Phoenix 101 Archives - Rogue Columnist

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix Union Station

Phoenix Union Station, circa 1975 (Photographer unknown).

When people talk now about a potential restoration of Amtrak to Phoenix, it’s insulting and unrealistic. Insulting because the plan is a stub to Tucson where passengers could board the every-other-day Sunset Limited (Although technically the Southern Pacific abandoned the “limited” name in the late 1950s. It’s unrealistic because the far-right Legislature would never fund such an effort. They despise light rail in Phoenix despite its popularity.

What’s needed is a restoration of the former northern main line so passengers could go to Los Angeles and points east and Midwest, as well as daily passenger service. State support has enabled a passenger-train renaissance across the country, such as Amtrak California, the Amtrak Cascades in the Northwest, Heartland Flyer between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, as well as service between Chicago and St. Louis and Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Detroit.

Every form of transportation is subsidized; driving and flying — major contributors to human-caused climate change most of all. Yet under today’s far-right regime federal support of Amtrak is iffy.

Read on to when Phoenix enjoyed abundant passenger trains.

Jon Talton May 23, 202523

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Growing up in old Phoenix

I grew up in a small town. Its name was Phoenix, and even though it had 439,170 people by the time I was four years old, in 1960, it still seemed like a place I could wrap my arms around and carry with me, just like the little towns in the movies. We lived near Cypress Street and Third Avenue, about a mile from the border of downtown. The houses faced the street, many had porches, the lawns were lush, the shade inviting.

My friends and I stashed fallen oranges and rolled them out into the rush-hour traffic on Third and Fifth — back then, before the Willo Soviet tried to wall off this neighborhood, these streets had three lanes each and carried substantial traffic twice a day, people going to and from work downtown. The oranges were also useful in friendly alley fights; more serious conflict escalated from dirt clods to rocks. Oh, we also ate them, because everyone had citrus trees in their yards and it was a quick drive out to the groves, where boxes of oranges could be purchased at roadside stands surrounded by the lavish bounty of the Salt River Valley. Some days we lay under the trees at Paperboys' Island, a pocket park at Third and Holly, and just stared into the cobalt sky, dreaming the dreams of young boys.

By the time I was eight, I was mobile and free, within limits. Specifically, I could ride my bike from Thomas to Roosevelt and Third Street to Fifteenth Avenue. It was an amazing landscape for a child. The library, art museum and Heard Museum were there. Soda fountains proliferated at drug stores, from the Rexall on Roosevelt and Third Avenue to Ryan-Evans at Seventh and McDowell to shops on Central. Every gas station had a drinking fountain with cold water, an essential for young desert rats. The firefighters at the old Station 4 on First Street and Moreland, as well as the Encanto/Seventh Ave. station indulged us. We bugged the people at Channel 12 and Channel 5 (Wallace & Ladmo's home!) for old reels of commercials — the apex of our ubiquitous trash picking. Encanto Park was a favorite hangout; it was where I decided I wasn't cut out to be a fisherman, but that didn't stop me from endless fishing journeys to the lagoons. The lovely moderne Palms Theater at Central and Virginia offered movies if we didn't want to hitch a ride downtown.

This part of the city was dense then with businesses. This was long before entire blocks were bulldozed or turned into dead space by parking garages. The buildings on the northeast and southeast corners of Seventh Avenue and McDowell, for example, were chock-full of small businesses. So was today's mostly empty Gold Spot — I got my hair cut there by Otis Kenilworth. Downtown was still the busiest shopping district in the state, followed by Park Central mall — both bracketing our neighborhood. I wasn't as fortunate as someone born a few years younger to sample the old city, but it was still pretty intact in the early and mid-1960s.

The big Valley Bank sign turned atop the art deco tower and other neon signaled downtown. Among the downtown landmarks was the Hotel Westward Ho, with its famed Thunderbird Room, where presidents stayed well into the 1960s. The skyscrapers going up along Central seemed signs of progress, not incoherent planning. I watched so many of them being built. My grandmother and I took the bus to shop downtown or at Park Central. This daughter of the frontier "traded," as she put it, at the small A.J. Bayless store at Central and Moreland. Just west were the shady median parks along Moreland and Portland, two of the few City Beautiful Movement touches Phoenix received. The parkways were lined by lushly landscaped apartment buildings. Every day, we drove downtown at 5 p.m. to pick up my mother at the Greater Arizona Savings Building, where the Interstate Stream Commission had its offices. It was amazing to see the crowds on the streets, just like a big city.

Jon Talton August 9, 201023

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Sun City

The curvilinear streets and golf courses of Sun City.

Fifty years ago, Del Webb began Sun City. It was just south of Grand Avenue and the Santa Fe railroad amid the flat farm fields of Maricopa County and near the tiny railroad sidings at Surprise and El Mirage. I first saw it from the train — there was no Sun City station, for this was a development built for the automobile. For most Phoenicians, it was a curiosity — or a joke. Pat McMahon's misanthropic, demented Aunt Maud character on Wallace & Ladmo was from Sun City. Photos of oldsters riding around in their golf carts provoked much mirth. When an older lady asked my grandmother if she was going to move out there, this daughter of the frontier was aghast. "Why would I want to be stuck out there with all those old people?" she asked. The older lady was shocked.

Yet Sun City would prove to be one of the most influential events in the history of modern Phoenix, setting in train a series of business, demographic and social changes that have proven to be very mixed blessings. Before Sun City, Phoenix was something like a real city. Tourism and snowbirds were part of the mix. But so was a huge agricultural economy, along with a large — for its population larger than today — and growing number of technology, aerospace and defense businesses. Resorts were limited. The artist colonies in Scottsdale and Carefree were more important than retirees. After Sun City all this would change.

Del Webb had been building in Phoenix for decades before Sun City. Go to the iconic Phoenix Towers at Cypress and Central and you'll see his name on the building, erected in 1956. Downtown sidewalks from years before had it etched in the concrete (although here Webb competed against "Frenchy" Vieux). He grew rich in the New Deal. In World War II, he built military facilities, as well as the concentration camp — there's no polite way to put it — at Poston to hold interned Japanese-American citizens and other Japanese living in America. By the time he envisioned Sun City, he was no longer "ole Del," but a very rich man, friend of celebrities, part-owner of the New York Yankees — and, among Phoenicians in-the-know, trailed by the odor of associations with organized crime and war profiteering.

Jon Talton January 18, 20105

Phoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

:Carl Hayden

This week, Sen. Robert Byrd will surpass Arizona's Carl Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress. As Arizona's only congressman and later its fixture of a senator, Hayden was there for 56 years. The Arizona Republic's Dan Nowicki provides a good primer on Hayden for the majority of Arizonans who have either never heard of him, or merely associate his name with a high school.

When he was alive, Hayden was the most prominent of the walking reminders of Arizona as a frontier state. He had been born when the Salt River Valley was barely settled, had chased outlaws on horseback as Maricopa County sheriff (above left), then had become the Baby State's first representative in Congress.

"Ol' Carl Hayden," as he was known by the time I was alive, will forever be associated with the Central Arizona Project. The best book on Hayden and the CAP is my friend Jack August's Vision in the Desert. It was his life's work, and as it headed toward victory, Hayden realized it would not mean the sustenance and extension of agriculture in the Salt River Valley, but rather its transformation into a megalopolis. I have heard he was ambivalent about this reality, as many who fought for the CAP came to be. Ironically, many of the sustainability issues Phoenix and the Southwest face today were made in the 1950s and 1960s by the CAP adversaries in California — although they were hardly angels.

Jon Talton November 16, 20093

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

People of color in old Phoenix

The 1948 graduating class from George Washington Carver High School (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

From its founding until the late 20th century, Phoenix was an overwhelmingly Anglo city. But Phoenicians of color were always here. This column tells a bit of their stories.

Phoenix was settled by many Southerners and ex-Confederates, and it kept that Southern sensibility well into the 1960s. The white Chicagoans who started coming in the 1930s brought their own racial biases that for decades tore that city apart.

Into the early 1950s many places in Phoenix were legally segregated, including schools. Phoenix Union Colored High School, later George Washington Carver High, opened in 1926. Booker T. Washington and Paul Lawrence Dunbar elementary schools were built for younger "colored" children. (Washington is now home of New Times).

Deed covenants restricted many neighborhoods to "whites only." Minorities couldn't buy houses north of Van Buren Street well into the 1940s (and, as the 1913 advertisement shows, often couldn't buy south, either). Many stores and restaurants would not serve blacks, Mexicans, Japanese and American Indians. Swimming pools were segregated, too. Arizona had an anti-miscegenation law on the books from 1865 to 1962.

To be fair, there was no "colored waiting room" at Union Station and Encanto Park golf course accepted minority players in the 1940s. No lynching based on race is on record. Chinese-American children went to white public schools. Early minority businessmen such as Jose M. Iberri prospered. Mexicans who could "pass" for Anglos, such as the Van Harens, could move more freely. But the race and class lines were not hard to find. Phoenix always saw itself as an Anglo city (and the demographics back this up, especially after 1920), unlike old Tucson with its proud Spanish and Mexican traditions.

And consider: For decades the distance between the mansions of "Millionaires Row," Chinatown, and "the slums" were often only a few blocks.

The Salt River Valley, of course, had once been part of Mexico. Prior to Columbus, it was the site of the most advanced irrigation-based civilization in the Americas before being abandoned by the Hohokam. By the time the cavalry forced peace on the Apaches and white families such as mine began arriving in the latter part of the 19th century, Hispanics and Pimas were living in the Valley, too.

The nature of the town was embodied in one of its founders, Jack Swilling. He had a Mexican wife, Trinidad Escalante, as well as an adopted Apache son, Guillermo.

In other words, Phoenix was never Des Moines in the desert.

Jon Talton November 5, 200912

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Mesa

The Southern Pacific depot in downtown Mesa, circa 1963, when six passenger trains a day still served the station.

I got a rare treat in the mid-'60s for a poor kid from the 'hood: Getting to see Willie Mays play in a game of the Giants vs. the Dodgers. It was spring training and we drove to the little ballpark in Mesa. The game was great. Unfortunately, we were in the family 1959 Ford Galaxie, a source of never ending trouble and built, as my mother never tired of saying, during Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's tenure as Ford president. That night the only gear that would work was reverse — and we drove all the way home to Phoenix going backwards.

It's low-hanging fruit to grab this memory as a metaphor for what has happened to Arizona's third most populous city. A city so populous, indeed, that it is larger than St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Pittsburgh — and has nothing to show for it. No major university (an iffy branch of ASU miles from downtown doesn't count); no major corporate headquarters; no great museums; no magical neighborhoods. City Hall looks like a low-end office building. Even the area around the Arizona Temple, Mesa's one majestic asset, has been allowed to crater. The miles of enchanting citrus groves have almost all been bulldozed (and when I asked in 2006 if there was any preservation effort for the remainder, a top city official looked at me blankly).

It's a sad, and in many way surprising outcome. But operating by Arizona's rule of "when in a hole, keep digging," Mesa shows every sign of continuing the practices that got it in what is a morass even by Phoenix standards. The Cubs are playing the city for fools, threatening to leave, shopping spring training sites around the area, including some on the rez. Mesa's response could be to plan an intimate ballpark downtown on the light-rail line. It would enhance critical mass for a walkable urban space that Mesa lacks. It would be much more pleasant that the newer spring-training parks with their endless parking lagoons amid dehumanizing sprawl. It would help prepare Mesa to prosper in the higher-cost energy future.

Not surprisingly, Mesa is scouting two sites in the middle of nowhere, but on the all mighty freeway. When in a hole, keep digging.

Jon Talton October 12, 20099

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: ‘Master planned communities’

Phoenix had perhaps the worst luck of any major American city from the standpoint of urban design and civic beauty. It came of age in a huge spurt of growth in the 1950s and beyond. The City Beautiful Movement was forgotten. Suburbia, lookalike houses, automobiles and long single-occupancy car trips moved to the center of American life.

An old city still exists — what wasn't torn down by City Hall from the '70s through the '90s — but it's not much and most Phoenicians don't even realize it exists. When I lived in Willo, it was always painfully entertaining to be picked up by the airport shuttle, already full of people from the suburbs. They were giddy over the front porches! The shade trees! The old houses and walkable neighborhood and closeness to the center of the city! I learned that their real-estate agents had never even showed them this part of the city.

Suburbia wasn't always, as Jim Kunstler would put it, a cartoon landscape not worth caring about. Willo was once a suburb on the streetcar from a compact Phoenix. In Cincinnati, there's the magical Mariemont, a leafy "planned town" from the 1920s, which accommodated the American longing to "get out of the awful city," while creating a real community and a real human space worth caring about. It was accessible by — especially by — streetcar and interurban railway to downtown Cincinnati. Now the latter two are long gone as America has embraced a life with fewer choices.

A large number of people in metro Phoenix and a majority of the Anglo middle class live in something altogether different — a radical enterprise that has transformed civic life, urban form and even democracy: the "master planned community."

Jon Talton September 25, 20098

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History Phoenix Confidential

Phoenix Underworld

The scene after Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was fatally injured when a bomb went off in his car in 1976.

You don't have to scrape too far beneath the veneer of "a clean, new, well-run city" to understand that Phoenix is perhaps historically one of America's more corrupt, crime-run cities. It didn't get a great city in exchange for its corruption, as with Chicago. And being crime-run isn't the same as being crime-ridden, so whatever statistics the boosters pull out to show community safety are really beside the point.

It's long been this way. When I was a child, Phoenicians sniffed that Tucson was the Mafia town, with Joe Bonanno, Pete Licavoli Sr., and company. Yet the FBI estimated that in the 1960s Phoenix had more mobsters per capita than New York City. I grew up just a few blocks from the house where, in 1958, Gus Greenbaum and his wife had their throats slit in retaliation for Gus' skimming from the casino tills in Vegas (and, local lore has it, the hitmen then ate the steaks the Greenbaums had just cooked). Phoenix was full of bars (Rocky's Hideaway, the old Blue Grotto, Ivanhoe, the Clown's Den, etc.) frequented by made men and the wanna-bes.

This was not the result, as some would have it, of "the Wild West atmosphere." Rather, it was the interface between a city growing too fast with few rules or institutional checks and the migration of Midwestern gangsters to exploit the situation (or, later, to be relocated by the feds). And an establishment willing to look the other way, or join in the "business." A culture of fraud built on successive real-estate booms, or scandals such as the collapse of Arizona Savings in the early 1960s, also made the city a magnet for criminals. The most prominent figure in this was Ned Warren (aka Nathan Waxman), the Kingpin of Arizona Land Fraud. He figured in the Bolles bombing.

Jon Talton September 8, 200921

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Vulnerabilities

The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, built upwind from the nation's fifth-largest city and plagued for years by regulator's safety concerns. It is the only nuclear plant in the world not near a large body of water.

People move to Phoenix bragging about the lack of blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. True enough. Yet they are moving into a place burdened by its own special hazards. They're the ones your real estate agent didn't mention; the ones that what is left of journalism rarely covers. That nobody talks about them besides — I hope — emergency planners, does not make them any less dangerous. Indeed, a case could be made that Phoenix is one of the highest-risk metro areas in the nation. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Risk Index, Maricopa County is rated "relatively high." Higher than "tornado alley" in Kansas and Oklahoma.

One of the most populous metropolitan areas in the nation has been built in a hostile desert. It's isolated, with limited highways, no passenger rail and surrounded by hundreds of miles of inhospitable, waterless badlands. Evacuation in an emergency would be impossible. The closest large cities — Tucson and Las Vegas — are as vulnerable as Phoenix. Gasoline must be brought in by pipelines from refineries hundreds of miles away. Water and the electricity for air conditioning depend on complex, vulnerable systems.

This harsh reality should have been brought home earlier in this decade, when, amidst brutal August heat, a gasoline pipeline broke; a year later, a mid-summer transformer fire threatened to shut down the power grid. The gas crisis was particularly frightening. Fights broke out at filling stations. People drove around in search of a tanker truck to follow. More inquisitive residents were surprised that such a large city has no refinery and is served by only two pipelines, one from the east, one from the west, built decades ago when Phoenix held a fraction of its current population.

Jon Talton July 27, 20094

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: The High Country

East Clear Creek near the Mogollon Rim

Mention the High Country now and several images come to mind. Escape from Phoenix during the worst days of summer. "Cabins," for those with means, that are usually just subdivisions plopped down amid the pines, sometimes with a golf course attached. Flagstaff's charming downtown. Prescott Valley's hideous sprawl. Wildfire season. The horrific traffic on Interstate 17 and the Beeline Highway.

Thank God, I got to see a very different High Country, as different from what exists now as old Phoenix was from the current migropolis.

Even in the 1960s, it was rough, empty country. The entire state population in 1960 was 1.3 million — smaller than the city of Phoenix now — and 1.7 million in 1970. In 1960, Flagstaff had 18,000 people, Prescott 13,000, Payson wasn't even counted (it had 1,800 in 1970). And yet Arizona had built good highways — and still had passenger trains — so it was possible to explore this enchanted land in relative comfort.

Jon Talton July 21, 20092

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Phoenix 101: Conservatives

Sen. Barry Goldwater, center, and Rep. John J. Rhodes, right, after the fateful showdown with President Nixon in 1974 when they told him he must resign.

Conservatism wasn't always synonymous with the Kookocracy. The political label has carried different meanings at different times through the state's history.

The Kooks down at the Capitol today would be anathema to the lions of the dawn of modern Arizona conservatism: John J. Rhodes, Paul Fannin and, especially, Barry Goldwater.

What later passed for Arizona conservatives could say, "Barry changed," when the senator criticized the religious right or the ban on gays in the military with his characteristic circumspection. No, he didn't. I had conversations with Rhodes late in his life — the House leader who, along with Goldwater and Republican Sen. Hugh Scott, told Richard Nixon he must resign the presidency. Rhodes was aghast at what the state Republicans had become.

Arizona conservative lions telling a disgraced president of their party it was time to go. Can you imagine John McCain or Jeff Flake showing such independence or integrity?

Jon Talton July 6, 20098

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: The Mormons

The Arizona Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mesa.

Growing up in Arizona, I found the Mormons neither strange nor mysterious, much less threatening. They were part of the wonderful mosaic of a state still tasting of the frontier, before it had been overrun by immigrants from the Midwest and miles of lookalike crapola subdivisions.

We had a Book of Mormon in our library, more a testament to my mother's insatiable curiosity than any desire to convert. My great-grandparents were among the first non-LDS farmers to settle near Mesa, and Grandmother reveled in telling the story about how the Saints pestered them to convert and "seal" their marriage in the temple, much to the horror of these former Presbyterian missionaries. But it was a story told gently and with affection for all.

The Mormons were revered among the great Arizona pioneers. They were known for their generosity, including to "gentiles," something our family experienced. Mormons were hard-working, reliable, self-reliant, patrons of education and the arts. Mesa in those days was a beautiful small city, a monument to the energy and far-sightedness of its LDS founders. We would regularly drive down neat and prosperous Main Street to see the beautiful Arizona Temple. The Mormon kids with whom I went to high school were among the most talented in one of the country's top high-school fine arts program.

The Mormons were also powerful. That was clear even at an early age.

Jon Talton June 23, 200915

Phoenix 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.

Jon Talton June 9, 20095

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

The old city

Phoenix in the 1950s.

I carry a memory of old Phoenix — and feel its loss profoundly — in a way that's probably unusual even for natives of my generation. It's not nostalgia; I know too much about the place for that. It's a more complex reaction, to history thrown aside, opportunities lost and the destruction of a very flawed paradise, but a paradise nonetheless.

It was not really captured in the Channel 8 documentaries on Phoenix in the 1950s and 1960s. As popular as those shows were, they were a classic example of telling history through the lens of the present. Hence, we saw much about sprawl (the start of Maryvale and Sun City) and Sky Harbor. They missed so, so much. What they missed are the things I describe in talks when I say, "If you arrived in Phoenix after 1970, I feel sorry for you."

I was fortunate to grow up in central Phoenix in the late 1950s and 1960s, fortunate, too, to be the offspring of a mother and grandmother who were Arizonans with history in their bones. We lived in a house built in 1928, in an old neighborhood close to downtown. I attended the same grade school as Barry Goldwater, Paul Fannin and Phoenix Mayor Margaret Hance. It was different from growing up in suburbia.

Jon Talton June 4, 200936

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Water and Phoenix’s rebirth

Theodore Roosevelt Dam and spillway, 1915.

On the mountain tops we stand
All the world at our command
We have opened up the soil
With our teardrops
And our toil
–Gordon Lightfoot (Canadian Railroad Trilogy)

That people can move to the Salt River Valley turn on a reliable tap or jump in a shimmering swimming pool, never even wondering where the water originates, is testimony to the mighty acts and sacrifices of previous generations.

Today's transplants would never know it, but they live in one of the world's great fertile river valleys. But unlike the Nile and Euphrates, the Salt is dangerously unpredictable. It floods. It dries up to nearly nothing. In the end, it destroyed the most advanced hydraulic civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas, which we call the Hohokam.

It very nearly did the same to the Americans who found the valley after the Civil War, having sat there empty for centuries as if providentially awaiting them. Even some of the Hohokam canals were intact, needing only to be cleaned out by the newcomers. But the river had its own harsh logic. The territorial "lifestyle," as related by my grandmother, was unbelievably primitive, even at the end of the 19th century — always dependent on the river's tricks. Phoenix might never have risen from the ashes.

Jon Talton May 28, 200910