Phoenix

In the conventional telling of Phoenix history, World War II marks the pivot between the "old" and "new" city. The reality is not quite so neat. But the war does deserve its own niche, separate from the more expansive decade of the 1940s.

As with the Great War, the most immediate local beneficiaries of the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in 1939 (China had been fighting for its life against Japan since 1937) were the cotton farmers of the Salt River Valley. Even with America nominally neutral, Washington tilted policy toward Britain and France, and our extra-long staple cotton was critical to making tires.

But unlike World War I, the Second World War would touch Phoenix much more profoundly. It would bring military bases and new industries. Population increases would strain the city. Simmering racial hostilities would break through. One of the great injustices of American history would literally run through the heart of town.

The valley's destiny lay not merely with the land but in the sky. It, along with Tucson, was identified as an ideal place to train military pilots thanks to the abundant clear days. Even before America entered the war — and in spite of a large isolationist sentiment in the Congress and the country — FDR's War Department began seeking locations for air bases in the Southwest. They were meant to enhance "preparedness," Roosevelt's armed neutrality, but also train British, Canadian and Chinese pilots.

Nothing has done more to wreck American cities than cars. Jane Jacobs was more precise: Planners and road builders "do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhow — with or without automobiles."

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she continued: "The simple needs of automobiles are more easily understood and satisfied than the complex needs of cities… Cities have more intricate economic and social concerns than automobile traffic. How can you know what to try with traffic until you know how the city itself works, and what else it needs to do with its streets? You can't."

This 1961 warning did not stop the ongoing civic vandalism, which was particularly visited on Phoenix with catastrophic consequences.

Old Phoenix, with its 17 square miles and 105,000 people in 1950, was convenient and walkable. Streets were of modest widths — you can still see it on Third and Fifth avenues today. Cars easily co-existed with pedestrians. One fine example was the shady City Beautiful Movement parkways on Moreland and Portland streets. North of McDowell, Central was a two-lane street lined with lush palms.

But the planner elite, with their superstitions about how cities should work, were already undermining it.

Dunlap Avenue looking east in Sunnyslope's main commercial district in the 1950s.

Of all the areas that became part of today's 516-square-mile Phoenix, Sunnyslope had the best chance of being its own separate town.

At the foot of North Mountain, Sunnyslope was very different from Phoenix proper (the name came from the Sunny Slope subdivision laid out by William Norton in 1911). It was a desert town, north of the Arizona Canal which marked the beginning of the oasis.

It was higher than the historic Phoenix townsite, something you still can see today if you drive south from Hatcher on Central Avenue, and framed by rugged terrain. My grandmother sold real estate in Sunnyslope and any time I, an oasis kid, would go with her, it seemed very exotic. And unlike Phoenix, its history was not based on agriculture.

Instead, Sunnyslope attracted "health seekers" and usually poor ones. In the Great Depression, it hosted a Hooverville. And Phoenix leaders not only looked down on it, they didn't want it to be part of the city. It received virtually none of the massive New Deal aid that saved Phoenix in the 1930s.

The oldest human activity in the Salt River Valley is agriculture. But the second oldest, in the era since American settlement began in the late 1860s, is land: platting, subdividing, buying, selling, flipping. It's an old-fashioned extraction industry. The remarkable thing is that it remains Phoenix's economic foundation.

With the 1851 Salt and Gila River Meridian, or "baseline," located near today's Phoenix International Raceway, the Americans set in place the point from which land would be surveyed and divided. This is a historic method of American empire, going back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. It laid down a template that organized and regularized land to make it fungible.

Initially, the land was divided into farms, the square-mile layout that remains the bones of Phoenix until one gets into the mountains. But as the towns of Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa, Glendale and others grew, increasing amounts were subdivided for houses and businesses. Phoenix's unique location in one of the world's richest river valleys made agriculture a natural source of wealth. But so was the land itself. The 1877 Desert Lands Act expanded the Homestead Act, not only attracting settlers but also speculators.

My new book, a concise history of Phoenix, comes out Nov. 9. Some initial signings are set for early December (see the "news" page of my author site) with more to come early next year.

I didn't intend to see two books published this year. High Country Nocturne, the eighth David Mapstone Mystery, would have done fine. But I was approached by an editor at the History Press who liked my Phoenix history columns on this site.

Initially, I thought it would entail a fairly easy compilation of that work. Instead, they wanted an almost entirely new book — and fast. So I set out to write the dissertation I never did.

I received a great deal of help in assembling the 60-plus photos that grace the book. That was still some of the most time consuming work. So was drilling down into primary sources. Then I had to make it my own, my concise interpretative history that can stand apart from fine work already done by Phil VanderMeer, Brad Luckingham and William Collins.

(Photo by Jacob Roddy)

All my young life, Wickenburg was the most enchanting desert town closest to Phoenix. Even into the 2000s, it retained its main street charm.

Prospector Henry Wickenburg, an Austrian native, was the namesake of the town along the Hassayampa River. He discovered gold nearby in 1863. It became the famous Vulture Mine, based on claims Wickenburg sold to Behtchuel Phelps of New York. "The Comstock of Arizona" and "largest and richest gold mine" in the territory yielded about $2.5 million before it played out. Wickenburg himself scraped a living farming before committing suicide in 1905.

The young town was also contested by the Yavapai, who didn't appreciate the Anglo and Mexican settlers taking their land. In the Civil War, federal troops were withdrawn and the Yavapai attacked. Confederate cavalry responded but soon withdrew. Hundreds were killed on both sides before an uneasy peace settled.

Wickenburg the town played a major role in the rise of Phoenix. Jack Swilling, who also made some inportant gold finds there, saw an even richer possibility in the prehistoric Hohokam canals of the Salt River Valley. In the late 1860s, Swilling dragooned a crew of workers from Wickenburg to help excavate one, which became today's Grand Canal, and build Swilling's Ditch.

Later, Wickenburg became a stop on the Santa Fe Railway between the northern Arizona mainline and Phoenix; another line was built west to connect more directly with California. Until 1968, Wickenburg had daily passenger train service (and the depot still stands). The town was also an important stop on U.S. Highway 60 between Phoenix — on Grand Avenue — and Los Angeles.

Even as Phoenix grew into a soulless blob and once-magical places such as Prescott were subsumed by sprawl, Wickenburg retained its uniqueness with local businesses, an intact and walkable central business district and even a working movie theater. Celerity rehab centers had replaced the dude ranches of the 1930s but Wickenburg circa 2005 seemed remarkably authentic. So close to plastic suburbia of "the Valley" and yet wonderfully apart. Now it is in the fight for its life, at least as the town we knew and loved.