Phoenix Union Station
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix Union Station

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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. 

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The old city
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

The old city

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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.

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