World War II, heavy demand for housing — hardly any had been built during the Depression and World War II — and federal loan guarantees sparked a nationwide residential building boom. This was especially true with new suburbs, built on the Levittown mass-production model. With builders such as Ralph Staggs and John Hall in the lead, subdivisions just outside the 17 square miles of the city began to grow. By the mid-1950s, subdivisions averaged 180 houses, according to historian Philip VanderMeer.

In 1954, John Frederick Long began quietly buying nearly 70 farms west of Phoenix. A Phoenix native, Long worked on the family farm, spent four years in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and came home to several failures as an aspiring businessman. In 1947, he married Mary Tolmachoff, who also grew up on a farm in the Valley. With a GI loan and some savings, they built a house on a lot on north 23rd Avenue.

Before even moving in, the Longs received an offer to sell the house for almost double the cost of $4,200 in materials. This launched him as a homebuilder, first on a very small scale. But with Phoenix growing — a sharp post-war recession had been reversed by the infusion of Cold War defense spending — Long had a vision for something much bigger.

Phoenix 101: the architects

One of the troubles with Phoenix is that most of the metropolitan area has been built up over the past two decades or so. The result is a deadening sameness of off-the-shelf architecture for house-builders and retailers, the boxes you'd find in newer parts of anywhere, with some faux Spanish-Tuscan crap attached. This is added to plenty of boring cookie-cutter buildings erected from 1960 through the 1980s. And Phoenix has more than its share of prominent architectural disasters.

That's too bad because Phoenix was once known for its great architecture, from office and government buildings to the magical period-revival homes of the historic districts, and especially its effervescence as a capital of Mid-Century Modernism.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) established his Taliesin West architecture school and home far out of town in 1937. A few Wright houses are left here, although contrary to popular myth he didn't design the Arizona Biltmore. The great Wright commission executed here was intended as the Baghdad opera house. You know it as Grady Gammage Auditorium (above), built after Wright's death.

But many more applied their calling here. This is an incomplete list, and I'm sure our smart commenters will have more:

The Deco masters and classicists:

Royal Lescher (1882-1957) and Leslie Mahoney (1892-1985) are responsible for some of Phoenix's most majestic public buildings, especially the 1929 Art Deco Phoenix City Hall (Edward Neild of Shreveport worked with them on the Maricopa County Courthouse portion). Lescher & Mahoney also designed the Orpheum Theater, Brophy College Chapel, the U.S. Post Office at Central and Fillmore, El Zariba Shrine Auditorium (former home to the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum), the Phoenix Title and Trust Building (today's Orpheum Lofts), Hanny's, St. Joseph's Hospital, the Phoenix Civic Center, Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the tragically lost Palms Theater and many schools and landmarks.

Lee Mason Fitzhugh (1877-1937) and Lester Byron (1889-1963). The firm of Fitzhugh & Byron was the architects behind such landmarks as First Baptist Church (finally being renovated), First Church of Christ, Scientist, George Washington Carver High School, and the Lois Grunow Memorial Clinic.

Albert Chase McArthur (1881-1951), a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright, moved his practice from Chicago to Phoenix in 1925. Here he designed his most famous work, the Arizona Biltmore. Less well known is that McArthur also was the architect for several houses in the Phoenix Country Club estates and elsewhere.

Phoenix 101: streetcars

Moses Hazeltine Sherman was a teacher from Vermont who made his way to Arizona Territory in 1874. While teaching, he also made money in land and mining. Later, he would move to Los Angeles and become a millionaire. But before that, he and M.E. Collins founded the Phoenix Street Railway in 1887.

Originally the streetcars were pulled by mules. But electric cars took over in 1893. The new Territorial capital had a little more than 3,000 people. By 1925, the system boasted nearly 34 miles of track on six lines. It had two major spines. One ran west to the Capitol and on to 22nd Avenue, and east to the State Hospital along Washington Street. The other operated north and south from downtown to the Phoenix Indian School.

A long addition ran east from the Indian School to 12th Street, then cut north and west, eventually terminating in Glendale. Other routes went to the Fairgrounds; north through the new Kenilworth district to Encanto Boulevard, and over to the east side ending at 10th Street and Sheridan. Most of the streetcar lines ran down the middle of the streets.

Through the middle of the 20th century, most American cities and large towns had extensive streetcar networks. Numerous electrified interurban railways were also build, competing with the steam railroads of the time. They carried freight in addition to passengers on larger cars. The largest system was in Los Angeles, the Pacific Electric, known for its iconic red cars. Owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad, it operated more than a thousand miles of track in the LA basin.

Jack August, an appreciation

At the 2004 launch party for my novel Dry Heat, I'm with Jack August, center, and his wife Kathy Flower August. Jack passed away on Friday.

When I was a popular columnist at the Arizona Republic, it felt as if everyone outside of the Kookocracy (I coined the term), including many of the most prominent people in Phoenix, became my friend. "I never thought I'd read this in the Republic!" they would say about my writing, truth-telling about the Ponzi-scheme economy, the crash to come, the lost beauty, policy blunders, and Phoenix's forgotten and ignored past. "Don't worry, you'll have a place with us" if you get fired, some promised. I was not fooled.

When the pressure became too much and the Republic kicked me out as a columnist, they almost all melted away. Instantly. Like drops of water on a high-summer sidewalk. I was not only dropped but shunned. Later, some would resurface if they needed something, but that's human nature not friendship. I can count the genuine friends who stuck with me on two hands. Jack August stuck. He was that kind of man. Crisis reveals character.

His death at age 63 is a staggering loss for Arizona, for all who knew him. He was a towering figure as a historian of a state that suppresses its past, where so many newcomers keep the home of their heart in the Midwest and crow, "There's no history here." He was an irreplaceable counterweight to these toxins. He was a mensch who gave full measure to the term "a gentleman and a scholar."

I first ran across Jack long before, in an appropriate way, pulling one of his books out of the shelves at Flagstaff's sadly lost McGaugh's bookstore and newsstand downtown. This was on a visit, showing my girlfriend my home state with no expectation I would ever live here again. A title caught my eye, Vision in the Desert, by Jack L. August Jr. The book chronicled Carl Hayden's leading role in the long fight for the Central Arizona Project. Susan bought it for me and I read it on the plane as we crossed the country.

My mother had spent a decade working on the Arizona v. California lawsuit and the CAP, mostly for the Arizona Interstate Stream Commission but also for the lead attorneys, Mark Wilmer and Charlie Reed. I knew my water history. One of my dreams was to write a history of Arizona's fight for the Colorado River, especially the outsized personalities, back stories, and intense days-and-nights of work fueled by uppers and booze as David took down Goliath. Vision was impressive and I wondered: Who is this Jack August?

Phoenix 101: the twenties

If this photo shows a busy little city from the Roaring Twenties, that's exactly what you found in Phoenix during this transformative decade. Town to city, horses to cars, less Wild West and more sophistication — Phoenix had been moving this way for years. But in the 1920s, they became solidly entrenched — even Town Ditch was covered. The first "skyscraper," the seven-story Heard Building, right, opened in 1920. By the end of the decade, it had several taller and more impressive siblings that remain some of the city's most treasured and beautiful buildings. Central Methodist Church (ME South) on the near right would move to a handsome new structure at Central and Pierce.

The nation entered the decade with Woodrow Wilson as president. But he was incapacitated by a stroke and his wife, Edith, was protecting him from most visitors and essentially carrying out most of his executive duties. America was disillusioned by the outcome of the Great War, the Palmer Raids and the "Red Scare," what was seen as Wilson's overreaching, and two decades of the Progressive Era. Voters (including women, for the first time) eagerly embraced Ohio's Warren G. Harding as the next president. He promised a "return to normalcy," forever wrecking the correct word "normality." Harding freed the Socialist Eugene Debs, who Wilson had imprisoned for opposing American involvement in the war.

The Great War had brought changes to the Salt River Valley, especially with the booming demand for cotton. By 1920, it had turned into a bust and Phoenix was suffering through the national recession. Things would soon turn around as the economy expanded and America embarked on, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history." It was the Jazz Age, with the experiment of Prohibition sidestepped with speakeasies. Prohibition was hardly observed at all in the non-Mormon towns of the West. In Phoenix, bars, borthels, and gambling dens operated in the open, sometimes making payoffs to the city. This wide-open environment soon attracted the Mafia, including Al Capone.

The Phoenix of the 1920s was expanding out of the half-mile footprint of the original township. In the previous decade, the city had surpassed Tucson to become the most populous place in Arizona. With more than 29,000 people in 1920, Phoenix would grow nearly 66 percent over the next 10 years. Residential neighborhoods expanded a half mile north of McDowell, west of the Santa Fe tracks at 19th Avenue, and east as far as 16th Street. These were gradually incorporated into the city limits, which expanded from five square miles in 1920 to 6.5 square miles a decade later.

The mansions of "Millionaire's Row" still graced Monroe Street, but the central business district was moving north. Elegant bungalows lined the streets north of Van Buren into the fancy new Kenilworth District north of Roosevelt Street and eventually the Period Revival neighborhoods just beyond McDowell, including Palmcroft. Many of these were reachable by the streetcars.

Phoenix 101: air conditioning

The first air-conditioned building in Phoenix was the Hotel Westward Ho, in 1929.

The common narrative is that Phoenix's spectacular growth was made possible by air conditioning. But that's only partly true.

Some of the hottest places in America were big cities in 1930, when air-conditioning units were large and expensive, confined to the largest buildings with money to spend. Among them were New Orleans (458,762), Dallas (269,475) Houston (292,352), and Atlanta (270,366). These cities suffered not only very hot, but also humid, summers. Phoenix, by contrast, had a population of only a little more than 48,000 that year. Even El Paso, the city that Phoenix leaders aspired to surpass as the business capital of the Southwest, held 102,421 people.

Before the beginning of the great post-war migration to the yet-to-be-named Sunbelt, the Intermountain West was lightly populated and a magical place unknown to most Americans outside of movies. The entire state of Arizona had a population of fewer than 436,000. The Intermountain West population was about 3.7 million out of a total U.S. population of 123 million. In other words, those seven states had fewer people than today's metropolitan Phoenix.

The great impediment to Phoenix's growth was not as much heat — note the cities above — as isolation. Cut off from the east and north by nearly impenetrable mountains, and from the west by forbidding desert, Phoenix was far from natural routes of commerce or travel. This began to change as branch lines of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads reached the emerging agricultural empire of the Salt River Valley in the late 19th century (the railroads' main lines had been built through northern and southern Arizona). This changed dramatically with the completion of SP northern main line through the city in 1926. Along with new highways, this forever broke through Phoenix's seclusion.

A dozen historic elections

With Donald Trump, the most extreme and unqualified candidate of a major party, in striking distance of winning the presidency, we stand on the edge of the abyss. This election shouldn't be this close. You can use the comments section as an open thread as the next few days unspool. For my contribution, here are a dozen of the most consequential elections, nationally and in Arizona. At the least, they show that elections do indeed matter.

1828: John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson. Adams, the sitting Whig president, was defeated by war hero Jackson. The Whigs stood for the "American System" of internal improvements (infrastructure), a national bank and limiting the spread of slavery. Jackson was just the opposite. Jackson's victory led to the breaking of solemn treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes and their brutal relocation west (denounced by Adams) to open land for slaveholders, among many other ills.

1844: James K. Polk vs. Henry Clay. The defeat of "Harry of the West" not only doomed the American System but eliminated the last chance that the Civil War might have been postponed or avoided. One reason was the familiar partisan circular firing squad. Clay lost votes in New York and Pennsylvania to the abolitionist Liberty Party. It was the death of the Whigs.

With Polk, the nation again had a Southerner determined to extend slavery, including by prosecuting the highly unpopular Mexican War. At one point, Polk considered demanding all the territory to Tampico, but didn't want so many Mexicans brought into the union (they automatically became U.S. citizens with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war). On the other hand, in settling the Oregon Country dispute with Great Britain, he would have settled for the Columbia River as the northern border (in other words, Seattle would be in British Columbia). With Polk, the Civil War became inevitable.

The park Phoenix almost lost

Today's Papago Park is full of delights and history, from the Desert Botanical Garden to the Phoenix Zoo, Hole-in-the-Rock, hiking, baseball, and Hunt's Tomb. As the official website says, "Its massive, otherworldly sandstone buttes set Papago Park apart, even in a city and state filled with world-class natural attractions."

But Papago Park almost didn't happen.

For those of you who don't venture south of Bell, north of "south Chandler," or are out-of-town readers, I'm writing about land that sits in east Phoenix and north Tempe. Technically, the boundaries run from McDowell on the north to Tempe Town Lake on the south, and 52nd Street and the Crosscut Canal/College Avenue to the west and east respectively. The park could have been much larger.

These magical uplands were five-and-a-half miles from the original Phoenix townsite when they were included in the reservation for the Pima and Maricopa tribes by President Rutherford B. Hayes. This was 1879, when the biggest concerns of the hardscrabble settlements of Phoenix and Tempe were reclaiming the Hohokam canals for agriculture. The National Park Service claims the Hohokam used Hole-in-the-Rock to mark the solstice. Early American settlers also appreciated the beauty of the ancient rock formations, including Carl Hayden (born in 1877) growing up across the river in Tempe.

Later in the 19th century, the reservation was contracted to the present-day borders of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Some desultory mining activity took place around the buttes and they became more popular as exotic destinations for visitors. In 1914, a grown up Hayden, the new state's only representative in the U.S. House lobbied his friend, President Woodrow Wilson, to make the area a National Park. Wilson declined, but using the presidential powers of the Antiquities Act, declared it the Papago Saguaro National Monument. At the time, it stretched from the Salt River to Thomas Road.

Minorities in early Phoenix

I'm gradually going back through Phoenix 101 columns and fleshing them out with more serious scholarship. This is a crazy week, so I may or may not get to a new column. In the meantime, enjoy this expanded column that first appeared in 2009:

 

 

Phoenix 101: the eighties

Wrigley Mansion looking southwest over the city in the 1980s.

On the night in 1968 after President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill authorizing construction of the Central Arizona Project., my mother took me on a long drive. We went through the citrus groves, the empty farmlands between the towns, the enchanting oasis that was Phoenix. Like many who had dedicated a good part of their lives to win the CAP, she had deep misgivings. She wanted me to see the place, burn it in my brain, and remember. "It will be gone," she said. She didn't live to see her prediction come true. But the ferocious transformation of Phoenix from my beloved old city to the nearly unrecognizable concrete desert of today largely  happened during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The big changes began in the 1980s.

In 1980, Phoenix's population was nearly 790,000, up 36 percent from 1970. The city would grow slower in the 1980s — up 25 percent. But Maricopa County grew almost 41 percent. Yesterday's small communities began to become today's mega-suburbs as sprawl took off as never before. For example, Glendale, which had grown by 168 percent in the 1970s, added another 52 percent in the eighties. It would hold nearly 148,000 people by 1990. Arrowhead Ranch, the citrus groves owned by the Goldwater and Martori families, was being developed into subdivisions, one of the largest new "master planned communities" in the state. Phoenix remained the power center of the state and county through the decade, but its hold began to slip.

In 1980, Phoenix still enjoyed a robust base of major headquarters. By most measures it was never stronger and almost all were located in the Central Corridor. Among them were the three big banks, Valley National, First National, and the Arizona Bank; Greyhound; Arizona Public Service; American Fence; Central Newspapers; Western Savings, and Del Webb Co. Karl Eller's Combined Communications had been purchased by Gannett in 1978 but Eller remained active, taking control of Circle K in 1983 and making it the nation's second-largest convenience store chain.

APS formed a holding company, Pinnacle West Capital, that was not regulated like the utility by the Corporation Commission. Among its ventures was the S&L Merabank. Taking advantage of airline deregulation, America West Airlines was formed by local investors in 1983 — it would go on to merge with USAirways and take over American Airlines. And Phelps-Dodge, which for a century controlled much of Arizona's destiny as the world's leading copper company, moved its headquarters from New York City to a new tower in Midtown Phoenix.

Bolles: a players guide

"They finally got me...Mafia, Emprise, Adamson...find John Adamson..." — Don Bolles

On June 2, 1976, a bomb detonated under the car of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in Midtown Phoenix. He survived an agonizing 11 days before he died. A recent article by Bolles' colleague John Winters lays out the basics. I've written about the case before here, as well as the Phoenix underworld. The closest assassins went to prison. Yet full justice was never served. The real puppetmasters got away with it. Many in high positions wanted it to go away.

But what exactly was it? The case has been extensively covered over the years, from the Arizona Project of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and contemporary, dogged reporting, by Republic and Phoenix Gazette reporters, including Al Sitter, Paul Dean, and Charles Kelly. New Times ran the IRE series and kept digging over the following decades, especially with Jana Bommersbach, John Dougherty, Tom Fitzpatrick and Paul Rubin. The Republic continues with retrospectives. Don Devereux, who worked for the Scottsdale Progress, still writes a blog about the case. A fascinating new book by Dave Wagner, an R&G city editor, The Politics of Murder: Organized Crime in Barry Goldwater's Arizona, makes an important contribution.

With so much having been written, so many characters and theories, one danger is becoming lost in a house of mirrors. The Bolles case would be the ultimate test of a mystery writer, were he foolish enough to try to make it into popular crime fiction. That's because in real life, the case was complex and shaded. It involved journalism and supposition, not all of the latter ultimately true. Carl Bernstein said that good journalism is the best available truth at that moment. But journalists write on history's leading edge and history is an argument without end. Law enforcement continues to debate the case, too. Files were lost or misplaced, perhaps deliberately. Among them, Phoenix Police file No. 851. In addition to the missing file, index cards for the files were also removed from the records room. Did it contain inconvenient information about Adamson, Emprise and Kemper Marley? Or more? Self-serving narratives, hidden agendas, and bad memories further blur the trail. Many questions remain. 

So my modest attempt for the 40th anniversary of the bombing is a list of the actual major players and their connection with the most notorious assassination of a reporter on American soil:

John Adamson: Don Bolles left his post covering the state Legislature to meet Adamson at the Clarendon House Hotel on June 2nd. Adamson promised a juicy tip on a land fraud involving Barry Goldwater, Harry Rosenzweig, Sam Steiger, and Kemper Marley. In reality, while Bolles waited for him in the lobby, Adamson planted the dynamite device under the driver's side of Bolles' new Datsun 710. After giving up on the meeting, Bolles returned to the parking lot, started his car, and pulled out when the bomb went off.

Usually portrayed as a small-time but menacing hood, Adamson hung out on the Central Avenue bars and the dog track. But he actually had worked his way up to being chief enforcer for land-fraud kingpin Ned Warren and had been retained by associates of Barry Goldwater for dirty business in a Navajo power struggle. He also worked as a confidential informant for someone in the Phoenix Police. Bolles identified Adamson in his famous last words. In exchange for cooperation, Adamson was given a 20-year sentence. When convictions from his testimony were thrown out, prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder. This conviction didn't stick. So after serving 20 years, Adamson entered federal witness protection, then voluntarily left it, dying in 2002. Some retired cops and journalists suspect that Adamson protected the true source of the death warrant on Bolles. In a jailhouse interview with Bommersbach and Rubin, Adamson said chillingly, "I didn't kill him for a story he'd written. I killed him for a story he was going to write."

Phoenix 101: the forties

In 1941, Arthur Horton, a professor at Arizona State Teachers College, the precursor of ASU, published a remarkable Survey of Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun. What makes it still valuable is that it provides us with the most authoritative examination of Phoenix in that decade, or at any time until perhaps the 1960s.

The exhaustive report is also helpful in understanding a decade that meant far more than American involvement in World War II and its effects on Phoenix (which I wrote about here). That lasted less than four years out of 10. Much more was going on.

The decade began with a strong local economy, almost entirely thanks to the New Deal’s enormous largesse toward Phoenix and Arizona. The stimulus spending worked and helped pull Phoenix out of the Great Depression. By 1940, Americans were doing better and traveling, including visiting the mostly new resorts including the Arizona Biltmore, Camelback Inn, Jokake Inn, Adobe House, Ingleside Inn, Wigwam Guest Ranch and San Marcos at Chandler, as well as Phoenix’s premier hotels. The “Valley of the Sun” tourist promotion launched by the Chamber of Commerce and the railroads was paying off. To be sure, not everyone was doing better: 10,000 in the county (population 186,000) were on relief.

Agriculture remained the mainstay of the Salt River Valley’s economy. According to Horton, Arizona had 1.1 million grapefruit trees, 625,000 orange trees; 17,000 lemon trees; 5,000 tangerine trees, and 2,675 lime trees. Most of these were in the American Eden in and around Phoenix.