Phoenix 101: History

In 1940, photographer Russell Lee visited Phoenix. His main task was taking pictures of Farm Security Administration projects in the city. He joined such distinguished federal photographers as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein.

The FSA was created in 1937 to help ease rural poverty. Among its signature Phoenix operations were Camelback Farms, northeast of downtown and intended to create a stable environment for displaced farm families, and the United Producers and Consumers Cooperative, with about 12,000 members, mostly farmers.

But the trip yielded much more, including some iconic images of Phoenix as the Great Depression was loosening its grip and war was looming. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1903, Lee died in Austin in 1986. 

I've written about Phoenix in the 1940s here. Below is some of his work from the Library of Congress. Click on an image for a larger view.

Welcome sign outside of town, with the meeting days, times, and places of service clubs.

Central and Washington, with Lerner Shops, movie theaters, and streetcar tracks.

The famous saguaro streetlamp across from the Hotel Westward Ho. Only one was made, outside the Chamber of Commerce.

Henry Garfias, the son of a Mexican general, was elected Phoenix's first town marshal in 1881. Already famous for apprehending the stagecoach "ghost bandit" as a county deputy, Garfias (above, courtesy of Duran Lugo) was said to have shot dead several outlaws as marshal and brought order to Washington Street's Whiskey Row (16 saloons and four dance halls). Thus was born the Phoenix Police Department.

The department operated out of the old City Hall until it received a more modern space in the City-County Building in 1929. Call boxes were used throughout the city for officers to check in. Phoenix equipped its squad cars with radios in 1932. You can learn more about PPD's history from the Phoenix Police Museum, located in the 1929 Police Headquarters at 17 S. Second Avenue. My new novel, City of Dark Corners, is set in the Depression-era department.

The Phoenix Fire Department came from passage of a bond issue in 1886 to establish a volunteer fire service with modern equipment and an improved water supply. Still, two hose companies (one Anglo, one Hispanic) competed until Frank Czarnowski joined them together as the Phoenix Volunteer Fire Department in 1888. By 1922, it was a paid, full-time department.

Here are some early photos (click for a larger image):

A Nott steam fire engine, one of Phoenix's first (City of Phoenix).

Horse-drawn apparatus at Fire Station No. 1, First and Jefferson streets, in 1908 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Before "master planned communities," freeways, gravel, palo verdes, and endless pavement, Phoenix was closely surrounded by groves and farms, shade trees and virgin desert. It lasted until the 1960s and 1970s. I remember my grandmother taking me for a picnic on a dirt road surrounded by fields and beneath a cottonwood tree. Here are a few of the photos (click for a larger image):

Arizona willows or ash trees line Central and Southern avenues, 1930 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Another view of shady Central at Southern in 1930 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Lincoln Drive west of Scottsdale Road in 1935.

Orangewood Avenue in 1939 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

When today's Arizonans think about the state's most important U.S. Senators, they go to Barry Goldwater and John McCain. A few will remember Carl Hayden, one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, third in the line of succession to the White House.

Yet Goldwater, although the father of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party, had a thin layer of legislative accomplishments, and McCain did almost nothing for the state he made his home. Hayden was undeniably the most important figure in winning the Central Arizona Project in Congress.

The Arizona Senator who casts the longest shadow of accomplishments is nearly forgotten: Ernest McFarland. First elected in 1940 when he defeated incumbent Henry Fountain Ashurst, Mac was an important partner with Hayden in fighting for Arizona's share of Colorado River water. His most significant accomplishment was sponsoring the GI Bill, which provided benefits for returning benefits for returning World War II veterans, including educational benefits.

Mac was the father of the GI Bill. He also served as Senate Majority Leader from 1951 to 1953, followed by Lyndon Johnson.

Once upon a time, schools weren't built to resemble prisons with walls and steel fences, along with no shade and heat-radiating concrete and gravel. Even in early Phoenix, most were built to inspire. In 1873 (above) an adobe school at Central and Monroe was the beginning of better to come. Here are a few — click on the photo for a larger view:

Central School, shown in 1899, replaced the adobe structure. The town's population was about 5,500.

Monroe School at Seventh Street and Monroe, 1914. The building was preserved and is now the Children's Museum of Phoenix, alas without the shade trees and grass.

In 1977, when I was working on the ambulance as an EMT-paramedic, I was temporarily exiled from the city and worked for Aids Ambulance (the former Mesa Ambulance Service). This involved rotating to stations in Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, and Apache Junction. At the latter, two 24-hour units were maintained and the crews could expect major trauma calls, even lake rescues, in largely empty country. We proclaimed ourselves the Junction Medics. Superstition Mountain loomed to the east, not unlike the late 1940s photo above.

In those days, we left behind Mesa around Gilbert Road and were enveloped by massive citrus groves. This continued for about 12 miles, broken only by an occasional trailer park. Not much was out here. AJ's population was closing in on 9,000.

We christened Rossmoor Leisure World, a pioneering gated property, "Seizure World" because of the nature of calls from its elderly retired population. Williams Air Force Base sat miles to the south, down two-lane roads crossing farmland. Completion of the freeway was years away, so Main Street in the Maricopa County part of our territory wasn't even named or part of Mesa. It was four-lane U.S. 60, primevally dark at night, no curbs or sidewalks, lethal to pedestrians. Otherwise, it was empty desert all the way to the iconic mountain.

I couldn't imagine it would be anything else.

Fast forward to the 2000s. Mesa had ballooned from 63,000 in 1970 to nearly 400,000, grown all the way to the Pinal County line. The little suburbs I served had grown supersized and merged together into a sprawling conglomeration called the East Valley. The groves and farms were gone. Superstition's slopes were profaned by subdivisions. And all that empty desert was the most coveted piece of land in central Arizona. The boosters called it Superstition Vistas.

Tempe History Museum photo

The recent derailment and fire of a Union Pacific train on the Salt River bridge is a reminder that railroads still play a role in Phoenix, even if far less than in the past. As the late David Myrick explained in his seminal Railroad of Arizona: Phoenix and the Central Roads, eight attempts were made to build a line to the Salt River Valley before the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad's first train arrived on July 4th, 1887.

Among the many impediments — capital, supplies, heat, permission of the Pima Indians to cross their reservation — bridging the fickle Salt River was among the most persistent. The bridge above shows a "ten-wheeler" steam locomotive and two cars on the second iteration of the span. The first saw a flood destroy its approach trestle in 1890, then was severed entirely by the Great Flood of 1891, which also did substantial damage to canals and farmland; adobe structures collapsed from the rain.

In 1902, part of the bridge gave way without warning, dropping the locomotive 20 feet into the riverbed, killing one and severely injuring another, and leaving a passenger car hanging precariously. In 1905, the flooded Salt washed away a segment of this second bridge just minutes after a passenger train had crossed it. Similar washouts plagued the railroad's crossing of the Gila River.

Finally, the current heavy steel truss bridge was built in 1912-1913. UP says it will rebuild it — or at least replace one of the truss spans — which is good news for continued freight and potential future passenger service. Given Wall Street's pressure to suck profits from major railroads and Phoenix's relative unimportance on the system, I'd be surprised if UP built an entirely new and modern bridge.

Such was not always the case.

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy campaigning at Chris-Town mall on March 30th, 1968, soon after announcing his candidacy for president. He would be dead from an assassin's bullet less than three months later.

Some are comparing this year's unrest to 1968 — not persuasively, to my mind — so it might be interesting to check in on Phoenix during that tumultuous year. Just what a different world this was is evident in a headline of the Arizona Republic on Monday, January 1st: "All The World Gay As Old Year Dies." Cultural language wasn't the only difference. The overnight low was 35 degrees, common then as Phoenix had several frosts each winter. The low would hit freezing later in the week. These are much more rare today amid the human-caused heat island. The paper carried Today's Prayer on the front page, as it had for years.

The sixties were a period of great change in Phoenix, where the magic of the old city's oasis was very much alive but the suburbanized future was coming — Maryvale and Sun City were abuilding. The city grew 32% during this decade. The city also entered the big leagues of sports in 1968 with the NBA expansion team Phoenix Suns.

Downtown was still a major retail center at the beginning of the decade, but it was in decline by 1968, hollowed out by Park Central and other malls, as well as low-cost retail buildings bulldozed to create Phoenix Civic Plaza with its convention center and Symphony Hall. This also leveled many single-room occupancy hotels and other parts of the Deuce. Critics warned the shattering of the city's skid row would send vagrants to nearby neighborhoods, which it did.