Phoenix 101: History

This is downtown — pre CityScape (photographer unknown):

Above is downtown 2020 (photographer unknown).

This isn't downtown (it's Midtown):

This isn't downtown, either. It's 24th Street and Camelback (photographer unknown):

I wouldn't dare move to Chicago and claim that Hyde Park is the Loop. Nor could I say Hawthorne is downtown Minneapolis. Cincinnatians would quickly set me straight if I said Over the Rhine is downtown — downtown begins at Central Parkway. The natives in all these cities wouldn't let me get away with it. Nor would the transplants who felt a convert's zeal to protect the geographical integrity of their cities.

Yet people in "the Valley" (Silicon? Red River — of the north or of the south? San Joaquin? San Fernando? Of the Jolly Ho Ho Ho Green Giant?), many of them from these very cities, get away with this transgression every day in Phoenix.

Downtown Phoenix runs from Seventh Avenue to Seventh Street, and from the railroad tracks to Fillmore, or perhaps Roosevelt. It includes the original townsite and some additions. City Hall's definition taking the northern boundary to McDowell is ahistorical.

This beautiful scene in central Phoenix is from 1917. It makes you want to step into the picture and stroll. Not bad for a small, isolated city in a brand new state. More about that later. Alas, today the same location is a blighted vacant lot south of two once-graceful houses that have been turned into the Old Spaghetti Factory, the lawns replaced by asphalt.

I write because of an article in one of the online nooks of Fast Company headlined, "Phoenix is Pulling Off an Urban Miracle: Transforming into a Walkable City." Read and decide for yourself. On Facebook, someone said it came off like a press release. The kindest interpretation is that it represents an aspiration. To make it real, a little history might help.

Although Phoenix's growth is closely connected to the automobile age, the city was actually once highly walkable.

Let's define our terms. By "walkable," I don't mean you can drive your car to a canal bank or a desert "preserve" and hike. Not even the enchantingly shady, last time I checked, Murphy's Bridle Path. I mean the arrangements I enjoy in Seattle, where almost everything — shopping, restaurants, grocery stores, culture, health care, transportation hubs — is a quick walk or bus/bike ride away. One doesn't need a car.

Prior to the mid-1950s, when sprawl took off and never looked back, Phoenix offered such a "lifestyle." For anyone who grew up in the actual town prior to World War II, it was taken for granted.

When the pink-and-white Civic Center opened at Central and McDowell in 1950, it included a "little theater" but the art museum didn't come along for another nine years. Both were considered small confections to the main course: the public library. Things were not much different in 1974, when a young University of Kansas graduate named Jim Ballinger joined the museum's staff as curator of collections.

That the Phoenix Art Museum today enjoys national stature and draws prestigious international exhibitions — and has grown to take up most of the former Civic Center block — is mostly because of Ballinger, who announced Thursday that he will retire after 40 years with PAM. He became director in 1982. No other single figure has done more for the city's cultural landscape — to create, grow and sustain one — than Ballinger.

The reader should know that Ballinger and I are friends. We also were neighbors on Holly Street in Willo. But he first sought me out when I started as a columnist at the Arizona Republic, writing on such issues as the city and state's economic narrowness, lack of civic engagement, poor educational outcomes and difficulty in retaining talent. In our first conversation, he showed his incisive grasp of how such challenges would affect the future viability of cultural institutions.

Ask almost anyone who recalls Phoenix during this time and the fifties were indeed nifty. For most, it was the best time to have lived here.

This was also among the city's most sweeping eras of change. It saw the emergence of many of the trends that later turned unfortunate or worse. Below the gleam of Eisenhower peace and prosperity, much of the town was troubled.

To begin, however, it is easy to see why these years are remembered with fondness, and not merely with lazy nostalgia.

The fifties were the last decade when much of the city's life revolved around such sweet, small-town reveries as the Masque of the Yellow Moon, held annually at Phoenix Union High School's giant Montgomery Stadium. Although the Jaycees Rodeo of Rodeos would soldier on into the 1990s, it reached its pinnacle then, too. School let out for the rodeo parade day. Phoenix was not far removed from its roots of planting and cowboying.

They were the last time when some of the larger canals were still lined with trees, doubling as widely patronized swimming holes, and water-skiing behind cars was winked at by the Salt River Project. When most of the Project's footprint was citrus groves, the Japanese flower gardens and fields, not subdivisions. When this enchanting oasis was sheltered by shade and green, and beyond it was largely pristine desert and High Country. When mining, cattle and logging were the industries in the sparsely populated state.

Phoenix was the city. Every other town in the Salt River Valley was small and separated from Phoenix by groves, fields and desert.

No wonder the overnight lows were ten degrees lower than now and summers were shorter and less severe.

If you think "everything's fine" or that Phoenix has no troubles that aren't common to other cities, this is not your post. Spoiler alert: Everything is not fine.

We discuss problems and challenges, as well as intelligent responses, frequently in this space. A previous column sought to debunk the excuses, myths and lies about the place. But reading the comments on the most recent post made me wonder: Is Phoenix uniquely troubled? If so, how and why?

Sprawl doesn't explain it. What Kunstler calls "cartoon architecture" has befouled the nation from sea to sea. Good civic design was lost everywhere. The best cities in the country are surrounded by soul-killing suburbs, office "parks," malls, shopping strips, parking lagoons and laced up with freeways.

Car culture, per se, isn't the answer, either. Oklahoma City ranks lowest in non-vehicle commuting, yet the entire metro has long backed a levy that has impressively rebuilt downtown. Freeway-mad Dallas also boasts the nation's largest light-rail system.

The 1929 Maricopa County Courthouse and Phoenix City Hall when it was surrounded by shade trees and manicured lawns (Photographer unknown).

Alone among the cities of the American Southwest, Phoenix is the oasis. It has always been so, but whether it remains an oasis city is starting to come into doubt. A common narrative is that Phoenix attracted Midwesterners who wanted to recreate the landscape from which they came.

This is untrue. In fact, the early Anglo residents were from many regions, especially the South. And the oasis predates American settlement. The archeology of the region is in flux, but it appears that "plant husbandry" was being performed by prehistoric tribes as early as 3,000 or 1,500 B.C. (or BCE if you are trapped in the politically correct precincts of academia). By the first millennium A.D., the most advanced irrigation in the New World was being perfected by the Hohokam.

The Salt River Valley was an ideal location, with rich alluvial soil that would grow anything — just add water. The altitude and weather in the modern climate era allow for two or more growing seasons depending on the crop. Maize was imported from Mesoamerica. Cottonwoods, willows and other native shade trees grew along the riverbank and its subsidiary creeks. I have no doubt that Hohokam dwellings were well-shaded. The new settlers merely took it to a higher level.

The photo above captures the oasis city at its zenith, in the 1960s. Note the inviting public space provided by shade and grass surrounding an inspiring art deco building. This was the Phoenix I grew up in. At 10,000 feet, you would have seen a green city surrounded by bands of citrus groves, farm fields and horse pastures. And then: The majestic, largely untrammeled Sonoran Desert. What a place to live. The older neighborhoods were graced by mature trees and parking lawns, a grassy area between the curb and sidewalk. Encanto Park was an oasis within an oasis. Central, as you see below, was lined with palm trees. North of Camelback were shady acreages, often along streets with an abundant shade canopy, set back behind irrigation "laterals." My great aunt lived in one: It was a wonder of shade and tranquility behind oleander hedges on Seventh Avenue. Well into her eighties, this daughter of the frontier would walk out every Sunday evening to turn the valve and "take her water," the flood irrigation from the Salt River Project.

In our neighborhood, what is now Willo, few families had pools but most put in winter lawns to give the sweet season its magical green. Even driveways had grass between two narrow concrete strips. This was not the Midwest. It wasn't LA, although the parking lawns were imported from there. Instead, Phoenix created its own unique urban aesthetic. It wasn't planned. This Eden just happened. If you missed it, you have my deepest sympathy. Many areas of oasis beauty remain. If you want a sense of the practical benefit, drive south from Osborn on Fifteenth Avenue some summer evening with the windows down. When you cross Thomas into Encanto Park, the temperature will drop by ten degrees or more.