I must take a pass on writing new columns for the next several weeks while I finish a new book.
With the help of Front Page Editor Richard Silc and Arizona Researcher Michael Sampson, I'll continue to update the news links at left every day. Feel free to enjoy or have your blood pressure raised by the archives, including Phoenix history.
And the comments section is available for value-added commentary and discussion.
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A score of things that made today's Phoenix:
1. ASU: In 1920, Tempe Normal School was awarding teaching certificates and providing high-school courses. From there it became Tempe State Teachers College (1925), Arizona State Teachers College (1929), Arizona State College (1945), and finally a university (1958). Today, under the dynamic leadership of Michael Crow, ASU is one of the largest universities in the United States. Among its five campuses/centers is the transformative downtown Phoenix location. The downside: Phoenix is by far the largest metropolitan areas in America with only one real, full-sized university.
2. Agriculture: A century ago, Phoenix was the center of a major agricultural empire thanks to its location in one of the planet's great alluvial river valleys. Anything would grow — just add water, which was abundant thanks to Theodore Roosevelt Dam and its successors. It's almost all gone. At one time, we could feed ourselves and exported produce and beef to the nation. Now Phoenix is almost entirely reliant on the 10,000-mile supply chain. A more foresighted place would have established agricultural trusts to preserve the citrus groves and Japanese flower gardens.
3. Air conditioning: Refrigerated air showed up in movie theaters and new hotels a century ago. Swamp coolers and central air units made Phoenix bearable for more people year-round (no more sleeping porches and wrapping oneself in wet sheets in summer). For awhile after World War II, Phoenix was also a center of air-conditioning manufacturing.
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I'm not sure what I can add to the stories we've had on the Front Page. But I'll tell you what I know.
Writing from Seattle, I'm in one of the hotspots of coronavirus in the United States. As of today, 420 people are infected in King County, with 47 deaths. More will surely follow, but that's not the whole story. No infections or deaths have come from downtown or Belltown, where I live. The epicenter is an assisted-living center in tony Kirkland on the snooty Eastside across Lake Washington. So people should be cautious about making assumptions.
Gov. Jay Inslee has banned gatherings of more than 50 people and ordered all restaurants and bars shut down. More than 253,500 Washingtonians work in food service and drinking establishments. This "one-note-on-climate-change" presidential candidate who dropped out early has shown far more leadership on the pandemic than the current occupant of the White House.
Even so, we lack so much knowledge about the situation, especially because of the lack of test kits. South Korea has fast, free drive-through testing. The United States, "Great Again," feels like the Third World. We can't tell what is prudent and what is wild overreaction, what is irrational panic. Of course, many Republicans, even friends of mine, deny coronavirus is a problem at all. It's all a conspiracy to take down Dear Leader. Never mind lockdowns in Italy, Spain, and France. Never mind the British study that predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States without vigorous action.
Remember, 80,000 voters in three Midwestern states gave an Electoral College victory to the most unqualified and dangerous man in American history. For three years, we were mostly lucky (not Puerto Rico in Hurricane Maria) with no immediate crisis demanding presidential leadership. Now our luck has run out.
Someone tweeted: "I think it's okay to be a little resentful at Trump voters for ultimately murdering us."
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Carl Muecke illustration
Much has changed since late September, when 19 Democrats were running for president. Now, it's a Biden-Sanders contest. Despite the narrative that the former vice president was a dead candidate walking, he scored a massive win on Super Tuesday. This is a reminder that Twitter world is not the real world. Much can still change: Thirty-eight primaries remain and 62% of pledged delegates are still unwon.
Still, based on today's state of play and barring a massive setback for the frontrunner, Joe Biden will be the nominee.
Some friends of the blog asked me to assess the situation. I have a hard time topping Andrew Sullivan's essay, which was on Rogue's Front Page over the weekend. Among his many insights:
This was not the GOP in 2016 — unable to winnow the field and coalesce behind a single opponent to Trump, and then staggering backward into submission. This is the Democrats in 2020, finally a party capable of operating with some institutional authority. Here’s a headline you don’t often see: “Democrats Not in Disarray!”
So I'll try to bat cleanup and go in a few other directions.
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This is on display in his obituaries, the New York Times emphasizing that he "led General Electric through two decades of extraordinary corporate prosperity and became the most influential business manager of his generation." And "Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his (ghost-written) autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time." Fortune magazine named him "Manager of the Century," overlooking the likes of the legendary Alfred Sloan of General Motors.
Here, though, I must depart from de mortuis nihil nisi bonum (Of the dead, say nothing but good) taught me by my flamboyant Latin teacher at Coronado High School, Leo O'Flaherty (Magister O'). For John Francis Welch Jr. was the most destructive and toxic corporate leader of the century, probably in the history of American business. He's a big reason why we find ourselves in this era of inequality, the ashes of much of the middle class, and resultant political instability.
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Here are photographs of Phoenix from 100 years ago — I wrote about the decade in this column. Click on the image for a larger view. Enjoy!
The McColloch Brothers Commercial Photographers posing in 1928 outside the Arizona Republican offices. ASU preserves the McCulloch archive as an essential resource for images from 1884 to 1947.
First Street and Washington looking north with the Anderson Building on the left in 1928.
In 1926, Phoenix gained the northern main line of the Southern Pacific Railroad and most of its passenger trains at new Phoenix Union Station. This San Diego Chamber ad promotes a direct route between the two cities on the SP's challenging Carrizo Gorge route. That segment was originally begun by sugar magnate John Spreckels.
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• The Arizona Republic continues to tiptoe around the water issue. Most recent is a story about the uneven water availability for cities in metropolitan Phoenix. A day before, the paper ran a piece headlined "Buckeye is the nation's fastest growing city. But it doesn't have the water to keep it up."
Where to begin? First, Buckeye is not a city except on legalistic paper. It is a far-flung collection of real-estate ventures ("master-planned communities") connected by wide highways. Buckeye has an astounding 393 square miles of area for 74,000 people. As James Howard Kunstler puts it, "the matrix of single-family home subdivisions, arterial highways and freeways, chain stores, junk food dispensaries, and the ubiquitous wilderness of free parking — the last of these implying just one insidious side-effect of this template for living: mandatory motoring."
By contrast, the city of Phoenix consists of 519 square miles and 1.7 million people — that's a city. Buckeye, once tiny stop on the Southern Pacific Railroad was never meant to be a "city."
But the big enchilada is that Arizona doesn't have the water to continue unlimited sprawl. Who will tell the people? Who will stop the Real-Estate Industrial Complex?
• Phoenix opened the "Grand Canalscape" trail along 12 miles of the Grand Canal from Interstate 17 to Tempe. Mayor Kate Gallego said, “People are surprised when I tell them that Phoenix has more canal miles than Venice or Amsterdam. Today we are integrating the canals into our communities to improve neighborhood access, add new public art spaces and contribute to a healthier Phoenix by introducing them as a recreational amenity."
The Grand Canal, one of the original legacies of the Hohokam, once looked like the photo above. The new "safe, convenient route for bicyclists and pedestrians" is a sun-blasted emptiness. Phoenicians don't even know what they lost. Aside from road-widening, the ministrations of the Salt River Project is the biggest killer of Phoenix's once-abundant canopy of shade trees. And more sprawl is not worth the destruction of even one of those trees, much less tens of thousands. In the meantime, enjoy your skin cancer and heat exhaustion. It's heartbreaking to imagine a shaded canal, even in stretches. But, no.
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Oh, the temptation to put up another photo gallery of old Phoenix and let the traffic soar. But duty obliges me to put my shoulder to the task of commenting on our moment.
Forget a Democratic frontrunner. It's too early. I also know that some of you fervently want Bernie Sanders to win the nomination. Were the stakes for the republic and the planet not so enormous, I'd like to see it. When he got creamed, you would still believe — "He is the one!" — and make bitter excuses. But at least the zombie lies about how he wuz robbed in 2016 and would have triumphed if not for the eeevil DNC could finally expire.
America is not Seattle. Sanders can't win a general election. The angry shtick he honed on the Thom Hartmann radio program won't win a single swing-state vote that Hillary Clinton didn't carry and will alienate many that she did. He's not even a member of the Democratic Party and elides over the need for commanding Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to enact his sweeping agenda.
I generally agree with Sanders on many points. But he's not capable of winning. The American electorate is not me.
HRC lost the Electoral College in 2016 because of fewer than 80,000 votes in three Midwestern states. She won the popular vote by 3 million. And all this was in spite of Kremlin meddling, journalistic malpractice, vote suppression, Jill Stein, the Susan Sarandon cohort, and tepid support toward the end of the contest by Sanders. So few votes sealed our fate.
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Last week's gallery of the 1940s was so wildly popular, let's continue on a theme. For readers, I produced columns on Phoenix in the 1950s and the 1960s. I invite you to read them, for they provide important context and history of the photos that follow (images that didn't make the original decade columns).
Enjoy! (Click on image to see a larger version):
Overhead and in color, Phoenix in 1956. In the lower part of the photo are the Southern Pacific tracks and the Warehouse District. In the middle-left is Phoenix Union High School, including Montgomery Stadium. Camelback is bare of any houses, a situation that won't last long.
Roosevelt Row was decades in the future when Birch's Drugs was snapped in 1953. It was part of a larger commercial strip along east Roosevelt and easily walkable from the Evans-Churchill and Garfield neighborhoods.
Another walkable spot. Tenth Street and McDowell, part of the "Miracle Mile" commercial district in the 1950s.
The northwest corner of Indian School and Central shows A.J. Bayless, Bekins moving and storage, and Carnation Dairy's restaurant, soda fountain, and main processing plant. It's 1957.
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Earlier columns delved into our fair city in this decade and its role in World War II. Here are more images from the decade. Most are thanks to the McCulloch Bros. Collection at the ASU Archives or Brad Hall's archive (click for a larger view):
First Avenue looking northwest toward the Title and Trust Building (now the Orpheum Lofts).
First Avenue and Monroe in 1947.
Inside the famous Saratoga Cafe at Central and Washington.
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This is one of those weaponized words whose meaning is made murky by activists. It often means low-income housing. It doesn't mean I am entitled to afford a place on Sunset Cliffs in San Diego making low pay in "sunshine dollars." This is complicated issue.
So first, some definitions. According to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), "Families who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing are considered cost burdened and may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation and medical care. An estimated 12 million renter and homeowner households now pay more than 50 percent of their annual incomes for housing. A family with one full-time worker earning the minimum wage cannot afford the local fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States."
A more comprehensive view comes from the Center for Neighborhood Technology's H+T Index, which captures housing plus transportation affordability. Metro Phoenix's H+T costs average 49%, vs. a 68% national average and 46% in pricey Seattle and 55% in San Diego. The research center states, "The traditional measure of affordability recommends that housing cost no more than 30% of household income...However, that benchmark fails to take into account transportation costs, which are typically a household’s second-largest expenditure. When transportation costs are factored into the equation, the number of affordable neighborhoods drops to 26% (nationally).
The National Low Income Housing Coalition's annual Out of Reach report drills deeper. For example, to afford central Phoenix's 85003 ZIP Code requires an average hourly wage of $20.38 for a two-bedroom apartment. Maryvale takes $17.69 an hour (working full time). The once middle-class south Scottsdale's 85257 takes $23.08.
Now we're getting close to the problem in metro Phoenix.
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When I was a little boy, I rode the bus with my grandmother. We would board around Central Avenue and Cypress Street, riding downtown to shop. Such excursions were rare, to be sure. This daughter of the frontier loved to drive as much as she adored sliced bread, paper towels, and her "stories" (soap operas) on television.
In those days, the 1960s, buses were operated by a private company as Valley Transit. The city's surprisingly extensive streetcar system was a fading memory — cutbacks began in the Depression and the last dagger was a fire at the car barn in 1947. The replacement bus system was inadequate from the start.
In 1971, the city regained control of the system. Private ownership hadn't worked. Three years later, the Tico logo appeared on festively repainted Phoenix Transit buses. The mascot showed a sunny dot wearing a smile, sunglasses, and sombrero. It remained on Phoenix buses until the late 1980s.
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James Kwak has a new book that captures the zeitgeist of a Democratic Party that is trying to recreate a left-wing version of what the Republicans did in making itself an exclusively right-wing party. In Taking Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacy, he lays out our situation of inequality, business monopsonies, and complicit "third way" Democrats pioneered by Bill Clinton. Even Barack Obama bought a $12 million home on Martha's Vineyard.
Kwak writes:
And so, because this is a book about how to make things better, it’s a book about Democrats. It’s about how, in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, we latched onto the idea that a more modern, more sophisticated, more business-friendly Democratic Party could successfully compete for the White House. It’s about how this transformation, while paying off in victories in four of the past seven presidential elections (six if you go by the popular vote), has left us impotent in the face of growing inequality, even when in power, and incapable of making the case that we can help families struggling against economic insecurity and misfortune. And it’s about how a new Democratic Party, dedicated to a progressive economic agenda, can take up the challenge of ensuring a decent life for every American.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are on board. So are numerous Democratic activists, AOC and "the squad." I'm sympathetic to many of their positions, but I have some misgivings.
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In 2010, Phoenix and Arizona were stuck in the worst (by most measures) bust since the Great Depression. Unemployment peaked at 10.9% in January statewide and 10.2% in metro Phoenix. Single-family housing starts in the metro area plunged from a monthly peak of 6,000 in 2004 to 854. Construction jobs fell from 183,000 in June 2006 to 81,000 in the summer of 2010. Phoenix was a national epicenter of the housing crash.
It was an eerie time. Freeways that had been clogged with tradesmen's pickup trucks were noticeably empty.
Now, nearly a decade later, the economy has recovered. Metro Phoenix joblessness was 4.1% in October, higher than the 3.6% nationally but still a marked improvement. Building permits clawed out of the 2009 trough but are still at levels of the early 1990s.
Population — the holy of holies worshipped by the local-yokel boosters — bounced back. After falling from 2008 to 2010, it rose by 653,000 by 2018 in the metro area. A much ballyhooed snapshot had the city itself the fastest-growing in the United States from 2017 to 2018. But the percentage rate of change looks to be slower this decade than the 2000s or the record 1990s.
True, the decade doesn't officially end until a year from now. But the "twenties" begin in the popular imagination this New Year's. So let's take stock of the "teens":
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A new report from the Brookings Institution highlights how "Superstar Cities" — Boston, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco and Silicon Valley — captured nine out of 10 jobs at the headwaters of advanced industries from 2005 to 2017. (See the coverage here and here). And it offers an ambitious plan to spread tech centers to "loser cities" in what is mostly considered flyover country.
An interesting footnote: One of the authors of the Brookings study is my friend Mark Muro, who worked at the Morrison Institute at ASU in the early 2000s.
One can't argue with this reality, particularly set against rising inequality and four decades of mergers that took away the economic crown jewels of hundreds of American cities. But some context is also necessary. In addition to these headwinds, many of the "loser cities" made their own fate.
And I'm not talking about Detroit or Cleveland. A better example can be found in Phoenix. Despite being the nation's fifth-largest city and 13th largest metropolitan area, Phoenix punches well below its weight. And no outside force has done this to Phoenix as much as Phoenix has done it to itself.
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In 1967, my mother arranged for me, my friend Billy Warren, and my grandmother to spend much of the summer in Payson. It had not been connected to the outside world by a paved highway for even a decade. The population was around 1,500 and it was clustered around a real tiny town, the enchanting massif of the Mogollon Rim towering to the north above the forest. I was 10.
We lived in a rented house on what's now called Frontier Street, a few blocks west of Arizona 87 (the Beeline Highway). Like almost everything in town, it was built of wood. An early look around was a disappointment to this callow city kid: No trains, no chain restaurants, no easy biking to parks or soda fountains. I don't recall having television, either. Payson revolved around the two-lane highway, with logging trucks rumbling by and everything locally owned. At night, the darkness was primeval under the vault of billions of stars.
The fear of boredom didn't last more than 24 hours at most. The volunteer fire department had a new station a block south, a place to hang around, admire the apparatus, and talk to the firefighters. I got a library card and quickly became a darling of the librarians by being a bibliophile and checking out books every few days.
But the big show was outside.
Both Billy and I were in Scouts — Camp Geronimo was north of Payson — so my grandmother had no concerns about us spending most of the day wandering around the forest. And we did, armed with canteens, pocket knives and compass. She trusted our good sense and caution. In those days, child abductions were rare. Today, Arizona has 909 open cases of missing persons, many children.
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When I was about three, my family was driving from Tucson to Phoenix in those pre-Interstate times. I have three vivid memories. The first is the restaurant where we ate breakfast; it had ancient double doors with windows behind ancient double screens. The second is the fierce rainstorm that cut visibility severely, almost the desert version of a whiteout. We headed out of Coolidge, my mother behind the wheel, me between her and my grandmother. No other cars were on the two-lane road.
My third memory is of a vast torrent of fast-moving latte-colored water that suddenly appeared in front of us.
I'm sure it wasn't as wide or as biblical as I recall it. I had never seen water in a river before! But what was undeniable is that the bridge had washed out — perhaps at the Gila River — and only my mother's caution, slow speed, and fighter-pilot reflexes prevented our deaths.
As I write now, searchers are still trying to find six-year-old Willa Rawlings, lost when her father's "military-like truck" was swept away in flooding Tonto Creek. The bodies of her brother and cousin, both five, were found Saturday. Only Willa's shoe has been recovered. Her parents escaped.
The Republic's Laurie Roberts hit the right notes of sympathy and bafflement — that the driver would try to cross the flooded creek, and that the Legislature in its low-tax religion has failed to build a bridge. Yet I suspect little will change. Especially on the common-sense front, for bridges can be overwhelmed as anyone knows who remembers Scottsdale's comic attempts to span Indian Bend Wash in the 1970s.
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For Thanksgiving week, talented friend-of-the-blog Carl Muecke has been busy creating his unique takes on our crisis. Enjoy if you dare — in times such as these satire is a great antidote. (Click on image to enlarge).
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From the Arizona Republic on Nov. 17th. My annotations are in black.
Headline: ‘We need to act fast’: Statewide forum focuses on climate solutions for Arizona. Journalists are pushed to seek solutions to largely insoluble problems. Steve Jobs was more on the mark when he critiqued Fox News to Rupert Murdoch: "The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society."
Lede: With climate change cranking up the heat and intensifying droughts, more than 400 people from across Arizona gathered Friday and Saturday to brainstorm solutions for reducing planet-warming pollution and preparing for a hotter, drier future. What people? Doug Ducey? Developers? Republicans who have held control over the Legislature for decades? Elliott Pollack? Grady Gammage. No...
Second graf: Among them were young activists who see climate change as the defining issue for their generation. The time to act is now, they said. You bet. But what power do they have? Do they vote? Did they drive to the conference, adding to climate-causing emissions (rhetorical question)?
Next grafs: “This is rapid change and we should do something about it before it’s too late,” said Alicia Rose Clouser, a 13-year-old eighth-grade student from Sinagua Middle School in Flagstaff and a member of the Navajo Nation.
“My people will be suffering for generations on if we don’t do something,” she said. Mandatory inclusion of a woman and "marginalized person" but otherwise empty information calories.
Next: The two-day conference at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff brought together the students and teenage activists along with academics, health officials, tribal representatives, environmentalists, representatives of farming businesses, urban planners and city officials, and people from the community who said they wanted to be part of the discussion. Now we finally get the "who" — none of whom have the power to enact policies that would address climate change.
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Carl Muecke illustration.
According to the New York Times, "OK Boomer" is the Gen Z/millennial declaration of war on the baby boom generation. Shannon O'Connor, who is selling T-shirts and hoodies with the phrase, said:
“The older generations grew up with a certain mind-set, and we have a different perspective. A lot of them don’t believe in climate change or don’t believe people can get jobs with dyed hair, and a lot of them are stubborn in that view." The younger generation is mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore.
One problem, of course, is which boomers? The older cohort of this large and diverse generation got drugs, sex, rock'n' roll, and pensions. My cohort got the AIDS and STD scares, disco, and (if they're lucky enough) inadequate 401(k)s.
Is "OK Boomer" President George W. Bush or President Barack Obama (born 1961)? Such luminaries as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Sir Elton John, Michael Jordan, UA climate scientist Diana Liverman, chess grandmaster and Trump nemesis Garry Kasparov, Stephen King (who also relentlessly trolls Trump on Twitter), Elizabeth Warren, and yes, Hillary Clinton are all boomers.
I was a loner and never much identified with my g-g-g-generation. But I hate today's "woke" ideology of forcing people into groups that can be made into neat packages of victims or villains. That includes generations. No room for individuals in that ideology.
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St. Luke's Hospital was built on the ruins of the dense Hohokam village called La Ciudad. It tilts at an angle because it had to fit against the original canal dug by Jack Swilling and his gang from Wickenburg. The Town Ditch or Swilling's Ditch was covered in the 1920s but Villa Street preserved the angle. Today's St. Luke's extends all the way to Van Buren Street with a ghastly spread of rocks and gravel. Yet the hospital you see above was built in the shady Montezuma Heights barrio of houses and public housing projects south of Edison Park. No gravel.
In my time on the ambulance, I spent a good amount of time at the emergency room of St. Luke's (or, as we called it with our dark humor, St. Puke's). In the New Testament, Luke the Evangelist was referred to as a physician.
Once, we heard an explosion outside and went to check what had happened. A patient had thrown himself off an upper floor and was well beyond our ministrations. On a happier note, we regularly had lunch (Code 7) at nearby Sevilla's (before it moved to McDowell), a family-owned Mexican restaurant surrounded by the 'Jects. The homeboys kept watched over our units so they wouldn't be broken into for drugs or stolen.
Off duty, I would visit my mother there, in her twice-annual stays as a patient, being treated for the emphysema that would kill her within a few years. The care was good.
I write all this because, after a century at this location, St. Luke's is closing.
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I attended kindergarten in Coolidge. Back then it was a compact town of 5,000 people. It boasted a charming little Spanish-style railroad depot on the Southern Pacific, with six passenger trains and many freight trains a day. My uncle showed me how to place a penny on the tracks to be mashed under a passing train.
Pinal County was home to about 63,000 people, most working in agriculture. Florence, the county seat, had a population of about 2,100, Casa Grande, another compact desert town on the SP, held 8,300, Eloy 4,900, and the remote crossroads of Maricopa a few hundred. Even then, Pinal County had a water problem: It was almost exclusively dependent on pumping groundwater. Coolidge Dam in neighboring Gila County wasn't enough for Pinal County's water needs even in 1960.
Fast forward to today. Pinal County holds an astonishing 447,000 people — more than the city of Phoenix in 1960. Maricopa alone (above) had an estimated population of more than 50,000 as of last year. This once-rural, once-distant county has become a Phoenix bedroom community — except the passenger trains are long gone. And, contrary to one of the key goals of the Central Arizona Project and Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980, it's still dependent on pumping from ever-diminishing aquifers.
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Seattle recently completed demolition of the double-deck 1950s-era Alaskan Way Viaduct, which ran for more than 2 miles along the waterfront downtown. Now the traffic is in a tunnel and the city is preparing to enjoy unencumbered access to Elliott Bay. An even more ambitious goal is to put a long lid on Interstate 5 downtown, which is already covered by a park for a few blocks.
Meanwhile, in Southern California, the $8 billion, 63-mile High Desert Corridor freeway has been canceled. It would have been the first new freeway in LA County in a quarter century. According to Streetsblog, the project "would have spanned two counties connecting the north L.A. County cities of Palmdale and Lancaster with San Bernardino County cities of Victorville, Apple Valley, and Adelanto. The route would have gone through a patchwork of privately-owned undeveloped wild lands populated by Joshua Trees." The PIRG Education Fund named it one of the worst highway boondoggles in the nation.
But that's not how we roll in central Arizona. In addition to the unneeded South Mountain Freeway (pictured above), the state Department of Transportation is planning a $55-mile freeway running from Apache Junction to Eloy. There it would connect with Interstate 10. When in a hole, keep digging.
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When I was nine years old, I went to the main branch of the Phoenix Public Library (a short bike ride from home) and applied for my youth library card (nine was the youngest one could apply). It was the most prized occupant of my wallet. It was also an important passage into growing up.
Kenilworth School had a well-stocked library. That was unlike today, where underfunded schools often lack what was once considered a basic. Along with the charter school racket, which operates out of anywhere without resources or much oversight (the better to siphon public money to the owners), the now rely on the city libraries. This is a shocking change from when I attended Arizona public schools.
Anyway, my school library wasn't enough for this young bibliophile or for many of my friends. I wanted to wander inside the big coral-colored building at Central and McDowell (Barry Goldwater's name was on the plaque, from when he was a city councilman). The Arizona Room, stocked with history, beguiled me from the moment I walked in. I wanted to have borrowing privileges. Of course if one was late returning a book, a fine was attached. But I never got a fine (and we were broke, often hovering on the edge of financial catastrophe). I took my responsibility as a card holder seriously. Being a library-card holder was a privilege, not a right. I'm still a card-holder of the Phoenix Public Library, as I have been in the many cities and towns in which I lived. Even in little Payson, when I spent the summer of 1967, had a library and I got a card.
Turns out this is very 20th century/last millennium thinking.
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Carl Muecke illustration
Even though seven have dropped out, 19 Democrats are still running for the presidential nomination. One of the many hard lessons of Donald Trump's Electoral College win is that anyone can run for president, whatever (insert pronoun-war choice here)'s qualifications.
I'm old enough to remember when each party put up their most experienced and accomplished people to become Leader of the Free World. Ike never held elective office, but as a five-star general he successfully managed the politically charged alliance that liberated Western Europe. Reagan was "just an actor" (so was I, so this dismissal always grated), but he served two terms as governor of the nation's then-third largest state. The same was true of W. His father was "Mister Resume." JFK's resume was thinner, but included war hero, congressman and Senator.
No more. Here's my take, and the comments section is below for your's:
Michael Bennet. Who? He's a Senator from Colorado, been in office for 10 years, and before that was Denver superintendent of schools. Enough said.
Joe Biden. While the former vice president is experienced and has a centrist temperament, he's bungled two previous presidential runs, wears a target for every opponent, and is a haphazard speaker. His handling of Anita Hill and support for bankruptcy "reform" would dog him. He'd be no match for Trump in a debate.
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Behold the lovely mature pine trees in the photo above (thanks to Aimee Esposito, executive director of Trees Matter). They will soon be demolished if a plan is approved for Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church to use half its land in the Alhambra district for single-family houses in a gated property. WWJD?
Like the newspaper business, mainline Protestant churches are in such a catastrophic decline, much of it self-inflicted, that their most valuable earthly possessions are their property. But this latest abomination, reported by New Times, is part of an ongoing catastrophe that is going to help make Phoenix uninhabitable in the future — and is helping raise local temperatures now, not to mention making most of it remarkably ugly.
Most Phoenicians today likely have no memory of the old city, a lush Eden of trees, grass, hedges, flowers, citrus groves, farms, and the priceless Japanese gardens. This was made possible now only because of our federally funded water projects, but also because the heart of the Salt River Valley is a natural oasis, near the confluence of five rivers and sitting on some of the most fertile alluvial soil on earth. Growing up, I never saw one palo verde, most varieties of which provide zero shade, outside of going into the desert.
Today, Phoenix is ever more a paved monstrosity of asphalt, concrete, and grass, with the occasional "shade structure" which doesn't actually provide shade. Not surprisingly, overnight temperatures have risen 10 degrees in my lifetime. Losing the regular frosts once commonplace, West Nile virus is a new scourge, carried by mosquitoes that were once killed off in winter. And this is before the rising dangers of climate change.
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Most of our best commenters — people who made these columns worth writing and reading — have absented themselves in recent months. Traffic continues to rise modestly and I get nice emails from readers, for which I'm grateful. And I totally understand potential reasons the commenting A Team is gone. For example, ruminating over our situation is exhausting and perhaps toxic.
The outcome on the light rail vote (WBIYB) was a rare win. And I'm happy that the central core continues to fill in. Both these are longtime concerns of this column and, before that, when I wrote for the Arizona Republic. Otherwise, we keep losing. Phoenix and Arizona keep sprawling out, heedless of the cost and inefficiency of thinning out population; keep the "business model" of population growth and a low-end economy; keep extremist politics; keep throwing down gravel and ignoring the desperate need for shade trees in the city, etc.
When I started this blog in 2008, it was pro-bono work offering commentary, context, and history that wasn't being written elsewhere. That remains the case; if anything, institutional knowledge has declined sharply. But I have my day job at the Seattle Times and my novels, as well as feelers to write more history books. Without being anointed and becoming a best-seller, I would be content never to see my name in print again. But, as I've written before, I always felt I owed. That Phoenix was built on achieving impossible deeds — we made the desert bloom! — and it was my duty to carry the tradition on. I was raised that way. What a quaint concept today.
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No physical landmark says "Phoenix" more than Camelback Mountain. It's also a geological oddity. The camel's hump was formed in the Precambrian era, from 2 billion years ago (in Arizona) to 600 million years ago. But the camel's head came from the Tertiary period, as recently as 66 million old — it was created around the time as the Papago Buttes.
As Halka Chronic writes in Roadside Geology of Arizona, "The whole sequence of Paleozoic and Mesozoic rocks that should come between the Tertiary head and the Precambrian hump is missing!" It's also the only faulted mountain in the Salt River Valley, the hump caused by the earth being lifted upward rather than volcanic activity.
President Rutherford B. Hayes included Camelback in the Pima and Maricopa Indian reservation, a move reversed by the Territorial Legislature six months later. The 1956 photo above shows the mountain was still pristine, the same iconic image seen by the Hohokam, to whom it was sacred, and the first pioneers. But preservation was tardy and by this time private interests owned the entire mountain.
By the early 1960s, houses were marching up the side, with plans to go all the way to a resort on the top. I write about the ultimately successful effort to save the mountains elsewhere. It is true that Barry Goldwater took on the cause of Camelback after his unsuccessful 1964 presidential bid. We schoolchildren collected coins for the effort. But it ultimately took federal money, thanks to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, to save the upper reaches of Camelback.
Phoenix extended Arcadia Drive north of the mountain's namesake avenue to serve the luxury homes clinging to the side. Who doesn't remember their first kiss from Valle Vista Road with the city lights reaching to the horizon. Unfortunately, recent years have also seen enormous numbers of hikers, especially tenderfoots attempting the ascent of this wilderness in the hottest weather. Their rescues put first-responders at risk and cost city money.
Let's take a visual tour of this magical mountain through the years:
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I've spent a good part of my career advocating public funding for stadiums as a necessary evil to protect important civic assets. For example, I supported new stadiums for the legendary Reds and the perpetually disappointing Bengals ("Bungles”) when I was in Cincinnati. These new venues kept pro teams that would have otherwise decamped for larger markets.
I did it again most recently with the Phoenix Suns arena, arguing in November that allowing the NBA team to leave downtown would be a terrible blow to the central city:
Kate Gallego, facing Daniel Valenzuela in a March mayoral runoff, said, “it is not in Phoenix’s best interest to invest in an arena.” Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts wrote, "taxpayers are about to get hosed if this deal goes through."
Here's the real deal: If Phoenix doesn't invest in the arena, Sarver — who has none of Jerry Colangelo's civic spirit — will move the team to the Rez, renaming it the Arizona Suns, no doubt, or even to Seattle, which is hungry to replace its lost Supersonics. The damage to downtown and light-rail (WBIYB) would be catastrophic. Talk about hosed.
Now come the Diamondbacks, demanding further pro-team welfare. The team can leave Chase Field as early as 2022 and has been sending ominous threats: Exploring use of the Cardinals stadium in Glendale for while, flirting with the Las Vegas area, fielding feelers from other cities. The most comfort officials would give is that the D-backs "are highly likely to remain in Arizona."
And I'm starting to think: Git. Let. Them. Leave.
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This is the reality of Phoenix's light-rail system: nearly 16 million passengers carried in the most recent fiscal year; expansion of the original 20-mile starter line to 26 miles; an essential link between ASU's Tempe and downtown campuses; 30 percent of riders use the train for work; large numbers use it to reach sporting events; $11 billion in private and public investment has occurred along the line since 2008.
Light rail has also proved essential in giving Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa a fighting chance in an era where talented young people and high-quality companies want to be in city cores served by rail transit.
None — not one — of the hysterical predictions of opponents to light rail came true.
No wonder that voters backed light rail in three elections, in 2000, 2004, and 2015. We built it.
But destructive forces never sleep, never stop. Backed by dark money — including the Koch brothers and their nationwide war on transit — here comes Proposition 105 in the Aug. 27th special election. As is often the case, it's presented as an affirmative to deliberately confuse voters. "Vote yes!" hoping some will think they are supporting rail transit by marking that line. Signs say, "Yes on 105. Fix our roads" — but this has nothing to do with fixing roads; that's a different budget and roads are being fixed.
Don't fall for it. Vote no on Prop. 105 and its devilish companion, Prop. 106.
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Yes, I'll be writing about the needless election to save light rail.
But I was struck, forgive the pun, by last week's news that a "city killer" asteroid had passed our planet, coming so close it was only one-fifth of the distance between the Earth and the moon. The rock wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post.
I was strangely unsurprised. My black-dog mood since 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes but our fate was sealed thanks to 78,000 votes in three Midwestern states, in a deeply tainted, nay, stolen, election, has yet to abate. One of the most qualified people ever to seek the presidency lost to an astonishingly unqualified quisling for a foreign prince, a mob boss, a man now normalized by the media and heading for reelection.
Since then, everything has been falling apart. And all this time, I have thought: If we were surprised by a deadly visitor from the cosmos...yes, of course. The haunting 2011 film Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst, come true. Life, or its end, foreshadowed by art. Bad things coming our way.
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I watched the Apollo 11 landing and moon walks in Phoenix with my grandmother. She was born on the frontier with horses and buggies, was alive when the Wright brothers first flew, when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic...and now this. The entire trajectory of her life had been one of American progress (sliced bread! air conditioning! paper towels!). Mine was different.
Fifty years ago, Phoenix was on the cusp of nearly 582,000 people and Maricopa County of 971,000, increases over the decade of 32 percent and 46 percent respectively. The aggressive annexation that took the city from its compact 17 square miles in 1950 to 188 square miles a decade later continued. By 1970, Phoenix would spread over 248 square miles, all the way to the two lanes of Bell Road.
Charter government was still firmly in control of City Hall with little foreshadowing that its era was coming to an end. Milt Graham was still mayor. Young and popular, Graham had helped seed Charter's demise by running for a third two-year term, breaking the promise that the Charter Government Committee put up civic stewards, not career politicians, and mayors only served two terms. Importantly for the city's future, Graham was vehemently anti-transit.
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On Feb. 14th, 1912, Phoenix became the capital of the 48th state — Arizona would remain the "Baby State" until 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the union. With 11,314 people in the 1910 Census, it was still less populous than Tucson but would soon surpass the Old Pueblo, with growth of nearly 166 percent in this decade.
The new state capital was still fairly isolated. A transcontinental railroad main line wouldn't arrive until 1926. Still, in 1887 a branch from Maricopa had been completed by a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific, although it was plagued by flood wash-outs. The Santa Fe's Peavine branch had arrived from the ATSF main line at Williams via Prescott in 1895. A streetcar network was growing, too.
Phoenix was far from the powerhouse it would become. Arizona's economy was primarily driven by mining, so towns such as Bisbee and Jerome generated spectacular wealth with their copper mines. The same was true of the mining district around Globe. Railroads were also major players. All were controlled by out-of-state interests, a major reason the Progressive-era state constitution established a Corporation Commission to regulate at least rail lines (and later utilities).
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The expansion is now the longest in American history. According to the Arizona Commerce Authority, metro Phoenix posted the largest job gain from May 2018 to May 2019, at 3.2 percent. Let's take a closer look:
Arizona and metro Phoenix reached a historic high in seasonally adjusted civilian jobs as of May (click on the charts to enlarge):
Median household income adjusted for inflation also showed gains:
So far, not so bad...
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It's not true that Phoenix has no seasons. Not even the joke that they are "hot, hotter, hottest, and hell." They just change with a sublime nuance. Or this was once the case. Leaving the delightful 70s in Seattle, I am here for 110, headed to 111. This is five to six degrees hotter for this time of year than normal. Summer temperatures have risen about 10 degrees in my lifetime, especially the overnight lows. And summer is lasting longer.
This is mostly the result of "local warming," where the farms, groves, and desert have been replaced by sprawl and gravel, along with the destruction of thousands of shade trees and the grass and landscaping that made the city more beautiful and livable. I suspect that few people know this or even notice it. For one thing, Phoenix suffers from a high rate of population churn. And many of today's residents are here for the heat, "the hotter the better." Advanced automobile air conditioning and air-conditioned houses cloak the danger of this human-made environment. So when all the asphalt, concrete, and fruit of the Arizona Rock Products Association release the accumulated heat after sunset, so what?
Consequences abound. Several large wildfires have raged. I also notice on the Phoenix Fire Department regional dispatch site a significant uptick in brush fires, requiring significant commitment of apparatus to knock down. One reason is the expanding exurban development into the desert. Fools go hiking and mountain climbing in this weather. That was once rare. Summer was the time to spend inside, especially during the day (when the nights cooled down). When I was a paramedic in the 1970s, a summer mountain rescue was extremely rare. No more. Now, multiple rescues happen every day, putting first responders at risk and the "victims" often near death.
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The Census reported earlier this spring that Phoenix was the fastest-growing city in the country. During the Great Recession, I wrote in jest the prayer of the Arizona developer: "Please God, give me one more boom, with championship golf." And the prayer has been answered, or so it seems on the surface.
The city added 25,288 new residents between 2017-2018. But even adding in fast-growing suburbs such as Buckeye and the "town" of Gilbert, the metropolitan area is far below the 100,000-plus it was growing in the 1990s and early 2000s. A glowing Forbes article talked of "a business-friendly environment, plentiful job opportunities and affordable cost of living." But the reality is closer to the one elucidated by commenter Concern Troll: Most of the population increase in Phoenix can be attributed to retirees and the low-wage service jobs that cater to them.
Permits for new housing units in metro Phoenix haven't recovered to their pre-crash levels; they're about where they stood in the early 1990s. Construction employment is only where it stood at the turn of the century, far below the mid-2000s. If the local-yokel boosters — "things must be good because people keep moving here" — are having a growthgasm, they're faking it.
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The most precious treasure of old downtown Phoenix is in flux. This could provide the city a long-overdue opportunity. Or it could go sideways in a hurry. I'm writing, of course, about Union Station.
According to CBRE, the big real-estate services firm "has been retained as exclusive representative to offer qualified investors the opportunity to purchase fee interest in the iconic...Union Station site in downtown Phoenix at 401 W. Harrison Street." It goes on, "Depending on the vision of a new owner, the Property may be eligible for a myriad of monetary and tax advantaged programs..."
Sprint, which has used the station to house switching equipment since the late 1980s, intends to move out before the end of next year. The Union Pacific Railroad's ground lease ends in March 2023, a century after the building was completed. Now what?
One of the most popular columns on this site is my history of Union Station (with photos) — you can read it here. The Spanish revival building brought together the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads in one full-service station. Three years after its completion, the SP finished its northern main line and routed most of its passenger trains through Phoenix. The city was served by multiple intercity trains a day through the 1960s.
The last Amtrak train called here in 1996. The state refused to partner with the SP (merged with Union Pacific the same year) to maintain the west line between Phoenix and Wellton to passenger-train standards. Phoenix became the largest American city by far with no intercity rail service. Sprint — which was started by the SP — using the depot for switching equipment helped protect and save it. Being on the National Register of Historic Places wouldn't have stopped Joe Arpaio's jail-building mania and other losses in the Warehouse District. Mesa lost its lovely SP depot to arson...no one cared.
Who will care now?
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Illustration by Carl Muecke.
The Constitution provides a remedy for a law-breaking president. He can be impeached by the House and convicted and removed from office by the Senate. Therein lies the problem in the case of Individual 1.
Even if the House impeached Donald Trump — no sure thing — the Senate would quickly toss the indictment into the circular file. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might never even bring it to a vote. The Senate, with six-year terms and originally not even elected by the people, was intended to be a check on the popular and passing passions expressed by the House. But it has become something more in recent years.
The Senate is now a Republican firewall against any Democratic initiative or electoral gains. With solid control ensured by small primarily red states — Wyoming, with 578,000 people (about the size of Tucson), has the same number of U.S. Senators as California, with a population of 39.6 million. But it also prevents urgent action, whether to address the existential challenge of climate change or the mortal threat to the republic embodied in Trump.
Given this reality, is Speaker Nancy Pelosi correct in saying impeachment is "not worth it"?
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A conversation on one of the Phoenix history pages of Facebook got me thinking about the thousands of cuts that bled downtown nearly to death. It was about the old Main Post Office at Central and Fillmore, now mostly used by ASU but contained some incomplete or wrong information. Still, a useful jumping off point.
Back in 2013, I wrote a three-part series entitled "What Killed Downtown" (see here, here, and here). It's still the gold standard on the subject. But the tale of the Post Office illuminates it in microcosm.
This lovely Spanish-revival building was completed in 1936, designed by Lescher & Mahoney, the architects responsible for many of Phoenix's finest buildings. Among them are the Orpheum Theater, Brophy College Chapel, El Zariba Shrine Auditorium (former home to the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum), Phoenix Title and Trust Building (today's Orpheum Lofts), Hanny's, and the Palms Theater.
It was planned in the 1920s to replace the Post Office segment of the old Federal Building in the government block at Van Buren and First Avenue. With Sen. Carl Hayden's backing, it was originally intended to be six stories tall and closer to the central business district. But because of expensive land, the site was move north across from the new Westward Ho and the height was lowered. Building it was among the myriad federal projects that lifted Phoenix out of the Great Depression.
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President Carter (center) aboard the USS Los Angeles in 1977, first in its class of highly-advanced nuclear fast-attack submarines. At right is Carter's mentor, Admiral Hyman Rickover, "Father of the Nuclear Navy."
The idea of the treasonous criminal Donald Trump presiding over the funeral of Jimmy Carter is almost too much to bear. At age 94, it's a depressing possibility.
I confess to disliking Carter's presidency. But the man had real accomplishments. A Naval Academy graduate, he is the only president to have qualified in submarines. That means much more than serving in a boat — to "qualify" means an officer or enlisted person must have mastered every task aboard the sub. It's a big deal. Carter intended to make the Navy a career until the death of his father brought him back to Georgia.
With the passing of George H.W. Bush, Carter is the only living president to be a real military veteran.
Along with John Quincy Adams, Carter is the most successful and inspirational former president, from his work with Habitat for Humanity to overseeing elections around the world and carrying out numerous humanitarian and diplomatic missions. He never sought to monetize — and degrade — his office in the way most of his successors have done.
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My mother told me I was "a city kid" and a "desert rat." She was right about the first, but not the second. I was a child of the oasis, growing up in what are now the historic districts north of downtown and in the old city.
It's almost all gone now. Every time I'm back in Phoenix, I am struck my how ugly it is, especially with the proliferation of skeleton trees and heat-radiating gravel in places they should not be. If this is the price paid to accommodate ever-expanding sprawl, it's a devil's bargain, a short hustle. With the enormous numbers of newcomers and population churn, people don't even know what has been lost.
One of the most heartbreaking losses was the Japanese flower gardens along Baseline Road.(above). An agricultural trust could have prevented it. But the feral greed to replace it with faux Spanish-Tuscan crapola was too much to overcome.
A reminder: Phoenix is at or near the convergence of five rivers in the world's wettest desert. Scores of shade trees are native. With the alluvial soil of the Salt River Valley, anything will grow here.
But as on the national level (only 26,000 history majors now), the loss of memory is a dangerous thing. Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Thanks especially to the priceless McCulloch Bros. Collection at the ASU archives, we can struggle. I only wish more of these images were in color.
Here are a few views of authentic Phoenix. Click on an image for a larger view:
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In 1969, Dean Acheson's memoir Present at the Creation was published, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize in History a year later. At more than 800 pages, the book remains essential reading, not least because today we are present at the destruction.
As President Truman's Secretary of State — "the clearest thinking, most effective Secretary of State of the twentieth century," as Yale's Gaddis Smith rightly said — Acheson was the lead architect of the post-World War II order. The Marshall Plan, NATO, Bretton Woods, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and more.
As Tom Ricks wrote in Foreign Policy magazine:
It’s useful to remember that the international “system” as we know it today didn’t exist before World War II and would have been unthinkable except for the cataclysm of the war, the deployment of the atom bomb, and the aggression of an implacably hostile Soviet Union.
Truman and Acheson were in unknown territory, leading a country tired of war and ready to revert to its prewar isolation. “History is written backwards but lived forwards,” Acheson says, reflecting on the United States’ leap into the unknown. American leadership was never foreordained.
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They've been cutting down the historic shade trees that lined Cotton Lane in the far west valley, probably in anticipation of widening the road. More of authentic Phoenix...gone. Thanks to Joe Velasquez for the photo.
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This priceless, century-old house at 7019 N. Central Ave. has a demolition permit. The Preservation Police and every citizen needs to contact their council members, planning commission, "village" poobahs — whatever it takes. This is what old Phoenix looked like — not endless red-tile-roofs, concrete, gravel, and skeleton trees.
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Most of the historical photos on this site show the rise of a handsome small city, with commercial buildings, stores, churches, and warehouses.
But single-family houses and apartments proliferated in and near the original townsite even as monuments such as the Heard Building and Luhrs Tower rose. People were living downtown before it became desirable again in recent years. Above are the Dennis and Jacobs Mansions on Monroe between Second and Third Streets along "Millionaires Row," built in the 1890s. They were demolished in the 1950s for surface parking lots.
Rosson House, restored in Heritage Square, was designed by architect George Franklin Barber — he sold his designs by mail order. It was completed in 1895 at 139 N. Sixth Street. The Stevens-Haustgen Bungalow is nearby, also restored.
Most of the residences downtown were more modest. For example, the 1935 City Directory shows homes for Mrs. Della Jeanette at 129 S. Third Avenue, Mr. Samuel Lopez at 133 S., and Mr. Nestor Chavez at 333 S. Third Ave. Some were businesses where the owners lived on an upper floor. But others were simple, single-story houses gradually giving way to the expanding Warehouse District. The same is true along south Second Street, including parts of Chinatown, connected by Madison and Jackson streets, Gold and Paris alleys.
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Valley Center, now the Chase Tower, under construction in 1972. At 483 feet, it remains the city's tallest building.
The Republic recently ran a story to answer the question of why Phoenix lacks the skyscrapers that are one defining characteristic of other big cities. One of the problems of a place with so many newcomers is the loss of historical knowledge. So the story was, at best, incomplete.
The two big reasons given were automobile-based sprawl and a "polycentric" city with many cores. But both apply to other cities with much higher and more distinctive downtown skylines. Los Angeles comes to mind. It has "downtowns" in Century City, West LA, and Hollywood. It is a city built around the car, although it has rebuilt an extensive rail transit system.
But downtown LA, which is staging an astonishing comeback, is home to an impressive skyline. The Wilshire Grand, finished in 2017 and standing 1,100 feet with its spire is more than twice as tall as Phoenix's Chase Tower. The same is true of the U.S. Bank Tower, completed in 1989. About 28 skyscrapers there are taller than Chase.
Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Charlotte have cheaper outlying land and sprawl, but each has a much more impressive skyline than Phoenix.
One big reason downtown Phoenix lacks taller buildings is its proximity to Sky Harbor International Airport. Valley National Bank wanted its new headquarters to be even taller, but the plan was quashed by the FAA. Sky Harbor is not much closer to downtown than Logan airport to downtown Boston, but Logan's runways primarily run southwest to northeast. In Phoenix, the runways are east-to-west and airplanes usually fly directly south of downtown. Gaining altitude means expending more jet fuel, especially in summer. And Sky Harbor has enormous influence at city hall. This has prevented doable towers at a higher number of floors at Third Avenue and Van Buren and further west.
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Today's Valdemar A. Cordova Municipal Court Building occupies the site of young Phoenix's first major theater, the Patton Grand, which opened in 1898. The new motion-picture industry was just getting started, so the theater hosted a variety of events such as plays and concerts.
It was also a point of pride in a town with a population of 5,544, which had made it through the national financial panics and local droughts and floods that characterized that decade. The theater sat 1,200 people. It also boasted hefty backstage spaces, based on the photo above, with room for curtains, lighting, and scenery.
E.M. Dorris, of the prominent merchant family, bought the theater at the end of 1899. It became the Dorris Opera House, the name by which most old Phoenicians and history buffs know it. Until the completion of the Phoenix Union High School Auditorium, the Dorris was the heartbeat of civic events, from traveling musicians, plays, and speakers, to political and union gatherings. It then settled in as a movie theater.
But, at Third Avenue and Washington, it was only one of many movie houses within walking distance of the city center or the streetcars. Let's take a stroll to some of them.
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Illustration by Carl Muecke
I provoked quite a reaction on Facebook when I predicted that Trump would get away with his many crimes and be reelected. Let me explain.
From the very beginning of winning the Electoral College by 80,000 votes, Trump began violating norms. Instead of "we have one president at a time," he was making all sorts of policy diktats and claiming to save Carrier jobs in Indiana. The media, the only commercial entity deemed so important to the republic's health that its protection was enshrined in the Constitution, largely gave him a pass.
Much worse norms were broken and evidence of massive malfeasance and unfitness for office piled up, and the pattern continued. Some exceptions arose, especially the Washington Post; even the New York Times, which downplayed Trump's known corruption and Russian interference while overplaying the nothingburger of Clinton emails, produced some worthy investigative journalism on the Don. But most people don't get their news from newspapers, and most newspapers are infected by toxic both-sidesism. So the outrageous has become normalized.
The most recent example was the media's pivot away from the Mueller investigation and report, based on a memo from an Attorney General handpicked by Trump to ensure his protection from the rule of law. The actual 400-page report hasn't been seen by reporters or the public. The fierce curiosity and fight for truth by journalists in Watergate has been replaced by, "Nothing to see here, move on."
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Kate Gallego is the first mayor of Phoenix in 20 years who I don't know personally. That has disadvantages and advantages. The downside: I haven't spent hours over coffee or in city hall getting tips, sharing gossip, and taking the individual's measure. On the other hand, she's pretty much a blank slate to me, which allows me to see her totally from the perspective of an outsider.
All I know is what I read in the newspapers, and from Phoenix insiders, to paraphrase Will Rogers. She's not the first woman mayor of Phoenix — that distinction goes to Margaret Hance (and Thelda Williams was interim mayor). She's young — 37. She's smart, because she went to Harvard and everyone who's been touched by crimson is smart, or so we're told. On the Council, she supported transit but, wrongly to my mind, opposed upgrades to keep the Phoenix Suns downtown. Gallago is a relative newcomer. Otherwise, she's an unknown commodity.
The last time Phoenix had such a young mayor was the four years of Paul Johnson, who was in his early thirties when he took office in 1990. It was an unhappy tenure. Phoenix was hit with its worst recession since the 1930s and most projects from a big bond issue, which had been passed in the Goddard years, had to be postponed or downsized (one being a new City Hall). How much of this had to do with Johnson's youth is debatable — he was dealt a bad hand and to many did the best he could — but his relative lack of experience hurt him. To be extra fair, Terry Goddard was an impossible act to follow.
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