Rogue Columnist

Into the wild

When I was about three, my family was driving from Tucson to Phoenix in those pre-Interstate times. I have three vivid memories. The first is the restaurant where we ate breakfast; it had ancient double doors with windows behind ancient double screens. The second is the fierce rainstorm that cut visibility severely, almost the desert version of a whiteout. We headed out of Coolidge, my mother behind the wheel, me between her and my grandmother. No other cars were on the two-lane road.

My third memory is of a vast torrent of fast-moving latte-colored water that suddenly appeared in front of us.

I'm sure it wasn't as wide or as biblical as I recall it. I had never seen water in a river before! But what was undeniable is that the bridge had washed out — perhaps at the Gila River — and only my mother's caution, slow speed, and fighter-pilot reflexes prevented our deaths.

As I write now, searchers are still trying to find six-year-old Willa Rawlings, lost when her father's "military-like truck" was swept away in flooding Tonto Creek. The bodies of her brother and cousin, both five, were found Saturday. Only Willa's shoe has been recovered. Her parents escaped.

The Republic's Laurie Roberts hit the right notes of sympathy and bafflement — that the driver would try to cross the flooded creek, and that the Legislature in its low-tax religion has failed to build a bridge. Yet I suspect little will change. Especially on the common-sense front, for bridges can be overwhelmed as anyone knows who remembers Scottsdale's comic attempts to span Indian Bend Wash in the 1970s.

'Solutions' annotated

From the Arizona Republic on Nov. 17th. My annotations are in black.

Headline: ‘We need to act fast’: Statewide forum focuses on climate solutions for Arizona. Journalists are pushed to seek solutions to largely insoluble problems. Steve Jobs was more on the mark when he critiqued Fox News to Rupert Murdoch: "The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society."

Lede: With climate change cranking up the heat and intensifying droughts, more than 400 people from across Arizona gathered Friday and Saturday to brainstorm solutions for reducing planet-warming pollution and preparing for a hotter, drier future. What people? Doug Ducey? Developers? Republicans who have held control over the Legislature for decades? Elliott Pollack? Grady Gammage. No...

Second graf: Among them were young activists who see climate change as the defining issue for their generation. The time to act is now, they said. You bet. But what power do they have? Do they vote? Did they drive to the conference, adding to climate-causing emissions (rhetorical question)?

Next grafs: “This is rapid change and we should do something about it before it’s too late,” said Alicia Rose Clouser, a 13-year-old eighth-grade student from Sinagua Middle School in Flagstaff and a member of the Navajo Nation.

“My people will be suffering for generations on if we don’t do something,” she said. Mandatory inclusion of a woman and "marginalized person" but otherwise empty information calories.

Next: The two-day conference at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff brought together the students and teenage activists along with academics, health officials, tribal representatives, environmentalists, representatives of farming businesses, urban planners and city officials, and people from the community who said they wanted to be part of the discussion. Now we finally get the "who" — none of whom have the power to enact policies that would address climate change.

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.

Pushing the Pinal envelope

I attended kindergarten in Coolidge. Back then it was a compact town of 5,000 people. It boasted a charming little Spanish-style railroad depot on the Southern Pacific, with six passenger trains and many freight trains a day. My uncle showed me how to place a penny on the tracks to be mashed under a passing train.

Pinal County was home to about 63,000 people, most working in agriculture. Florence, the county seat, had a population of about 2,100, Casa Grande, another compact desert town on the SP, held 8,300, Eloy 4,900, and the remote crossroads of Maricopa a few hundred. Even then, Pinal County had a water problem: It was almost exclusively dependent on pumping groundwater. Coolidge Dam in neighboring Gila County wasn't enough for Pinal County's water needs even in 1960.

Fast forward to today. Pinal County holds an astonishing 447,000 people — more than the city of Phoenix in 1960. Maricopa alone (above) had an estimated population of more than 50,000 as of last year. This once-rural, once-distant county has become a Phoenix bedroom community — except the passenger trains are long gone. And, contrary to one of the key goals of the Central Arizona Project and Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980, it's still dependent on pumping from ever-diminishing aquifers.

Paving Arizona

Seattle recently completed demolition of the double-deck 1950s-era Alaskan Way Viaduct, which ran for more than 2 miles along the waterfront downtown. Now the traffic is in a tunnel and the city is preparing to enjoy unencumbered access to Elliott Bay. An even more ambitious goal is to put a long lid on Interstate 5 downtown, which is already covered by a park for a few blocks.

Meanwhile, in Southern California, the $8 billion, 63-mile High Desert Corridor freeway has been canceled. It would have been the first new freeway in LA County in a quarter century. According to Streetsblog, the project "would have spanned two counties connecting the north L.A. County cities of Palmdale and Lancaster with San Bernardino County cities of Victorville, Apple Valley, and Adelanto. The route would have gone through a patchwork of privately-owned undeveloped wild lands populated by Joshua Trees." The PIRG Education Fund named it one of the worst highway boondoggles in the nation.

But that's not how we roll in central Arizona. In addition to the unneeded South Mountain Freeway (pictured above), the state Department of Transportation is planning a $55-mile freeway running from Apache Junction to Eloy. There it would connect with Interstate 10. When in a hole, keep digging.

Library late fees fade away

When I was nine years old, I went to the main branch of the Phoenix Public Library (a short bike ride from home) and applied for my youth library card (nine was the youngest one could apply). It was the most prized occupant of my wallet. It was also an important passage into growing up.

Kenilworth School had a well-stocked library. That was unlike today, where underfunded schools often lack what was once considered a basic. Along with the charter school racket, which operates out of anywhere without resources or much oversight (the better to siphon public money to the owners), the now rely on the city libraries. This is a shocking change from when I attended Arizona public schools.

Anyway, my school library wasn't enough for this young bibliophile or for many of my friends. I wanted to wander inside the big coral-colored building at Central and McDowell (Barry Goldwater's name was on the plaque, from when he was a city councilman). The Arizona Room, stocked with history, beguiled me from the moment I walked in. I wanted to have borrowing privileges. Of course if one was late returning a book, a fine was attached. But I never got a fine (and we were broke, often hovering on the edge of financial catastrophe). I took my responsibility as a card holder seriously. Being a library-card holder was a privilege, not a right. I'm still a card-holder of the Phoenix Public Library, as I have been in the many cities and towns in which I lived. Even in little Payson, when I spent the summer of 1967, had a library and I got a card.

Turns out this is very 20th century/last millennium thinking.

The war on shade

Behold the lovely mature pine trees in the photo above (thanks to Aimee Esposito, executive director of Trees Matter). They will soon be demolished if a plan is approved for Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church to use half its land in the Alhambra district for single-family houses in a gated property. WWJD?

Like the newspaper business, mainline Protestant churches are in such a catastrophic decline, much of it self-inflicted, that their most valuable earthly possessions are their property. But this latest abomination, reported by New Times, is part of an ongoing catastrophe that is going to help make Phoenix uninhabitable in the future — and is helping raise local temperatures now, not to mention making most of it remarkably ugly.

Most Phoenicians today likely have no memory of the old city, a lush Eden of trees, grass, hedges, flowers, citrus groves, farms, and the priceless Japanese gardens. This was made possible now only because of our federally funded water projects, but also because the heart of the Salt River Valley is a natural oasis, near the confluence of five rivers and sitting on some of the most fertile alluvial soil on earth. Growing up, I never saw one palo verde, most varieties of which provide zero shade, outside of going into the desert.

Today, Phoenix is ever more a paved monstrosity of asphalt, concrete, and grass, with the occasional "shade structure" which doesn't actually provide shade. Not surprisingly, overnight temperatures have risen 10 degrees in my lifetime. Losing the regular frosts once commonplace, West Nile virus is a new scourge, carried by mosquitoes that were once killed off in winter. And this is before the rising dangers of climate change.

Musing about the future

Most of our best commenters — people who made these columns worth writing and reading — have absented themselves in recent months. Traffic continues to rise modestly and I get nice emails from readers, for which I'm grateful. And I totally understand potential reasons the commenting A Team is gone. For example, ruminating over our situation is exhausting and perhaps toxic.

The outcome on the light rail vote (WBIYB) was a rare win. And I'm happy that the central core continues to fill in. Both these are longtime concerns of this column and, before that, when I wrote for the Arizona Republic. Otherwise, we keep losing. Phoenix and Arizona keep sprawling out, heedless of the cost and inefficiency of thinning out population; keep the "business model" of population growth and a low-end economy; keep extremist politics; keep throwing down gravel and ignoring the desperate need for shade trees in the city, etc.

When I started this blog in 2008, it was pro-bono work offering commentary, context, and history that wasn't being written elsewhere. That remains the case; if anything, institutional knowledge has declined sharply. But I have my day job at the Seattle Times and my novels, as well as feelers to write more history books. Without being anointed and becoming a best-seller, I would be content never to see my name in print again. But, as I've written before, I always felt I owed. That Phoenix was built on achieving impossible deeds — we made the desert bloom! — and it was my duty to carry the tradition on. I was raised that way. What a quaint concept today.

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:

Snakebit

I've spent a good part of my career advocating public funding for stadiums as a necessary evil to protect important civic assets. For example, I supported new stadiums for the legendary Reds and the perpetually disappointing Bengals ("Bungles”) when I was in Cincinnati. These new venues kept pro teams that would have otherwise decamped for larger markets.

I did it again most recently with the Phoenix Suns arena, arguing in November that allowing the NBA team to leave downtown would be a terrible blow to the central city:

Kate Gallego, facing Daniel Valenzuela in a March mayoral runoff, said, “it is not in Phoenix’s best interest to invest in an arena.” Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts wrote, "taxpayers are about to get hosed if this deal goes through."

Here's the real deal: If Phoenix doesn't invest in the arena, Sarver — who has none of Jerry Colangelo's civic spirit — will move the team to the Rez, renaming it the Arizona Suns, no doubt, or even to Seattle, which is hungry to replace its lost Supersonics. The damage to downtown and light-rail (WBIYB) would be catastrophic. Talk about hosed.

Now come the Diamondbacks, demanding further pro-team welfare. The team can leave Chase Field as early as 2022 and has been sending ominous threats: Exploring use of the Cardinals stadium in Glendale for while, flirting with the Las Vegas area, fielding feelers from other cities. The most comfort officials would give is that the D-backs "are highly likely to remain in Arizona."

And I'm starting to think: Git. Let. Them. Leave.

The plot against light rail

This is the reality of Phoenix's light-rail system: nearly 16 million passengers carried in the most recent fiscal year; expansion of the original 20-mile starter line to 26 miles; an essential link between ASU's Tempe and downtown campuses; 30 percent of riders use the train for work; large numbers use it to reach sporting events; $11 billion in private and public investment has occurred along the line since 2008.

Light rail has also proved essential in giving Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa a fighting chance in an era where talented young people and high-quality companies want to be in city cores served by rail transit.

None — not one — of the hysterical predictions of opponents to light rail came true.

No wonder that voters backed light rail in three elections, in 2000, 2004, and 2015. We built it.

But destructive forces never sleep, never stop. Backed by dark money — including the Koch brothers and their nationwide war on transit — here comes Proposition 105 in the Aug. 27th special election. As is often the case, it's presented as an affirmative to deliberately confuse voters. "Vote yes!" hoping some will think they are supporting rail transit by marking that line. Signs say, "Yes on 105. Fix our roads" — but this has nothing to do with fixing roads; that's a different budget and roads are being fixed.

Don't fall for it. Vote no on Prop. 105 and its devilish companion, Prop. 106.

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).

Economy update

The expansion is now the longest in American history. According to the Arizona Commerce Authority, metro Phoenix posted the largest job gain from May 2018 to May 2019, at 3.2 percent. Let's take a closer look:

Arizona and metro Phoenix reached a historic high in seasonally adjusted civilian jobs as of May (click on the charts to enlarge):

Median household income adjusted for inflation also showed gains:

So far, not so bad...

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.

Growth and its discontents

The Census reported earlier this spring that Phoenix was the fastest-growing city in the country. During the Great Recession, I wrote in jest the prayer of the Arizona developer: "Please God, give me one more boom, with championship golf." And the prayer has been answered, or so it seems on the surface.

The city added 25,288 new residents between 2017-2018. But even adding in fast-growing suburbs such as Buckeye and the "town" of Gilbert, the metropolitan area is far below the 100,000-plus it was growing in the 1990s and early 2000s. A glowing Forbes article talked of "a business-friendly environment, plentiful job opportunities and affordable cost of living." But the reality is closer to the one elucidated by commenter Concern Troll: Most of the population increase in Phoenix can be attributed to retirees and the low-wage service jobs that cater to them.

Permits for new housing units in metro Phoenix haven't recovered to their pre-crash levels; they're about where they stood in the early 1990s. Construction employment is only where it stood at the turn of the century, far below the mid-2000s. If the local-yokel boosters — "things must be good because people keep moving here" — are having a growthgasm, they're faking it.

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:

Historic red alert

This priceless, century-old house at 7019 N. Central Ave. has a demolition permit. The Preservation Police and every citizen needs to contact their council members, planning commission, "village" poobahs — whatever it takes. This is what old Phoenix looked like — not endless red-tile-roofs, concrete, gravel, and skeleton trees.

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.

Mayor Gallego

Kate Gallego is the first mayor of Phoenix in 20 years who I don't know personally. That has disadvantages and advantages. The downside: I haven't spent hours over coffee or in city hall getting tips, sharing gossip, and taking the individual's measure. On the other hand, she's pretty much a blank slate to me, which allows me to see her totally from the perspective of an outsider.

All I know is what I read in the newspapers, and from Phoenix insiders, to paraphrase Will Rogers. She's not the first woman mayor of Phoenix — that distinction goes to Margaret Hance (and Thelda Williams was interim mayor). She's young — 37. She's smart, because she went to Harvard and everyone who's been touched by crimson is smart, or so we're told. On the Council, she supported transit but, wrongly to my mind, opposed upgrades to keep the Phoenix Suns downtown. Gallago is a relative newcomer. Otherwise, she's an unknown commodity.

The last time Phoenix had such a young mayor was the four years of Paul Johnson, who was in his early thirties when he took office in 1990. It was an unhappy tenure. Phoenix was hit with its worst recession since the 1930s and most projects from a big bond issue, which had been passed in the Goddard years, had to be postponed or downsized (one being a new City Hall). How much of this had to do with Johnson's youth is debatable — he was dealt a bad hand and to many did the best he could — but his relative lack of experience hurt him. To be extra fair, Terry Goddard was an impossible act to follow.

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.

Tucson, Microsoft, etc.

The Tucson Festival of Books has come a long way over the past decade. In a state where cultural institutions struggle, literature-loving is low, and in a city that punches way below its weight, one of the nation's premier book events has blossomed. I was honored to be there again earlier this month, on author panels and signing my books.

This is a bad look for Phoenix, as the hep cats say now. The state's population, economic, and governmental center of gravity cedes such a prize to a city it otherwise rarely even thinks about? Sadly for Phoenix, yes. Several years of festivals at the Carnegie Library never took off. Efforts to go big went nowhere.

In the Old Pueblo, the Arizona Daily Star, then led by my friend John Humenik, developer Bill Viner, and Frank Farias of the University of Arizona went big right from the start. The festival is held on the central mall of the UA, whose support has been essential. But so has that of the newspaper — something never forthcoming in Phoenix — and a growing array of corporate and individual donors, hotels and small businesses. The Tucson Medical Center is a major sponsor.

Admission is free. Helped by an army of volunteers, everything runs smoothly. The Festival treats its many authors very well. The CSPAN bus, always the sign of a prestigious book event, was there both days. What a gem for Tucson. And a treat for Phoenicians, if one can stand the Ugliest Drive in America (and mourn the passenger trains we once enjoyed between the two cities and beyond).

ASU Empire

Arizona State University President Michael Crow recently wrote an op-ed pushing back against the Republic's libertarian/"Goldwater" Institute columnist on funding for higher education. Crow wrote in part:

The Arizona Constitution is clear — public schools will be free and universities will be as close to free as possible. It is also clear in the Constitution that the state will use tax revenue to support the universities and to maintain them. But that’s not where we are today. In 2019, we have evolved to the point where nearly 90 percent of the financial support and maintenance of the university comes from sources other than the state.

And:

ASU is one of the most efficient universities in the country. Yet, with our mission of making tuition affordable and the limited state investment we still have a shortfall of $225 million per year to educate resident students. We subsidize the cost of their education through other means, including out-of-state and international student tuition.

If anything, Crow pulled his punches. Arizona's low funding for universities is a scandal decades in the making, as the Legislature paid for tax cuts in part by continually reducing general fund money for higher ed and slashing funding that was never replaced. This has had a profound effect on hurting the state's competitiveness, as well as its constitutionally mandated promise to in-state students. I'd love to see a lawsuit over this.

But under Crow's leadership, ASU has worked around the Kooks to build an empire.

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.

Mean streets

I lost a good friend this week. John Bouma, the longtime managing partner of Snell and Wilmer and a towering figure among Phoenix lawyers, was struck and killed by two vehicles in the 7500 block of north Seventh Street. It was night. Maybe he strayed into the street to retrieve a lost item. The investigation is ongoing. He was first hit by a 2017 Toyota Tacoma, which apparently then threw him into the path of a 2017 Jeep Patriot.

Bouma and I had very different politics. But, brought together by the late Jack August, we enjoyed numerous lunches at Durant's talking about Phoenix history. He knew my mother, who worked closely with Mark Wilmer on Arizona v. California, the landmark suit that won Colorado River water. He could also name all the old bars, mob-ridden and otherwise, that once enlivened old Phoenix. As with Jack, I will miss him terribly.

When I posted this on Facebook, including a mention of Phoenix's deadly streets, I was surprised by the people who rushed to blame Bouma and say, essentially, "Nothing to see here, move along." Really? Your hair-trigger, defensive boosterism can't even acknowledge this reality? I shouldn't have been surprised. Social media is no less a cancer than the local-yokel sunny-championship golf denial.

In fact, Phoenix has a major problem with pedestrian injuries and fatalities. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, Arizona has the highest rate of pedestrian deaths in the nation.

The water fix

The Arizona media have been producing many process stories (e.g. this one) about the federal government's insistence that states agree on a plan to use less Colorado River water at this time of historic drought. Resistant farmers in Pinal County have come in for special criticism, including an intelligent piece by the Arizona Republic's Joanna Allhands about Pinal likely to increase its pumping of groundwater.

At the same time, the same media have engaged in their usual growthgasm stories about Arizona once again being one of the nation's fastest-growing states in population. Arizona held 7,171,646 souls as of this past July. In 1970, two years after the funding for the Central Arizona Project was signed into law, the state's population was 1.7 million.

Yet I have yet to see any story connect the two.

The disconnect is staggering, matched only by the inattention to climate change as a prime driver of the ongoing Southwestern drought.

Arizona's "plan" is to keep adding people, no matter what. The entire economy's foundation is based on continuing large increases in population. Not only that, but to continue doing so in single-family housing sprawl far from historic urban centers. The Real Estate Industrial Complex hopes for 300,000-plus people west of the White Tanks. A monstrous development near Benson would destroy the San Pedro River, the last major free-flowing stream in the Southwest.

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.

The Suns arena dilemma

The rump City Council, with a caretaker mayor, seems in no hurry to address Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver's demands for a new or significantly remodeled downtown arena. Members are divided. Kate Gallego, facing Daniel Valenzuela in a March mayoral runoff, said, “it is not in Phoenix’s best interest to invest in an arena.” Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts wrote, "taxpayers are about to get hosed if this deal goes through."

Here's the real deal: If Phoenix doesn't invest in the arena, Sarver — who has none of Jerry Colangelo's civic spirit — will move the team to the Rez, renaming it the Arizona Suns, no doubt, or even to Seattle, which is hungry to replace its lost Supersonics. The damage to downtown and light-rail (WBIYB) would be catastrophic. Talk about hosed.

Scholars are united in saying that professional sports arenas are bad public investments. But they are neither fans nor do they live in troubled cities. In an Atlantic magazine article, Rick Paulas writes, "Pro sports teams are bad business deals for cities, and yet, cities continue to fall for them. But municipalities can support local sports without selling out their citizens in the process." Indeed, it's outrageous that taxpayers are shelling out millions for super-rich team owners. They should say no. And this is especially true for robust, normal cities.

But Phoenix is neither.

November impressions

As I write, Kyrsten Sinema has pulled ahead of Martha McSally in the Senate race. Republicans are suing to stop counting of ballots that have already been cast. Similar shameful gambits are underway in Georgia and Florida. The Party of Lincoln Trump will do anything to hold power. This is authoritarianism, dear readers.

If Sinema holds on, and the rule of law survives the Ducey appointed state Supreme Court, it would be an astonishing accomplishment. Sinema would have an insurmountable lead of not for the wasted votes of the Greens. As long as the Nader-Jill Stein-Bernie Bro faction insists on its purity, the Republicans will keep winning. No revolution will come from the left. It's already come from the right and is succeeding quite nicely.

Before Democrats take control of the U.S. House in January, Trump and the Republicans are capable of anything. Make sure your seats are in their full upright position and your seatbelts fastened. The survival of the republic is at stake.

Other notes:

• November feels like late September and early October in old Phoenix. This is on track to be the hottest year in recorded Arizona history, yet the booster magical thinking continues about what climate change means for Arizona.

• As much as I'm happy about the infill of the Central Corridor, I'm sad to lose the special view from Third Street looking south to the mountains. This was especially enchanting passing through Alvarado, where much of the lush old oasis still prevails.

• I am baffled by "shade structures," which are little more than ribs of steel or other designs that provide little shade at all. Not smart in the skin-cancer capital of America. Old Phoenix was covered with shade trees, as well as businesses that had awnings and overhangs to protect from the sun.

• We are at the centennial of the Armistice than ended the Great War. Our world was made by that conflict and its aftermath. Phoenix, too: Demand for cotton caused farmers to switch wholesale to the crop, reducing the diversity of agriculture in the Salt River Valley. After the war, cotton prices crashed, with hard times here.

Now I'll leave the comments section as an election open thread.

 

 

 

 

 

The next Phoenix mayor

I know that I should have a firm conviction about the mayoral election, but I don't. We can ignore the Republican and Libertarian candidates — their dogmas are totally unsuited to the needs of the nation's fifth-largest city. That leaves Kate Gallego and Daniel Valenzuela.

Both are supported by people I respect. According to the Arizona Republic, Gallego's backers include former U.S. representatives Harry Mitchell, Sam Coppersmith, Ron Barber and Anne Kirkpatrick, as well as former state Attorney General and Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard. Valenzuela's big names include retired U.S. Rep. Ed Pastor, former Phoenix mayors Paul Johnson, Skip Rimsza and Phil Gordon, councilwomen Laura Pastor and Debra Stark, and business leaders Jerry Colangelo and Sharon Harper.

That makes a choice tough. Gallego may get a tilt in her favor because she represented central Phoenix on City Council. But I'd be interested in what commenters say.

Neither Gallego nor Valenzuela were on the transformative City Council of the 2000s that helped land T-Gen and supported light rail (WBIYB), the downtown ASU campus, Phoenix Convention Center, Sheraton and other civic goods that led to today's downtown revival. 

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. 

Brains, trains, and automobiles

The biggest local story of the week is the unanimous (!) decision by the Rump City Council to raid funding intended for light-rail extension to Paradise Valley Mall and use it for street maintenance. As disheartening is that, as far as I know, neither major candidate for mayor has spoken out against it.

This comes soon after the Council (6-2) bucked an aggressive astroturf campaign by the Koch interests to kill that south Phoenix light-rail line (yes, the Wichita billionaires are deeply involved in destroying local transit). One step up and one step back. What's going on? A few observations:

The Council has changed from the consensus of the 2000s that brought some of the most constructive measures in decades. These include light rail (WBIYB), the downtown ASU campus, T-Gen and the downtown biomedical campus, and the new convention center. In recent years, the Council is less visionary and more divided — a situation made more difficult by the departure of Mayor Greg Stanton, and mayoral candidates Kate Gallego and Daniel Valenzuela.

Phoenix's size and means are wildly unbalanced. The Arizona Republic reported that city staff estimated that "4,085 of the city's 4,863 miles of streets will fall below a ‘good’ quality level in the next five years and require maintenance. Currently, 3,227 miles are already in fair, poor, or very poor condition. Bringing all of the streets up to a 'good' level in five years would cost $1.6 billion that the city does not have." 

'No hurricanes in Arizona!'

This piece of boosterism is not technically true — the state has been hit by the remnants of powerful Pacific hurricanes. Indeed, Arizona should take stock of Hurricane Florence and its effects in North Carolina. Let me explain.

Hurricanes are nothing new to the Carolinas. What is new is their severity, in part caused by climate change, combined with population growth and development.

Hurricane Florence was only a Category 1 storm when it made landfall, yet it caused historic levels of flooding. This came only a year after flooding damage caused by Hurricane Maria. In some cases, the very same areas saw severe flooding. Parts of South Carolina saw some damage, too.

North Carolina's population grew by more than 21 percent in the 1990s and nearly 19 percent in the 2000s. In 2017, it had more than 10.2 million people. South Carolina added more than 15 percent in those same decades.

A good part of that came in vulnerable coastal areas. For example, Wilmington's New Hanover County, an epicenter of Florence flooding, stood at 227,000 last year, more than double from its 1980 population. Horry County, S.C., another hurricane target, held more than 333,000 last year, more than three times its 1980 numbers. 

Ten years after

Newspapers are full of retrospectives on the Panic of 2008, the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. Phoenix and Arizona were one of the ground zeros of the housing crash, the result being the worst recession here since the Great Depression.

True, its effects were buffered by the safety net of the hated Franklin Roosevelt, including the copious amounts of Social Security checks that kept coming from the hated federal government. Still, unemployment shot up to nearly 11 percent statewide by 2010, slightly less in Phoenix and Tucson. The main industry, housebuilding, had been shot in the head. Prices fell 50 percent in many cases. Recovery was much slower than peer metros.

A decade later, single-family building permits are back at early 1990s levels. Construction employment is not only not recovered from the 2000s bacchanal but far below historic trend. This would be good news for conservationists but for the fact that much of existing and planned construction involves suburban pods in bladed desert, farmland, or forest.

So let others discuss Lehman Brothers, the Federal Reserve, how close we came to a second Great Depression, the good and bad of the response and recovery. What's so striking in Phoenix is how little was changed by this tectonic event. 

Retiring in Arizona

Arizona is only the 29th "best state to retire in," according to a new survey by Bankrate. The consumer financial services company ranked cost of living, crime, culture, health-care quality, taxes, weather, and "well being." No 1? That would be South Dakota, followed by Utah, Idaho, New Hampshire, and Florida. The Grand Canyon State didn't even make the top 10 in weather.

If this is true, it's bad news for the retirement industry, which has been a lynchpin of the state's economy since Del Webb began Sun City in 1959. Social Security payments accounted for an astounding $1.4 trillion for nearly a million retirees in Arizona as of last year alone — not to mention the savings and other assets they bring from back home.

The survey is highly suspect, of course. South Dakota is a fascinating place, with Mount Rushmore and Deadwood, but between immense snowfall and isolation and being downwind from the ICBM fields of North Dakota should World War III erupt, it doesn't sound like the best place to spend one's sunset years.

Because of savage cuts that have destroyed 40 percent of newsroom jobs over the past decade, PR people now outnumber reporters by 5-1 or more. Every day at the Seattle Times, I get scores of pitches. Many are click bait such as this. I rely on more gold-standard information, such as that from the Federal Reserve, universities or authentic think tanks.

But that doesn't mean Arizona is quite out of the woods on retirement desirability. 

Why 'haboob' makes me stormy

Daniel Bryant photo

My friend, the talented Richard Ruelas, wrote a diligently argued article in the Arizona Republic explaining why some dust storms here should properly be called "haboobs." He cites a 1972 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and its use by the popular weatherman Dewey Hopper, among others. It's hard to argue with Ruelas' conclusions — but the term still drives me crazy.

The original haboob is native to the Sahara Desert, a completely different environment than the Sonoran Desert (until climate change works its sinister magic in the decades ahead). They're heavy on sand, unlike our situation, and of even more massive proportions. And sure, monsoon, another Arabic-origin word, has use worldwide and is a longstanding expression for the rainy season in Arizona.

Still, nobody besides Hopper used haboob when I was growing up. My grandmother, with memories back to the 1890s, never used it. These were called dust storms, a classic of the Old West. They weren't haboobs. They were dust storms. The phenomenon is especially prevalent in the Gila River basin between Phoenix and Tucson. When Interstate 10 was completed, the state installed a system of signs to alert drivers to an impending dust storm.

What makes me come off sounding like Gampa Simpson is that the widespread use of haboob seems like another out-of-town imposition on Phoenix. The city has lost so, so much of what made it unique and magical in all the world, why more? The influx of millions of newcomers left us with people who don't even know the location of downtown, fools who hike the mountains in high summer, often with fatal results. Sprawl has destroyed our citrus groves and farms, torn apart the civic fabric, left the enchanting Japanese flower gardens under miles of schlock development. The oasis has been paved over, with gravel and skeleton trees and a few heat-stressed plants dying amid the output of the Arizona Rock Products Association. People don't even realize what's been needlessly lost in this frenzy of vandalism. (Ruelas, a careful and fair journalist, is a Tempe native).

In this Phoenix, knowledge of history and customs is not merely ignored but scorned by too many. "Home" is where they came from. They only love Phoenix when they get defensive about any valid criticism of the place. There's not even consensus on what to call this sunscape. So instead of the magnificent and distinctive Phoenix, we get "the Valley." This even though there's Silicon Valley, the San Fernando Valley, the Red River Valley (of the North and of the South), and the Valley of the Jolly (Ho-Ho-Ho) Green Giant. Way to position yourself in the global economy. 

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). 

Kooks and Kochs try to derail south Phoenix light rail

It appears that the six mile light-rail line to south Phoenix is on life support. I say "appears" because much of the reporting on the issue has been inaccurate. The Arizona Republic's Jessica Boehm reported the immediate news correctly, but plenty still needs to be filled in.

If I understand correctly, the City Council — with transit-backers Mayor Greg Stanton gone and Councilmembers Kate Gallego and Daniel Valenzuela set to resign in August to run for the seat — voted to "redesign" the south line along Central Avenue. This is to address a "grassroots" opposition complaining that Central would lose two of four lanes for automobile traffic.

Redesign may well mean death and loss of federal funding, especially with the rump Council after August. Skillful/shameful maneuvering by Councilman Sal DiCiccio, an ardent light-rail opponent, even took hostage City Manager Ed Zuercher, threatening his job and the city budget. This is the shorthand to a very complex moving drama.

It's no secret that the Koch brothers and other dark money groups are working to kill transit projects around the country. The anti-rail fetish on the right has always puzzled me. The "You Bastards" part of WBIYB is intended for them and their thuggish opposition to the starter line. And it's always possible to find a few discontents for a "grassroots" front group. But south Phoenix voters approved this line by 70 percent. If the likes of Better Call Sal prevail, this would be a blunder of historic proportions. For the facts and context, please read on. 

Ten and no change

A decade ago, Arizona and metropolitan Phoenix became an epicenter of the Great Recession, brought on by Wall Street hustles and Sun Belt overbuilding. Statewide unemployment reached a high of 10.9 percent, slightly less in Phoenix and Tucson. The speculative real-estate economy, which had become the economy, collapsed. House prices fell 50 percent or more, with historic levels of foreclosures or people being underwater on their mortgages. For many, this meant financial ruin. The overall damage was far worse than 1990 and both the state and metro area trailed their peers by years in recovering. Even now, the number of construction workers is at 1999 levels, even though population has grown considerably.

Ten years later, what's most remarkable is how little has changed. The one exception is real progress with central Phoenix infill, but it's a smidgen of the overall situation.

Sprawl development-driven economy? Check. Dependence on lower-skilled, lower-paid back office jobs? Check. The economic center in the car-dependent office "parks" of the East Valley? Check. Poorly-funded schools, more Big Sort Republican newcomers, Kooks in control of state government? Check, check, and check. Phoenix is the only major metropolitan area in North America that's building extensive new freeways, including the corruption-ridden South Mountain loop.

In other words, the vulnerabilities that drove Phoenix into a ditch a decade ago have been sustained and reinforced. No lessons learned. Nothing to see here, it's sunny with championship golf, so buy a tract house or move along. As Talleyrand said of the Bourbon dynasty, "They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing." 

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). 

Filling in

In the 2000s boom, central Phoenix saw many proposals and promises — including 60-story towers in Midtown — but hardly any private development happened. It took years of heavy lifting to get WilloWalk/Tapestry and One Lexington. Finally, even though the local economy has yet to fully recover from the Great Recession, the central core is seeing major infill. One prime example is Lennar's Muse apartments, built on the long dormant empty lot at the northwest corner of Central and McDowell, once home to AT&T's offices.

Just south, and also near the light-rail (WBIYB) station is a massive apartment complex under way near the Burton Barr Central Library. The north side of Portland Park has a tall condo building. More apartments are complete around Roosevelt and Third Street, while a crane hovers over the former site of Circles Records, erecting Empire Group's 19-story apartments. South of One Lexington, the long construction of the Edison condos is nearing completion.

This is transit-oriented development and it's finally happening.

An aside: Why does the announcement on trains say, "McDowell and Central, cultural district" instead of "Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix Central Library," and "Roosevelt and Central, arts district" instead of "Roosevelt Row arts district"? 

What is Grand Canyon University?

The university is one of the foundations of liberal Western Civilization. The concept of academic freedom originated at the University of Bologna in 1158. The University of Paris and University of Oxford were among the earliest institutions of higher learning. In America, Harvard was established in 1636. The United States typically had three types: private, church originated (the University of Southern California was affiliated with the Methodist Church), and those established by states. A very different Republican Party passed legislation in the 19th century for land-grant colleges and universities.

This landscape existed through most of American history. In addition, states created normal schools to train teachers — most became universities, the most notable being Arizona State University. Many also created institutions of higher learning for African-Americans. Beyond this, communities had junior colleges — Phoenix College was founded in 1920 — which morphed into community colleges. And entrepreneurs set up business schools or "colleges" to teach such basic skills as typing and bookkeeping. But this latter operation was a trade school, not a university.

When I was young, Grand Canyon College was a small liberal-arts Southern Baptist institution. It was the only other four-year or higher institution in metropolitan Phoenix besides ASU. Phoenix is by far the largest American city with so few real colleges and universities. This is a major drag on the metro's intellectual, research, and talent-attracting life. One cause is that Phoenix came of age after the era when wealthy patrons established universities (E.g. the University of Chicago, backed by John D. Rockefeller in 1890). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bought land for a Brigham Young University in Phoenix in the 1960s but it was never built.

Now the Baptist affiliation is long gone and we have Grand Canyon University. But, as a former editor of mine was fond of saying, what does that mean? 

The stand

John Loredo photo

I'm the beneficiary of Arizona public schools. At Kenilworth in the 1960s, we never suffered textbooks falling apart or holes in the ceiling. No, this elementary school whose alumni included Barry Goldwater, Paul Fannin, and Margaret Hance, which was integrated and taught everyone from poor kids to the scions of the Palmcroft elite, had superb teachers. It had a library and a verdant playing fields — the monstrous freeway only a line on a planning map — presided over by a magnificent, inspiring building.

At Coronado High School in middle-class Scottsdale, the story was much the same. Some of the finest teachers anywhere, one of the top fine-arts departments in the country, and Ralph Haver's inspired mid-century architecture. None of my teachers at either school were forced to buy supplies. Neither school was surrounded by a prison-like fence — and the '60s and '70s were hardly peaceful decades. There was even a brief teachers' strike in Scottsdale in 1971.

Now a statewide walkout is occurring. It is about much more than some of the lowest teacher pay in the nation. More even than gutting a billion dollars from public schools while dolling out tax cuts to the wealthy and politically connected. More than teachers seeing through Gov. Doug Ducey's cynical promise to raise wages 20 percent — something that wouldn't even bring their pay to the national average, and would require the Legislature to take money from other critical needs. Because...tax cuts. Taxes must always be cut.

Teachers have finally made a stand.

I have no idea whether it will be successful. I doubt it can change Arizona's trajectory. But the stand needs to be made.