Phoenix history 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

Bringing forth fruit

I first met Kit Danley in 2001 when she asked me to visit Neighborhood Ministries at its new home, hard against the railroad yards on Fillmore Street west of 19th Avenue.

It was a place that held fond memories for me. As a child, I had spent many hours train watching at the nearby Mobest Yard of the Santa Fe Railway. In those days, Fillmore ran through to 19th Avenue, and this end of the yard featured a cleaning facility for passenger cars (when Phoenix had passenger trains) and the locomotive turntable. South was the busy and (to my young eyes) imposing Valley Feed and Seed, where railcars were switched against the warehouse for loading and unloading.

Valley Feed and Seed looked very different in 2001: abandoned, decomposing, the grounds full of debris, silos that once provided seeds for this great agricultural valley now empty, eight acres of sadness. It was a graveyard that extended to Van Buren Street. Fillmore had been closed to a cul-de-sac when the yard was moved south (to lessen the train delays on McDowell). The surrounding area was known for crime now, not commerce.

But this was the site that Neighborhood Ministries had purchased in 1998 for an ambitious campus that would increase its outreach to the poor. By the time of my first visit, the organization had raised $2.2 million to begin renovations.

I liked Danley immediately. She was a near-native, went to Scottsdale High (I went to Coronado), and had chosen to make a stand in the wounded heart of Phoenix, founding Neighborhood Ministries in 1982. She was the polar opposite of the city of the short hustle, the state where hate was peddled for political profit.

And she would be frustrated that I appear to be making this column about her (it's not; read on). Like her spiritual forebear in Phoenix, Father Emmett McLoughlin, she felt called by Christ to minister here to the least and the lost, to the stranger and the wanderer, and find Christ in them.

Jon Talton April 1, 201594

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: The weather

This is the time of year when we see smug pieces in Phoenix media trumpeting the fine weather and making fun of the blizzard or snow in the Midwest or Northeast.

It's an old con going back a century or more — although it was typically the subject of advertising (as seen in the above promotion from the 1950s) rather than of "news" stories.

How can I be so cynical as to call it a con? Two reasons.

First, America had a long tradition of the West being misrepresented as the land of milk and honey by railroads and land barons. In most cases, the reality was disappointing, sometimes disastrously so. In reality, the land was unforgiving, "civilization" was primitive, fraud and lawlessness were common, and many immigrants were ruined.

Second, Phoenix historically had about seven decent-to-nice months and five hellish ones. I say "historically" because that ratio is starting to invert, about which more later. But many snowy places have five rough months and seven that range from livable to quite pleasant. Summer in Minnesota is lovely. So it the Phoenix braggadocio about its "superior" weather has always baffled me.

It is true that many people seek the sun almost pathologically, like the doomed space crew in the 2007 film Sunshine. "You don't have to shovel sunshine!" is a motto that resonates, at least with the 4 million people who seem to be willing to put up with almost anything in Phoenix as long as they get hot weather. I admit my blind spot: As a Phoenician, nothing makes me more depressed than endless sunny days.

Jon Talton February 2, 201565

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Media in old Phoenix

A crowd "watches" the World Series covered by the Arizona Republican outside the Heard Building in 1921. In these pre-radio days, news wire services transmitted each at-bat and inning, which were placed on the scoreboard.

If you grew up in Phoenix in the 1960s and 1970s, the media landscape looked like this:

The Arizona Republic was the morning newspaper. The afternoon paper was The Phoenix Gazette. Although both were owned by the Pulliam family, their newsrooms competed fiercely. The Republic was the statewide newspaper while the Gazette focused on the city. Publisher Eugene C. Pulliam was known for his conservative views and occasional front-page editorials. Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Reg Manning's signature included a cactus. Well into the 1960s, news hawkers in green aprons shouted headlines from downtown sidewalks, ready to sell you a paper.

Surrounding towns had their newspapers, too. Among them, The Mesa Tribune, Tempe Daily News, Chandler Arizonan, and Scottsdale Daily Progress. The city gained an alternative weekly with New Times, founded in 1970 by a group of ASU students. Phoenix Magazine was started in the 1966 by the Welch family.

Television meant the local affiliates of the three networks: KOOL (CBS), KTAR (NBC) and KTVK (ABC). Phoenix had one independent station, KPHO, which was the home of Wallace and Ladmo. Radio ran from easy listening to top 40 (KRIZ, KRUX and KUPD). By the 1970s, newcomer KDKB played album-oriented rock with a hippie laid-back style (The staff is shown at the Mesa Southern Pacific depot in 1973, above right). Broadcast towers topped the Hotel Westward Ho and Greater Arizona Savings Building (Heard Building) downtown.

You knew personalities such as bola-tie-wearing Bill Close, the Walter Cronkite of Phoenix, on KOOL (promoted on the billboard, right). Mary Jo West became one of Phoenix's first female anchors in 1976, joining Close (a crusty guy who was not happy to work with a woman at first). In 1982, Close would be at the center of a famous hostage situation, where a gunman took over the studio and demanded to read a statement on the air. On KOY radio, Bill Heywood presided over the morning drive time, while Alan Chilcoat did afternoons and "sang the weather." Johnny McKinney at KUPD was one of the many popular rock DJs.

Overall, what would come to be called "media" was pretty bland in Phoenix of this era. There were exceptions, and not merely when New Times started to shake things up. The Republic and Gazette was capable of excellent investigative reporting and exposed land fraud and crooked pols, along with plenty of boosterism. Glendale Pontiac dealer, and future governor, Evan Mecham published a short-lived Evening American because he thought Pulliam was too liberal. But most Phoenicians felt a deep connection to these publishers and broadcasters.

Jon Talton January 26, 201511

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix in the seventies

Central Avenue and Van Buren in 1972. Note the full block of businesses heading north to the Westward Ho. Central was still a two-way street.

No series of events better epitomized the 1970s and the turning point they marked in Phoenix than the fight over freeways, specifically the "inner loop" of the Papago Freeway.

Most Phoenicians had a vague idea that freeways were a possibility since the Wilber Smith & Associates plan was adopted in 1960. Interstate 10 had been completed to Tucson and was abuilding from the west. By mid-decade it had reached Tonopah, requiring a long drive over largely country roads to reach. Real-estate values plummeted along the path of the inner loop. But by 1970, Phoenix's freeway "system" consisted of only the Black Canyon (Interstate 17) which curved at Durango to become the Maricopa (I-10).

All this changed as the new decade opened and the plan's stark reality became clear. Specifically, the Papago would vault into the air, reaching 100 feet as it crossed Central Avenue. Traffic would enter and exit via massive "helicoils" at Third Avenue and Third Street. The freeway was promoted as being Phoenix's defining piece of architecture.

It didn't take Eugene Pulliam and the anti-freeway advocacy of the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette to make most Phoenicians horrified. In 1973, voters vehemently rejected the inner loop. They only had to look 372 miles west to see the destruction wrought by freeways. They didn't want Phoenix to "become another Los Angeles."

Jon Talton November 3, 201438

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Baker Nursery RIP

National readers of this blog will have to indulge me in writing again on sorrowful "news from home." Baker Nursery will be closing after 46 years in operation. Businesses come and go, we grow to love some of them, the verities of the marketplace don't care.

But this is a punch in the gut.

Baker's is a remnant of old Phoenix, the magical oasis, a garden city where people took special pride in bringing the bounty out of this timeless alluvial soil, where even the simplest apartments were lovingly landscaped. It is a remnant of the distinctive eastern part of the city that includes Arcadia but so much more. A remnant of when Phoenix was a very middle-class city, before the stark division of rich and poor, before the miles of linear slums.

What could have been more important for the garden city that once flourished here than nurseries? Phoenix once supported many, but Baker's was the best.

My mother was a Baker's customer from the start. Later, as a young man, I would take her to the nursery. She would select plants while I, well, admired the attractive Baker daughters.

Jon Talton October 9, 201421

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix in The Great War

Phoenix-born air ace Frank Luke Jr., Arizona's most famous hero from World War I, with his thirteenth official kill.

Arizona had been a state for little more than two years when the cataclysm broke out in Europe a century ago. When the United States finally entered the conflict in 1917, doughboys and sailors fought under the new flag bearing the perfectly symmetrical 48 stars created with the entry of the "Baby State." While the Great War was not as transformative here as its continuation in World War II, it still brought big changes to Phoenix.

When the guns of August 1914 commenced, Phoenix's population had clocked in at 11,314 in the Census four years before. By 1920, it would be more than 29,000. Although it was the state capital (and home of the "lunatic asylum," which in those days was separate from the Legislature), it was still smaller than Tucson. But downtown had become a thriving commercial center with multistory buildings.

The streetcar "suburb" of craftsman bungalows was taking shape in what are now the Roosevelt and F.Q. Story historic districts and the southeast corner of Willo. The city was tightly bound to the old township, with additions running out to the capitol, north above McDowell, south of Grant and east to around 16th Street. By 1917, bungalows were being built in the Bella Vista addition northeast of Osborn and Central. The Santa Fe and Southern Pacific had completed branch lines to the town, but civic leaders were lobbying hard for a mainline railroad.

In 1914, Phoenix adopted the reformist commissioner-manager form of government. It was meant to tame the corruption of the wide-open Western town. Soon, it was back to business as usual with compromised commissioners. It would be after World War II that meaningful reform would come to City Hall.

Arizona, with 204,354 in the 1910 Census, was still a wild place. It had been only 28 years since the surrender of Geronimo. The state's economy was based on mining, ranching and, in the Salt River Valley, a farming cornucopia.

Jon Talton September 18, 201424

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

What killed downtown, Part III

Central and Van Buren circa 1971. This once-vibrant business block is about to be replaced with Valley Center (now the Chase Tower). The old Trailways bus depot that stood at the far left has already been demolished.

Part I and Part II of "What Killed Downtown Phoenix" were the most popular posts in the history of Rogue Columnist. So much for the notion that Phoenicians don't care about the center city. Now it's time to bring the story to a conclusion.

By the mid-1970s, downtown was in a freefall, despite the construction of the Phoenix Civic Plaza, Hyatt Regency, new Hotel Adams, new Greyhound bus depot and skyscrapers housing the headquarters of the state's three big banks.

Unfortunately, in the process many historic buildings were demolished, including a priceless red sandstone multi-story building at Second Avenue and Washington. Block-long parking garages and assembly of superblocks created long, empty spaces along sidewalks where once there were dozens of shops.

Several valuable territorial-era structures were demolished to create the desolate, sunblasted Patriots Square (workers discovered an "underground city" from frontier Phoenix that had housed opium dens and gambling parlors, protected from the heat in an era before air conditioning). These and others lost were precisely the kind of buildings rehabbed in downtown Denver into Larimer Square.

One of the greatest calamities was the demolition of the Fox Theater, the finest movie palace downtown. This happened without a peep of protest. On the land, the city built a "transit center," which was little more than a Maryvale-style ranch house "station" and parking stalls for city buses. The Paramount somehow survived, running Spanish-language films (it would be reclaimed as the Orpheum). Another calamity was the Westward Ho, which closed as a hotel and only avoided the wrecking ball by being turned into Section 8 housing. The smaller San Carlos, thankfully, was saved as a historic hotel.

Jon Talton March 25, 201349

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

What killed downtown, Part II

Downtown was still busy in the late 1950s, at Third Street and Washington. Even though this was part of the Deuce, note the variety of businesses and pedestrians.

In the previous post, we left downtown Phoenix in 1940 as the vibrant business and commercial center of a small, relatively dense city, surrounded by pleasant neighborhoods, served by streetcars, and dependent on agriculture. World War II brought massive changes to the Salt River Valley. Thousands of troops were trained here. Phoenix was still a frontier town, wide open to gambling and prostitution, and governed by a shady city commission. At one point, base commanders declared the city off limits to troops. This began a reform movement that eventually led to a council-manager form of government and the decades of "businessmen's government" from the Charter movement.

The Battle of Britain and the threat of strategic bombing made a deep impression on American war planners. So in addition to wanting to move plants away from the vulnerable coasts, they also widely dispersed new war industries and Army Air Forces bases around the valley. One example was the Reynolds Aluminum extrusion plant built at 35th Avenue and Van Buren, far from the city center. Dispersal brought the first Motorola facility, but not to the central business district. This set in place a habit of decentralization that continued after the war when city fathers set out to bring new "clean industries" to the city. They failed to land a Glenn Martin Co. guided missile venture for the vacant Goodyear plant in its namesake town. But Goodyear returned in 1950, eventually building airframe components there. Garrett's AiResearch, which also had a plant outside the city during the war, returned after a vigorous Chamber of Commerce effort, to a site near Sky Harbor. No thought appears to have been given to locating the city's new industries near the core.

After the war, America embarked on a massive economic expansion and migration, both benefiting Phoenix. Demand had been pent up from both the Depression and wartime rationing. By 1950, Phoenix entered the list of the 100 most populous cities, at No. 99, with 106,818 in 17 square miles. Many servicemen who had trained here fell in love with the place and moved back as civilians. Inexpensive evaporative cooling became widely available and was installed in every house built in far-flung subdivisions.

Jon Talton March 18, 201322

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

What killed downtown, Part I

Downtown Phoenix in the 1930s, a view facing south.

When you see downtown Phoenix today, be kind. No other major city suffered the combination of bad luck, poor timing, lack of planning, vision and moneyed stewards, as well as outright civic vandalism. The only thing missing was a race riot, which happened elsewhere in the city during World War II and is not spoken about.

First, definitions. Downtown Phoenix runs from the railroad tracks to Fillmore and between Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Any other definition — even though much of the local media are oblivious to this — is ahistorical, inaccurate and, as my sister-in-law would say, just wrong. Twenty-fourth Street and Camelback is not downtown. Central and Clarendon is not downtown.

If one were going to site the center of Phoenix today, one would pick Arcadia, with majestic Camelback Mountain nearby. But that was not the case with the original township in the 1870s. The town was centered in the great, fertile Salt River Valley, soon to be reclaimed by revolutionary waterworks from the Newlands Act and connected by railroads to the nation. It was here that downtown grew and for decades flourished. But Phoenix was small and isolated. It did not grow from 10,000 in 1910 to more than 185,000 in 1930 like Oklahoma City. In 1930, Seattle's population was more than 386,000 and Denver nearly 288,000. Phoenix held 48,118 souls in the same year and was far from any other metropolitan area.

It's a fascinating counterfactual to wonder what might have happened in downtown Phoenix if not for the Great Depression and World War II. The decades before 1940 were the golden age of American city building, including art deco architecture and the City Beautiful movement. One can see it in such buildings as the Luhrs Tower and Luhrs Building, the Professional Building and the Orpheum Lofts (and, north of downtown, in the Portland Parkway). Conventional wisdom holds that the Depression didn't hurt Phoenix much, but this is not true. With deflation and little building happening, it stopped downtown dead. This was continued by the material shortages of World War II. By the time the economy began the long post-war expansion, downtown was facing too many obstacles and didn't have many of the grand bones of the other cities I mentioned.

Jon Talton March 11, 201340

Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Phoenix 101: Maryvale

In the late 1950s, my uncle bought a house from John F. Long in Maryvale — and I mean he bought it from John Long himself sitting in a trailer on land that would become Phoenix's first major post-war suburb. My uncle was pretty much Long's target demographic: A veteran of World War II and Korea, young with a family and a good job. Tens of thousands more did the same thing. His house was a sparkling new ranch with an "all electric kitchen" and a pool. Every time we visited, I felt inferior, us living in a down-on-its-heels Spanish period-revival house, built in the 1920s with a gas range, just north of downtown. My mother sniffed that his commute faced the sun coming and going. But how I wanted to live in Maryvale. It was the future. Except it wasn't. Now our old house is restored and valuable in one of the state's most desirable historic districts. Maryvale is a linear slum.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. Long named the district after his wife and loved it until he died. He was unapologetic about building affordable starter homes for ex-GIs and his company tried to support Maryvale even as it began an inexorable decline. He took the model of Levittown, the "planned communities" built by William Levitt in the northeast in the last 1940s and 1950s. But Long added his own twists, such as the distinct Phoenix ranch house and abundant pools. Like its model, Maryvale was defined by curvilinear streets with cul-de-sacs and walls, providing a sense of privacy. Sometimes the newness could be jarring: I remember walking with my uncle through cabbage fields — across the street (until these were obliterated by more houses).

Jon Talton January 30, 201245

Phoenix 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.

The 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.

Jon Talton December 13, 201027

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Encanto Park in old Phoenix

A city such as Cincinnati built great parks, from the showpiece Eden Park, home to the Cincinnati Playhouse, Cincinnati Art Museum, Kron Conservatory and Mirror Lake Fountain, to the exquisitely designed Ault Park near the tony Mount Lookout and Hyde Park neighborhoods. Eastsiders who won't venture beyond the "Sauerkraut Curtain" may not even know about Mt. Echo Park, one of my favorites with its awesome views of downtown and the Ohio River.

The Queen City of the West had the good fortune to come of age in the golden age of park design and have the wealth to pull it off. Phoenix, a modest farm town at this time, built only one: Encanto. That makes it all the more a civic treasure. This Saturday Encanto Park will celebrate its 75th anniversary.

I write this not to take away from the city's achievement with desert parks, especially South Mountain Park and Papago Park. But they are what they are, often stunning preserves of the Sonoran Desert for hardy hikers and, more often, drivers.

Encanto was different, built as an oasis of shade and grass and City Beautiful Movement design, meant for people, picnics and strolling. Now more than ever, you can feel the instant cooling of the park and golf courses when you drive south of Thomas on 15th Avenue on a summer night. It's not like the Midwest — for that kind of lush greenery, look to Cincinnati. It lacks the size and resources that Los Angeles could put into Griffith Park. Encanto, inspired by San Diego's grand Balboa Park, is its own enchanted feat. It is a capsule of old Phoenix, a magical refutation of those who say "Phoenix has no soul."

Jon Talton November 25, 201015

Phoenix 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.

Jon Talton November 8, 201010

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