Phoenix 101: The Phoenix 40
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: The Phoenix 40

Once upon a time, the Phoenix 40 ran this town, got things done, showed real leadership. The Phoenix 40 was an exclusionary bunch of powerful white men trying to hold onto their power in changing times. The Phoenix 40 was only the tip of an iceberg of evil and corruption that sits deep in the DNA of the city and state. So go the tales, myths and realities long after the legendary group morphed into the benign and toothless Greater Phoenix Leadership.

PulliamThe real Phoenix 40 was formed in 1974 by Arizona Republic publisher Eugene Pulliam (left), lawyer-civic leader Frank Snell and KOOL owner Tom Chauncey. They sent a letter to prospective members and 40 leaders, including Gov. Raul Castro, showed up at the Biltmore for the first meeting in early 1975. The group hoped to focus on transportation, crime and education — crime getting top billing after the murder of a key witness in the land-fraud trial of Ned Warren Sr. The original membership is no secret, not quite 40, and reads like a Who's Who of mid-1970s Phoenix: Clarke Bean, Hayes Caldwell, Chauncey, Msgr. Robert Donohoe, Junius Driggs, Karl Eller, George Getz, Sherman Hazeltine, Robert Johnson, George Leonard, Stephen Levy, James Maher, Richard Mallery, Samuel Mardian, Jr., James Mayer, Rod McMullin, Loyal Meek, Dennis Mitchem, Pat Murphy, Rev. Culver Nelson, William Orr, Jesse Owens, Pulliam, William Reilly Sr., Newton Rosenzweig, Raymond Shaffer, Bill Shover, James Simmons, Paul Singer, Lawson Smith, Snell, Franz Talley, Thomas Tang, Maurice Tanner, Keith Turley, Mason Walsh, Robert Williams and Russell Williams.

And, yes, it's telling that the list didn't include, say, Lincoln Ragsdale or Rosendo Gutierrez. Yet the Phoenix 40 was never as dangerous as its critics feared nor as benign as it claimed to be, but it's an important touchstone in the city's evolution to the current unpleasantness.

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Posted inPhoenix

The rule of holes

It's the sweet season in Phoenix, with the usual nice weather, resort amenities and economic forecasts. The panel at the annual lunch sponsored by JPMorgan Chase and ASU was its usual sunny self. According to the Arizona Republic, Philadelphia economist Joel Naroff said, "Better times are ahead. I truly believe this is a recovery, that this is an economic change that you can count on." ASU economist Lee McPheters told attendees, "2011 is going to be the best year for Arizona's economic growth in the past three years. So, I think there are bright skies ahead."

Another sense of the luncheon comes from the tweets by Channel 12 anchor, and former Republic business editor, Brahm Resnik: "Show of hands at Chase econ forecast luncheon indicates (fewer than) 6 people in room of 1200 believe recession is over." "1 year ago #PHX job losses were worst in US. Now, PHX No. 2 in US (sure doesn't feel that way)." " 'At threshold of recovery,' McPheters keeps saying." "Home prices have not hit bottom, Pollack says." "Apartment market only (commercial) market that looks good. The rest of you might consider suicide," Pollack tells crowd. "Pollack says 4-5 more years till commercial construction returns to normal (same as his forecast year ago)." Pollack being Elliott, the developer/economist who was once one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Real Estate Industrial Complex.

It's one sign of the trauma wrought by the Phoenix depression that Elliott Pollack is the realist in the room. Unfortunately, the overall tone sounds much like every year's brightside delusion, while the facts confronting Phoenix, Arizona and America keep sliding in the opposite direction.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Midwesterners

The comments section has been busy with musings about the Midwest migration to Arizona and the degree to which it is to blame for the disaster facing the state and Phoenix. I've offered my assessment in previous posts (it's a great deal to blame).

That doesn't mean every midwesterner is at fault, much less that I hate the Midwest. I spent nearly a decade there, in southwest Ohio, and hold it warmly in my heart. I saw it at its best and lately I've seen it at its worst. But no discussion of Phoenix is complete without assessing this huge tide of immigrants and the things they carried.

The first Anglo settlers of Phoenix were a ragtag group of tough adventurers, everybody from "Lord" Darrell Duppa, namer of Phoenix, who was born in England (maybe France), to the father of Tempe, Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Yankee who had worked the Santa Fe trail. The Mormons settled Mesa.

But Southerners and former Confederates were arguably in the early majority, personified by founder Jack Swilling, CSA. This gave the town a peculiar Southern-Western character that persisted into the early 1960s. My family came from Indian Territory and before that the pre-Civil War Texas frontier. Midwesterners arrived in more numbers with the completion of the Santa Fe Railway and its direct connection from Chicago. Among them was Dwight Bancroft Heard, who bought the Arizona Republican in 1912. He was a major landowner and farmer, and was the driving force behind the region's cotton industry. Along with his wife, Maie Bartlett Heard, he founded the Heard Museum.

Other midwesterners of note: Kansan Eugene C. Pulliam, who built a publishing empire including the renamed Arizona Republic. Lawyer Frank Snell was from Kansas City. (His partner Mark Wilmer, the star litigator who won Arizona v. California before the Supreme Court, came from Wisconsin by way of Texas.)

Another former Chicagoan was Walter Bimson who built Valley National Bank into a powerhouse. Heard, Pulliam, Snell and Bimson were city builders. The latter three, for example, in the late 1940s and 1950s, recruited the high tech industries whose fumes the metro area still runs on. All loved Phoenix. It was their home. In every way they connected the health of the city to that of their companies.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Lost opportunities

My chief goal in writing the Phoenix 101 post about the old city was to dispel the notion that “there’s no history here,” spoken by the transplants as they file into the tract houses of their so-called master planned communities. More, to fight the canard that “Phoenix has no soul.” Well, maybe now in most places, but it wasn’t always so. Yet the post was so popular, it seems logical to follow up with a brief history on choices made and opportunities missed.

It’s important to make a distinction. People have sometimes dismissed my observations with words such as “well, everyplace changes” and “my hometown isn’t the same any more, either.” At the risk of being pedantic, that’s not my point. First, while every place changes, it doesn’t necessarily change mostly for the worse. Cities such as Seattle, Portland, Denver, Charlotte, San Diego and even Oklahoma City have undergone massive changes. Yet they have managed to preserve and revive their center cities, their civic spaces and enhance livability (and they have plenty of suburbs, so Phoenix isn’t special there). I miss the old railroad yards in downtown Denver – but what an amazing city it is now. It’s gotten better. Second, Phoenix is not just any city – so who cares if it’s no worse than Fresno or Youngstown? It sold its magic for dross. And its choices have set the stage for crisis, whether sudden or lingering.

Much was out of the control of Phoenicians and their leaders. Phoenix grew large after the City Beautiful Movement, so it lacked many great civic spaces; it was a modest farm town during the 1920s, so it had relatively few art deco towers. Worst of all, it came of age with the automobile, Levittown-style suburbia, and the savage city planning and dehumanizing design ethos of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier. Still, Phoenix made choices. It lost opportunities. Here are a few.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Power primer

Phoenix has no history. Why are things so screwed up here? It's just like every other place…

Such are some of the statements, whether inane and inaccurate or plaintive, that I often hear from Rogue readers, or just folks down in "the Valley" when I sneak back for a journalist-guerrilla raid. So, a new occasional feature, Phoenix 101, to try to fill in the gaps for a place where even natives my age have never even ridden a city bus, much less know a rich, corrupt and even inspiring history. Let's start with power.

From the era of the Hohokam, power in the Salt River Valley flowed from water. Whoever controlled the water — and how it was used — sat upon the commanding heights of the society. Even today, the divide between Phoenix and the East Valley is partly an echo of the old war between the north and south side of the Salt River over who would get the precious, and fickle, riches of its stream. Even today, the Salt River Project remains, very quietly, the kingdom and the power and the glory.

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Posted inPhoenix

Copper Square bites the dust, but has anyone learned anything?

News item: A Phoenix business group plans to stop using the name Copper Square
that has branded a 90-block downtown retail-and-office district for
eight years. The Downtown Phoenix Partnership is working with Scottsdale’s SHR
Perceptual Management on a name that will highlight downtown Phoenix as
"Arizona’s cosmopolitan heart…"

Where to begin? Perhaps it’s most telling that the Downtown Phoenix Partnership is paying a Scottsdale company to come up with a name for downtown Phoenix. Such is the fecklessness, confusion and drift that characterized the whole "Copper Square" debacle.

You know where I stand. I wrote against the silly name even before they rolled it out, saying, among other things, that the name of the "district" is already established by decades of custom: Downtown Phoenix. In a city hostile to public spaces, there is no square, and downtown has no historic link with the copper industry. And who wants to live in a city that doesn’t have a downtown? Yet millions of dollars that might have been spent on, say, recruiting private employers to downtown, went to banners and assorted crap saying "Copper Square."

So what will these marketing gods from Scottsdale — apparently there were no companies available in downtown Phoenix (which ought to tell you something of the real problem) say?

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