Rogue Columnist

When Scottsdale was real

After I finished grade school at Kenilworth north of downtown Phoenix, we moved to Scottsdale (population 68,000) so I could attend Coronado High School. My mother was alarmed by news that a gang of teenagers had kicked a West High student nearly to death. I lucked out, going four years and graduating from one of the nation's best public secondary schools, with a superb fine arts program and academics. And I got to see Scottsdale before it became so rich and big and fake, Silicone Valley with its plastic surgery and a city limits reaching all the way to the Tonto National Forest.

Here's how "the West's Most Western Town" was in those decades. Most of the gallery is thanks to Brad Hall's collection. Click on a photo for a larger image:

Brown Avenue in the 1950s. Scottsdale's population was a little more than 2,000 in 1950.

The Lulu Belle at Scottsdale Road and Main Streets.

Main Street in the 1950s. It was much the same in the 1970s.

The art of American Eden

In the first half of the 20th century, the produce of the Salt River Valley traveled to customers in the east via refrigerated boxcars (reefers), iced before they left the Warehouse District packing houses and others in Glendale and Peoria, and along the route. But the wooden crates and later cardboard boxes were decorated with vivid illustrations that advertised the produce — and created a distinct art form. Almost all were done by anonymous artists.

Here is a sample. Click for a larger image:

More early Phoenix

Phoenix grew from 270 people in 1870 to 11,314 in 1910. Here's a gallery of our town before statehood. Most are from the Library of Congress or Brad Hall. Click on a photo for a larger image:

Phoenix in the 1870s. Lots of shade trees and not a palo verde in sight.

Twelve mule-team freight haulers at Montezuma Street (First Street) and Jefferson in 1880, before the railroads arrived. Look at all the shade trees.

Another view of how goods were delivered. This is at Maricopa Street (Second Street) and Jefferson.

The territorial capitol under construction in 1898.

Adams Street east of Center, looking southeast circa 1890. It's near the future site of Switzers and Hanny's.

Looking northeast up Melinda's Alley near Mojave Street (First Street) and Monroe in the 1890s.

USS Arizona

Arizona had barely been in the union for two years when the keel was laid on battleship 39 (BB-39) at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, named after the 48th state. In attendance was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Battleships were the premier capital ships of any navy and had been revolutionized by the 1906 launch of the Royal Navy's HMS Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun ship. It lost the smaller-caliber weapons of its predecessors in favor of batteries of deadly 12-inch guns that could hurl shells for miles. The ship took its name from Queen Elizabeth I's saying, "I will trust in God and dread nought." This gave the name to all classes of future battleships.

Arizona, according to the New York Times, would be "the world's biggest and most powerful, both offensively and defensively, superdreadnought ever constructed." It was armed with three batteries of three 14-inch big guns each, with a range of 12 miles. The armor belt at its widest (made by Krupp) measured 13.5 inches; the deck was also armored. She was 608 feet long and displaced nearly 30,000 tons, becoming at the time the largest ship in the fleet (today’s new Gerald R. Ford carrier is 100,000 tons and more than 1,000 feet long).

Arizona was launched in 15 months with 75,000 people in attendance, including the state's governor, George W.P. Hunt. Esther Ross of Prescott christened her with two bottles, one of sparking wine and another of water from Theodore Roosevelt Lake (the state had recently passed prohibition).

Phoenix's architectural icons

In an earlier column, I wrote about Phoenix's influential architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Will Bruder (who decamped for Portland). Here is a gallery of the most iconic and beautiful structures from the past and present, from the McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives, Library of Congress, and Brad Hall. Click on a photo for a larger image.

The Fleming Building at First Avenue and Washington in 1938. It was completed in 1883, the most impressive building in the young town. Among its amenities: A basement bowling alley and two rooms as the first public library. It was demolished in the 1980s for the boxy Wells Fargo Building.

The State Capitol at 17th Street and Washington, completed in 1901 as the territorial capitol. The Legislature never funded a replacement statehouse, although architecturally compatible additions were made. Modernistic structures for the House and Senate were added in the 1960s, and the scene was marred by the 1974 Executive Tower behind it. The Capitol is now a museum with its copper dome.

The Center Street Bridge, first span across the Salt River connecting farmers with the city and its railroads. Completed in 1911, it was claimed to be the longest reinforced concrete bridge in the world.

The Hotel Adams, built to replace an 1896 wooden structure that burned in 1910. It was demolished in the mid-1970s for today's Renaissance Hotel (first named the new Hotel Adams).

Some Phoenix then and now

If you're a Phoenician of a certain age, you've seen tremendous change to the cityscape. Here are a few thanks to the McCulloch Bros. Collection in the ASU Archives and Brad Hall's collection. Click on the photo for a larger image.

McDowell and Central:

1940.

1959 with the Phoenix Civic Center.

2020 with infill, light rail, the Phoenix Art Museum, and Midtown skyscrapers.

Valley towns

Even into the 1960s, the towns of the Salt River Valley were distinctive and separated from each other as well as from Phoenix. Let's take a photo tour (click for a larger image):

Glendale:

Main Street seen in the 1930s when the town's population was about 3,700.

The sugar beet factory circa 1940 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

First Avenue (58th Drive) looking north (Brad Hall collection).

Grant Woods, an appreciation

The spontaneous outpouring of grief on news of Grant Woods' death at 67, too too young, is a measure of the man. We'll never see the same for Doug Ducey or Kyrsten Sinema or almost any Arizona pol you can name. Something similar might happen for Janet Napolitano or Terry Goddard, but this is an elite club.

Woods and I became friends when I returned to Phoenix in 2000 as a columnist for the Arizona Republic. A graduate of Mesa's Westwood High, we had long-running jokes because I had graduated from rival Coronado High in Scottsdale. He was a valuable off-the-record source and I knew the score. He'd already been ridden out of the Republican Party as a RINO. The state party had been radicalized since he was Attorney General from 1990 to 1999.

He was an outlier from the start, forcing the eccentric Bob Corbin from the primary and emphasizing civil rights, including a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Gov. Evan Mecham had repealed his predecessor, Bruce Babbitt's holiday proclamation in 1987. The holiday didn't become state law until 1992.

Neon Phoenix

Nothing said magic and excitement in an American city more than neon during the first half of the 20th century. The Great White Way in New York City. Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. Chicago's Magnificent Mile. In New Orleans, Bourbon Street.

Neon was found widely — from Route 66 to old Las Vegas. Today, with a few lucky exceptions, much of it has been replaced by bland, but easier to maintain signage or consigned to museums out of context. But it had particular beauty and sexiness in a city. This was true even of a small city such as Phoenix.

The challenge for the visual historian is finding color images, even though Kodak introduced Kodachrome film in 1935. Finding them, at least for Phoenix. Here's what I've got (click on the photo for a larger image):

Neon lights up Donofrio's Cactus Candy store on Central, 1915 (McCulloch Bros./ASU Archives).

A ribbon on neon on Central Avenue in the 1940s. Even the billboard above the coffee shop for Schlitz beer features neon.

The 2000s

I'll wrap up the series of decade history columns (twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and 'teens) with a look at Phoenix from 2000 to 2009.  This one is different because I was an active participant in many of the events, having returned home as a columnist for the Arizona Republic. Caveat lector.

Phoenix and Arizona roared into the new century on a historic wave of growth in the 1990s. The city's population topped a million for the first time, clocking in at more than 1.3 million in the 2000 Census and surpassing San Diego as the nation's sixth most-populous city.

All seemed to confirm the near constant, mysterious levitation of growth, despite the downturn in 1990 foreshadowed by the 1988 Barron's "Phoenix descending" report. The Greater Phoenix Economic Council (GPEC) had established high-end clusters to cultivate. But having worked in San Diego, Dayton, Denver, Cincinnati, and Charlotte, I was concerned and started asking questions.

For one thing, the big local election issue was Prop. 202, an initiative that would have required (very loose) growth boundaries. Early polling showed it leading among respondents. And the real-estate interests went crazy, labeling it "the Sierra Club initiative, ripping down supportive signs, and economist/developer Elliott Pollack darkly warning that if it passed a devastating recession would result.

Downtown through the years

Follow this visual history of downtown Phoenix through the decades. I use the historic boundaries of downtown: Fillmore Street to the north; the railroad tracks to the south; Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street to west and east respectively. Click on a photo to see a larger image.

The early 1900s:

Looking east on Washington Street from the Ford Hotel. Redewill's music store was owned by the family that built the 1914 bungalow where we lived in Willo in the 2000s. We placed an Interior Department National Register of Historic Places plaque on it, the A.C. Redewill House.

The twenties:

Central Avenue heading south from Monroe Street, with the Hotel Adams the multi-story building on the left, and Central Methodist Church (ME, South), Heard Building, and Luhrs Building on the right.

Second Avenue and Washington in 1929. The awnings are on the red-brick Fleming Building. From left to right in the distance are the new Hotel Westward Ho, the Professional Building, and the Hotel Adams annex (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Read more about this decade here.

Growing up, in photos

I wrote a column in 2010 about growing up in central Phoenix in the 1960s. Along with the old city column, they sum up an experience that few had, fewer still remember. Now I have enough photos to show a bit what my lost world looked like. 

Me around the age of five, taken at the Ramada Inn on east Van Buren.

The house on west Cypress in today's Willo Historic District, looking much as it did when I grew up with my mother and grandmother. It's also David Mapstone's house in the Mapstone Mysteries (Willo Historic District photo).

Central and Palm Lane looking south. I was baptized and confirmed in Central Methodist Church in the foreground, and spent hours in the central library, middle left (Brad Hall collection).

Maps of Phoenix

When I was a child, I loved to get the maps from my Great Aunt's monthly National Geographic magazines. And the Arizona Room at the Phoenix Public Library had more maps, but of the state and city. 

Now Phoenix is the nation's fifth most populous city and runs nearly into Yavapai County. Here's a snapshot of how it got there (click on the map for a larger image).  

1867: No Phoenix yet, and no railroads. The Overland Mail Route follows rugged country to the south past Maricopa Wells.

1881: The original. township. with two public squares. The north-south streets are named, not numbered.

1892: The Salt River Valley with platted land and canals (Mostly Hohokam).

1884: Phoenix in the center of a multi-county map. The Gila and Salt River Base Line is prominent. It governed the surveys of Arizona Territory and became Baseline Road.

Phoenix's Art Deco gems

Art Deco architecture flowered in America in the 1920s and 1930s, epitomized by New York's Chrysler Building and the Los Angeles City Hall. Phoenix, population 29,053, was too small to gain as much as Deco fans like me would have wished. But it managed to preserve most of its masterpieces of the era.

Here they are (click on the photo for a larger image):

The Luhrs Tower:

When most people think of Phoenix Deco they think of this 14-story masterpiece, the brain child of George Luhrs Jr. and connected to the Luhrs Building by an arcade. Located at First Avenue and Jefferson Street, it was designed by Trost & Trost of El Paso.

Eden in photographs

One of the most popular columns on this site is American Eden. Before red-tile-roof subdivisions built at an acre an hour. Before pavement, gravel, and longer, hotter summers, the Salt River Valley was an agricultural empire. Anything would grow here — just add water — and we shipped it across the country. Also, compared with today's 10,000-mile supply chain, we could feed ourselves.

Here's a sampling of images. Click on one for a larger view. Most are from the McCulloch Bros. Collection at the ASU Archives.

Fruit stands were ubiquitous into the 1970s. This stood at 41st Street and Baseline Road.

The Sunny Hills Fruit Stand at 32nd Street and Baseline in the 1960s.

Another one at 51st Street and McDowell in the 1960s. Phoenicians could ship fresh oranges and grapefruits to family and friends (Brad Hall collection).

Alfalfa fields in 1923.

Churches of early Phoenix

Phoenix in the 1880s boasted 16 saloons and four dance halls on Washington Street's notorious Whiskey Row. But as the town grew, the number of churches weren't too far behind. Here are a few (click the image for a larger photo):

Central Methodist was the oldest Protestant church in Phoenix, founded in 1872.

The postcard shows it in 1904 at Central and Monroe Street. It was founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, part of the Methodist split before the Civil War. North and South churches reunited in 1939.

Here's the building in 1942 although the congregation has moved farther north on Central (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

When the river ran free

The Salt River flows without the impediment of upstream dams, pre-1911 (Tempe History Museum).

The first settlers to the region found a Salt River running as it had for millennia, free from its headwaters in the White Mountains to the northeast 200 miles to its meeting with the Gila River southwest of modern Phoenix.

The river had sustained the most advanced irrigation civilization in the pre-Columbian New World, although mysteriously gone for 500 years. The River brought not only with water, but also some of the planet's richest alluvial soil to its valley. Anything would grow here. These pioneers, especially Jack Swilling who saw the potential of the abandoned Hohokam canals and hired miners from Wickenburg to clean them out, hoped it would do the same for them.

There was, however, a catch. The Salt was a fickle river. It could run at a healthy flow much of the year, then turn nearly dry at the height of summer, interspersed with floods that destroyed the primitive diversion dams and irrigation systems of the pioneers. Archaeologists estimate that great floods had occurred on the river for two million years.

Floods hit in 1880, 1884, 1886, and 1889. The 1890s, when my family arrived, were particularly tough years. Against a backdrop of national "panics" (financial recessions), the Salt River rampaged and nearly dried up. The 1890 flood was followed a year later by a monster that breached its banks by miles, nearly reaching the Phoenix townsite and inundating crops.

The pioneers began to wonder if they would go the way of the Hohokam.

Washington through the years

No east-west street was more important to early Phoenix than the one named after our first president. It carried streetcars, was the heart of the business district, held important buildings, and was movie-theater row. Washington remains the north-south dividing line for street addresses (Central is east-west). Let's take a tour through time.

1901: A dusty road with horses and mule-drawn streetcars.

1904: The Indian and Cowboy Carnival Parade.

1905: At First Street looking west.

Downtown's pivotal 1970s

Between the long series of civic missteps that murdered downtown Phoenix and its recent rebirth of sorts, the 1970s loom large. As the decade began — shown in the photo above — much of corporate Arizona and the energy of the city had shifted to Midtown. 

The city opened the brutalist Phoenix Civic Plaza (so named because the Phoenix Civic Center was at Central and McDowell with the library, art museum, and "little theater"). The new complex offered a convention center, Symphony Hall, and sun-blasted open space. It was intended to revive downtown, but its "super blocks" destroyed the fine-grained, human-scale of the old urban fabric, including much of the Deuce. That fabric was characterized by eight or nine steps between doorways to shops or offices shaded by awnings.

Walter Bimson of Valley National Bank gave downtown a vote of confidence, insisting the new headquarters tower be build there rather than at Central and Osborn. The other big banks followed. Two new hotels were also built. But it was a catastrophic 10 years for historic preservation. The gallery below tells some of the story. Click on a photo for a larger image.

A rendering of Phoenix Civic Plaza. The shade trees in the foreground of Symphony Hall never happened, leaving an uninviting frying pan. It did show the concert hall's signature lobby chandeliers to advantage, lost now to the new Convention Center.

Early Phoenix mapped

One of the most interesting sources of information on early Phoenix can be found on the Library of Congress' Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. The Sanborn Map Co. produced detailed maps of 12,000 U.S. cities and towns, detailing not only buildings but in many their construction materials so insurers could assess their risks.

Below I have some views of Phoenix, one in 1911 and the remainder from 1949, focused on Union Station and the Warehouse District. Click for a larger image.

Russell Lee's Phoenix

In 1940, photographer Russell Lee visited Phoenix. His main task was taking pictures of Farm Security Administration projects in the city. He joined such distinguished federal photographers as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein.

The FSA was created in 1937 to help ease rural poverty. Among its signature Phoenix operations were Camelback Farms, northeast of downtown and intended to create a stable environment for displaced farm families, and the United Producers and Consumers Cooperative, with about 12,000 members, mostly farmers.

But the trip yielded much more, including some iconic images of Phoenix as the Great Depression was loosening its grip and war was looming. Born in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1903, Lee died in Austin in 1986. 

I've written about Phoenix in the 1940s here. Below is some of his work from the Library of Congress. Click on an image for a larger view.

Welcome sign outside of town, with the meeting days, times, and places of service clubs.

Central and Washington, with Lerner Shops, movie theaters, and streetcar tracks.

The famous saguaro streetlamp across from the Hotel Westward Ho. Only one was made, outside the Chamber of Commerce.

Police and fire in early Phoenix

Henry Garfias, the son of a Mexican general, was elected Phoenix's first town marshal in 1881. Already famous for apprehending the stagecoach "ghost bandit" as a county deputy, Garfias (above, courtesy of Duran Lugo) was said to have shot dead several outlaws as marshal and brought order to Washington Street's Whiskey Row (16 saloons and four dance halls). Thus was born the Phoenix Police Department.

The department operated out of the old City Hall until it received a more modern space in the City-County Building in 1929. Call boxes were used throughout the city for officers to check in. Phoenix equipped its squad cars with radios in 1932. You can learn more about PPD's history from the Phoenix Police Museum, located in the 1929 Police Headquarters at 17 S. Second Avenue. My new novel, City of Dark Corners, is set in the Depression-era department.

The Phoenix Fire Department came from passage of a bond issue in 1886 to establish a volunteer fire service with modern equipment and an improved water supply. Still, two hose companies (one Anglo, one Hispanic) competed until Frank Czarnowski joined them together as the Phoenix Volunteer Fire Department in 1888. By 1922, it was a paid, full-time department.

Here are some early photos (click for a larger image):

A Nott steam fire engine, one of Phoenix's first (City of Phoenix).

Horse-drawn apparatus at Fire Station No. 1, First and Jefferson streets, in 1908 (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

Rural scenes of old Phoenix

Before "master planned communities," freeways, gravel, palo verdes, and endless pavement, Phoenix was closely surrounded by groves and farms, shade trees and virgin desert. It lasted until the 1960s and 1970s. I remember my grandmother taking me for a picnic on a dirt road surrounded by fields and beneath a cottonwood tree. Here are a few of the photos (click for a larger image):

Central and Southern avenues, 1930.

Lincoln Drive west of Scottsdale Road in 1935.

Orangewood Avenue in 1939.

Mac

When today's Arizonans think about the state's most important U.S. Senators, they go to Barry Goldwater and John McCain. A few will remember Carl Hayden, one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, third in the line of succession to the White House.

Yet Goldwater, although the father of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party, had a thin layer of legislative accomplishments, and McCain did almost nothing for the state he made his home. Hayden was undeniably the most important figure in winning the Central Arizona Project in Congress.

The Arizona Senator who casts the longest shadow of accomplishments is nearly forgotten: Ernest McFarland. First elected in 1940 when he defeated incumbent Henry Fountain Ashurst, Mac was an important partner with Hayden in fighting for Arizona's share of Colorado River water. His most significant accomplishment was sponsoring the GI Bill, which provided benefits for returning benefits for returning World War II veterans, including educational benefits.

Mac was the father of the GI Bill. He also served as Senate Majority Leader from 1951 to 1953, followed by Lyndon Johnson.

When Midtown cooked

Midtown wasn't planned. It simply escaped...any coherent city planning, zoning, or vision. Some say it was Phoenix's attempt at Los Angeles' Wilshire Boulevard, the nearly 16-mile avenue from downtown LA's financial district to Santa Monica. Maybe. But Phoenix never had the economic power or urban assets to support its version of Museum Row on the Miracle Mile, Century City, Koreatown, Beverly Hills, Westwood with UCLA, and subway lines. Wouldn't want to become another LA.

The two are comparable in that both were the sites of a majority of post-1960 skyscrapers. In Phoenix, it began with the building above. A turquoise-skinned International-style box, the Guaranty Bank Building opened in March 1960, designed by architect Charles Polacek and built by contractor David Murdock (who lived a remarkable life). At 252 feet, it dethroned the Hotel Westward Ho as the tallest building in Phoenix and the Southwest. On the top floor the Cloud Club offered a spectacular view.

Over the next thirty or more years, this was the heart of the city. For better and for worse.

The Camelback Towers was also complete in the photo (a mile north at Pierson). Park Central Shopping Center had replaced the Central Dairy in the late 1950s. Del Webb's Phoenix Towers at Central and Cypress Street, one of the few co-ops in the city, opened in 1957. Twin mid-rise office buildings were opened two blocks south of Thomas; they eventually included U-Haul's headquarters. Midtown, still unnamed, was coming together haphazardly. The central business district, including most shops and department stores, were still downtown (Fillmore to the railroad tracks, Seventh Avenue to Seventh Street).

Phoenix's historic schools

Once upon a time, schools weren't built to resemble prisons with walls and steel fences, along with no shade and heat-radiating concrete and gravel. Even in early Phoenix, most were built to inspire. In 1873 (above) an adobe school at Central and Monroe was the beginning of better to come. Here are a few — click on the photo for a larger view:

Central School, shown in 1899, replaced the adobe structure. The town's population was about 5,500.

Monroe School at Seventh Street and Monroe, 1914. The building was preserved and is now the Children's Museum of Phoenix, alas without the shade trees and grass.

More Arizona railroad images

In addition to my popular column and gallery on Phoenix Union Station, I've written about the Ghost Railroads of Arizona, the many lines that helped build the state that have mostly disappeared. Another column detailed the difficult enterprise of building railroads to Phoenix, ending its isolation. And most recently photographer Jack Delano's trip across northern Arizona during World War II. Many of these have additional photos, so check them out even if you read the text.

Now, a grab bag of railroad photos from the 1950s to today. A reminder: Phoenix is by far the largest city in North America without intercity passenger trains, mostly a failure of state government.

Click on the photo for a larger image:

The Sunset Limited, premier train of the Southern Pacific, on its way to Phoenix in 1950.

A Santa Fe train hauling a block of refrigerated boxcars ("reefers") near the Colorado River crossing at Topock in 1953. These cars also hauled Salt River Valley produce by the trainload when Phoenix was an agricultural empire.

Santa Fe freight action on the double-track main line near Holbrook in 1962. The lead locomotive is a new U25B, General Electric's first independent entry into the American diesel market. It was nicknamed the U-Boat.

Wartime on the Santa Fe

In March 1943, the photographer Jack Delano made a remarkable journey across northern Arizona on the main line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. He was working for the federal Office of War Information, documenting the massive work railroads were doing bringing troops and war materiel to both the European and Pacific theaters. In the process, he gave us images of small-town Arizona stretched along the railroad and U.S. Route 66. For example, above is downtown Flagstaff seen from the old depot looking across "the Mother Road." Flag's population was about 5,000.

Between 1941 and 1944, American railroads carried 83% of the increase in all traffic, along with 91% of all military freight and 98% of military personnel. Pullman put its thousands of sleepers into the effort and built thousands more troop sleepers and kitchen cars. The Santa Fe through northern Arizona, a critical route to the West Coast, saw a 175% spike in freight traffic. More than 1,000 cars a day went through the Albuquerque division headquarters of Winslow, with its 33-track yard and massive roundhouse and shops, along with passenger and troop trains.

The Southern Pacific through southern Arizona, including wartime Phoenix, saw similar challenges. But it didn't have a Jack Delano to document it.

This gallery comes from the Library of Congress. Click on a photo to see a larger image.

Passing a freight train carrying M-3 Lee tanks from the Arsenal of Democracy.

Superstition Vistas

In 1977, when I was working on the ambulance as an EMT-paramedic, I was temporarily exiled from the city and worked for Aids Ambulance (the former Mesa Ambulance Service). This involved rotating to stations in Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, and Apache Junction. At the latter, two 24-hour units were maintained and the crews could expect major trauma calls, even lake rescues, in largely empty country. We proclaimed ourselves the Junction Medics. Superstition Mountain loomed to the east, not unlike the late 1940s photo above.

In those days, we left behind Mesa around Gilbert Road and were enveloped by massive citrus groves. This continued for about 12 miles, broken only by an occasional trailer park. Not much was out here. AJ's population was closing in on 9,000.

We christened Rossmoor Leisure World, a pioneering gated property, "Seizure World" because of the nature of calls from its elderly retired population. Williams Air Force Base sat miles to the south, down two-lane roads crossing farmland. Completion of the freeway was years away, so Main Street in the Maricopa County part of our territory wasn't even named or part of Mesa. It was four-lane U.S. 60, primevally dark at night, no curbs or sidewalks, lethal to pedestrians. Otherwise, it was empty desert all the way to the iconic mountain.

I couldn't imagine it would be anything else.

Fast forward to the 2000s. Mesa had ballooned from 63,000 in 1970 to nearly 400,000, grown all the way to the Pinal County line. The little suburbs I served had grown supersized and merged together into a sprawling conglomeration called the East Valley. The groves and farms were gone. Superstition's slopes were profaned by subdivisions. And all that empty desert was the most coveted piece of land in central Arizona. The boosters called it Superstition Vistas.

Central through the years

The trouble with Central Avenue is it's not central to anything now." So a real-estate mogul told me in 2001. He was totally bought into endless sprawl at the expense of Phoenix, but he was also wrong. With the metroplex spread from Buckeye to Gold Canyon, Phoenix's most important street is more important and convenient than ever, as has been shown by light rail (WBIYB)  and growing infill.

I've written about Central before. But let's take a photo journey, thanks to Brad Hall's collection, the McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives, and Library of Congress. Click for a larger image.

When it was Center Street, a southward look at Washington in the 1890s. Construction workers are installing water lines.

Here's a view of the Hotel Adams in 1909. It burned down a year later and was replaced by a "fireproof" hotel.

The Center Street, the first across the Salt River. Completed in 1910, the 2,120-foot-long span was claimed to be the longest reinforced concrete bridge in the world.

Commerce in old Phoenix

The McCulloch Brothers, who have left a priceless archive at ASU, were primarily commercial photographers. Their work, which spans from 1884 to 1947, offers a variety of images of business in the young, growing city. Most of this gallery is thanks to them.

You can read about the decades on these earlier history columns: Phoenix at statehood, the twenties, the thirties, the forties, and the fifties. Enjoy and click on the photo for a larger image.

A downtown sidewalk scene circa late 1910s with the Arizona Cigar Co. and the Apache Trail Auto Stage Co.

Washington Street, the city's main commercial drag in 1928. Awnings helped keep pedestrians cool.

Overland Motors at 10 W. Van Buren in the 1920s. These blocks of the city would become the main location of auto dealers.

Phoenix Motor Co., a GM dealership, was at 401 W. Van Buren Street. It's been restored as The Van Buren, a concert venue.

Miracle Mile

I don't know when the stretch of east McDowell from 10th Street to beyond 16th Street received this nickname. It's certainly not the legendary shopping destination of Chicago. But I do know it was Phoenix's first major retail-commercial artery outside of the downtown central business district. (Grand, Van Buren, and 17th Avenue/Buckeye were mostly motels, restaurants, and "curio" shops for travelers).

The Miracle Mile was special because it had an urban fabric missing from any other part of the city outside, even Midtown and Uptown on Central Avenue. The commercial buildings were densely packed, most right up on the sidewalk. McDowell was only four lanes wide. The result was walkability missing in most parts of a city built for the automobile.

McDowell's businesses continued beyond 16th Street and, going west, to Seventh Avenue. However, the Miracle Mile most exemplified urban authenticity. No wonder efforts are under way to reinvent the stretch. Included is a public art arch. Sadly, they face the headwinds of demolished buildings and a six-lane McDowell which is much more dangerous for pedestrians, especially at night.

A footnote: When I was around nine some friends and I rode our bikes along the mile, then turned around and came back — on the sidewalk but against traffic. I raced to catch up with them when a car pulled out from a side street. I hit the fender and tumbled over the hood, landing on the pavement. The terrified driver picked me up from the asphalt (which you shouldn't do) and carried me to the sidewalk. There an ambulance (Phoenix Ambulance, where I would work a decade later) took me to Good Sam to await my mother and grandmother. I got away with a mammoth bruise on my upper leg.

Come with me on a tour of the historic Miracle Mile (click for a larger image):

Kenilworth centennial

My name and graduation date are etched in one of these bricks, which were installed to mark the 80th anniversary of my alma mater. I was honored to be one of the speakers. As for the bricks, they looked poorly carved so you might have to look hard to find those of us who paid to have our names on them. But the important thing is that Kenilworth survives, thrives, and this year celebrates its 100th anniversary.

Kenilworth was the grandest of several handsome elementary schools completed in that era, including Monroe, Grace Court, and Booker T. Washington. It was in the neighborhood that initially had the same name, where Phoenix's elite moved. Now it's the Roosevelt and F.Q. Story historic districts. But that, and the ill-considered Papago Freeway inner loop, were far in the future in 1920. Then the streetcar ran along Fifth Avenue.

By the time I came along, in the 1960s, the streetcar was gone. But Third Avenue ran straight in front on the school, no curve for the freeway onramp. Seventh Avenue was only four lanes wide with a friendly crossing guard named Paul. We lived on Culver Street when I was in first and second grades, then moved to Cypress in today's Willo historic district for the remainder of my time there.

Railroads to Phoenix

Tempe History Museum photo

The recent derailment and fire of a Union Pacific train on the Salt River bridge is a reminder that railroads still play a role in Phoenix, even if far less than in the past. As the late David Myrick explained in his seminal Railroad of Arizona: Phoenix and the Central Roads, eight attempts were made to build a line to the Salt River Valley before the Maricopa and Phoenix Railroad's first train arrived on July 4th, 1887.

Among the many impediments — capital, supplies, heat, permission of the Pima Indians to cross their reservation — bridging the fickle Salt River was among the most persistent. The bridge above shows a "ten-wheeler" steam locomotive and two cars on the second iteration of the span. The first saw a flood destroy its approach trestle in 1890, then was severed entirely by the Great Flood of 1891, which also did substantial damage to canals and farmland; adobe structures collapsed from the rain.

In 1902, part of the bridge gave way without warning, dropping the locomotive 20 feet into the riverbed, killing one and severely injuring another, and leaving a passenger car hanging precariously. In 1905, the flooded Salt washed away a segment of this second bridge just minutes after a passenger train had crossed it. Similar washouts plagued the railroad's crossing of the Gila River.

Finally, the current heavy steel truss bridge was built in 1912-1913. UP says it will rebuild it — or at least replace one of the truss spans — which is good news for continued freight and potential future passenger service. Given Wall Street's pressure to suck profits from major railroads and Phoenix's relative unimportance on the system, I'd be surprised if UP built an entirely new and modern bridge.

Such was not always the case.

Phoenix, 1968

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy campaigning at Chris-Town mall on March 30th, 1968, soon after announcing his candidacy for president. He would be dead from an assassin's bullet less than three months later.

Some are comparing this year's unrest to 1968 — unpersuasively, to my mind — so it might be interesting to check in on Phoenix during that tumultuous year. Just what a different world this was is evident in a headline of the Arizona Republic on Monday, January 1st: "All The World Gay As Old Year Dies." Cultural language wasn't the only difference. The overnight low was 35 degrees, common then as Phoenix had several frosts each winter. The low would hit freezing later in the week. These are much more rare today amid the human-caused heat island. The paper carried Today's Prayer on the front page, as it had for years.

The sixties were a period of great change in Phoenix, where the magic of the old city's oasis was very much alive but the suburbanized future was coming — Maryvale and Sun City were abuilding. The city grew 32% during this decade. The city also entered the big leagues of sports in 1968 with the NBA expansion team Phoenix Suns.

Downtown was still a major retail center at the beginning of the decade, but it was in decline by 1968, hollowed out by Park Central and other malls, as well as low-cost retail buildings bulldozed to create Phoenix Civic Plaza with its convention center and Symphony Hall. This also leveled many single-room occupancy hotels and other parts of the Deuce. Critics warned the shattering of the city's skid row would send vagrants to nearby neighborhoods, which it did.

More old Phoenix

A few days ago, we lost the Golden West Hotel, formerly the Steinegger Lodging House, at 27 E. Monroe Street and built in 1889. It held Newman's cocktail lounge as late as 2005. But even with all of Phoenix's losses, the preservation police could not save the oldest building in downtown. Duran Lugo documented this act of civic vandalism on Facebook's Phoenix Shadetree History page.

In memory, let me clear my desktop of some historic Phoenix photos that likely haven't been on this site before (click for a larger view)

. And a final thought: If the Golden West isn't safe, what about Union Station?

This is Seventh Avenue looking north toward Osborn in the 1940s. The image perfectly captures old rural Phoenix, including abundant shade trees. No palo verdes of gravel to be seen.

Busy Central and Washington in the same decade. Unlike today's suburban feel, downtown looked like the business core of a real city.

Thanks to Brad Hall, here's a high-resolution shot from Monroe and Central looking toward the South Mountains in the '40s. Note the Santa Fe Railway ticket office in the Professional Building. A few steps farther to the left is the Golden West. South of the Professional Building is the Hotel Adams, demolished in the 1970s.

The skyline through time

In a column last year, I explained why Phoenix lacks the skyscrapers that are the defining feature of big cities (such as Seattle, above). Why? It's complicated. Now, let's look at the Phoenix skyline through the years. Click on the image for a larger view.

Looking north on Central from Jefferson Street, we see Phoenix's first real skyline that emerged in the 1920s building boom. At left with radio towers is the Heard Building and beyond it the cap of the Security Building. At left, beyond the Hotel Adams, is the Professional Building.

Seen from the Courthouse Park, the Luhrs Building and art deco Luhrs Tower were among the most iconic structures from the 1920s skyline.

Another shot, this time from the Hotel Luhrs balcony, showcases the Luhrs Building and beyond it the Luhrs Tower.

David William Foster, an appreciation

David W. Foster in 2016 at a celebration of his 50th year teaching at ASU, in the Old Main building. At left is his wife, Virginia.

My dear friend, David William Foster, Regents Professor at Arizona State University, died peacefully last night at age 79. His ASU bio doesn't begin to capture the man in full, but it's worth quoting at length because of the depth and breadth of his accomplishments:

David William Foster is a Regents Professor of Spanish and women and gender studies at Arizona State University. He has written extensively on Argentine narrative and theater, and he has held Fulbright teaching appointments in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. He has also served as an Inter-American Development Bank professor in Chile. Foster has held visiting appointments at Fresno State College, Vanderbilt University, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Riverside, and Florida International University. He has conducted six seminars for teachers under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the most recent in Sao Paulo in summer 2013.

In 1989, Foster was named the Graduate College's Outstanding Graduate Mentor, and in 1994 he was named Researcher of the Year by the Alumni Association. He received the 2000 Armando Discepolo Prize for theater scholarship awarded annually by GETEA (Grupo de Estudios de Teatro Argentino y Latinoamericano) of the Universidad de Buenos Aires.In 2010, Foster was honored for his lifetime work on Argentine culture by the Centro de Narratoloia at a program held at the Argentine National Library. He is past president of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association.

We've lost a man of astounding achievements, and this comes atop the crushing loss of historian Jack August in 2017. Arizona, and the world, are less for these passages.

The Groundwater Act

History is written by the victors.

This marks the 40th anniversary of the Arizona Groundwater Management Act. The state Department of Water Resources said in a press release:

The 1980 Act was – and remains -- the most sweeping state law in the Nation governing groundwater use. In addition to creating a coherent, manageable system for helping wean Arizona’s most populous regions from groundwater use, it enacted the framework for long-term groundwater-use reduction that continues to the present.

“In Arizona, we stand on the shoulders of giants — pragmatic, visionary leaders whose achievements have shown us the way and enabled our high quality of life,” said Governor Doug Ducey.

If today's Arizonans know of the landmark law at all, it's via the shorthand that new developments were required to show a 100-year supply of water. But it was primarily intended to stop groundwater depletion, which was frighteningly reducing aquifers that had taken centuries or millennia to fill. The most noticeable sign of this phenomenon is subsidence, the collapse of the earth and opening of fissures as groundwater is pumped away.

Groundwater pumping was particularly problematic in Pinal County, which depended on it heavily for agriculture. The irrigation district from Coolidge Dam wasn't nearly enough for the demands of farming there, rapidly giving way to tract houses. The resulting dead landscape along I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson makes it The Ugliest Drive In America.

More from early Phoenix

This post piggybacks on the Phoenix at Statehood column from this past year. This time the emphasis is on photography, most from the Library of Congress and the McCulloch Brothers collection at the ASU Archives. Click in the image for a larger view. Enjoy.

Washington and Center streets in 1872. The town wasn't even incorporated until nine years later. Note the abundance of shade trees even at this early stage.

Before the arrival of the railroads, mule teams hauled freight to and from Phoenix — in this case headed for "the mines." This is the 1880s at Jefferson and Second Street (Maricopa Street).

Another view of mule teams hauling freight along Jefferson Street in the 1880s.

First Avenue and Adams (Cortes Street) in the 1890s. The 1889 Fleming Building is recognizable at right. Today the boxy Wells Fargo tower stands there.

More midcentury Phoenix

I continue to feed the endless appetite for photographs of Phoenix. The value I try to add on this site is telling some of the story behind the images. I get these from a variety of sources but one of the best is Brad Hall's History Adventuring on Patreon — pledge a dollar or more and you can get access to far more photography. Click on the image for a larger view.

Here's the southwest corner of Central and Osborn in the 1970s before the two bank towers were built. This was when the city was still litigating its long battle against billboards, hence the Eller sign advertising an early gated property around 27th Street and Osborn. Behind it is an old Phoenix stucco apartment. To the right are the Mayer towers, the short one with the Playboy Club on top and the tall one with the outside elevator, headquarters of First Federal Savings.

From when I was growing up, here's the Arizona Bank at Central and Cypress Street. The shady area to the north surrounds a beautiful building that now houses the Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona. Most of these trees were ripped out for palo verdes.

The Blue Cross-Blue Shield headquarters at Third Street and Indian School, completed in 1970. This midcentury masterpiece was lost, replaced by a gas station.

20/20 hindsight

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.

More Phoenix in the 1920s

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.

Kelly Printing at Third Avenue and Monroe Street, 1928. 

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.

More Phoenix in the '50s & '60s

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). Thanks to Brad Hall for most of these.

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.

More Phoenix in the 1940s

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.

Tico days

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.

Phoenix in the 'teens'

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":

When Payson was small

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.

St. Luke's memories

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.

Camelback through the years

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 (Click on a photo for a larger image).: