History Adventuring

When I bought the house that I am in right now, in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix), I was looking for a garage. That is, I wanted a safe place for my car. I'm sure that I had some thought that it would be nice if there would be a place for me to sleep, etc., but mostly it was the garage that I was interested in. I found exactly what I was looking for, as the house I own appears from the front to be nothing but garage. The front door isn't really visible, there is no large expanse of lawn, no big picture window. Mostly garage. And, of course, it opens directly into the house. I step out of my car, and in a couple of steps I'm in my kitchen. And it's all for my cars. I've owned some really nice cars. And in my younger days I just hated the thought of them having to sleep outside, maybe in a parking lot where they could get rained on, or having the heat of the sun fade the paint, or be vandalized, or stolen. Yeah, I worried a lot. The idea of a garage f...

When I learned to drive, in the 1970s, seat belts in cars were still a fairly new idea. I was the young generation who had to take classes in order to get our license, as opposed to my parents' generation, who I guess just mostly kind'a got behind the wheel of a car and figured it out themselves. At least that's what I heard. I had driving simulation in school, and movies that showed what happened with crashes, that sort of thing. So I didn't need all that much convincing to use seat belts. Many of my friends in Phoenix were involved with motorsports, and since I liked sports cars and though I never raced, I followed their lead. They wore seat belts. I learned all of the defensive driving techniques, downshifting to stay on the power curve, accelerating into a turn, that kind of thing. The first rule of racing, of course, is that you can't win if you don't finish, and that meant staying alive. At age 19 someone on the road in Phoenix did something stupid,...

When you think of places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, you realize that the cost of living in Phoenix, Arizona is much less. But it wasn't always that way. 100 years ago Phoenix was a very expensive place to live. And that's because everything had to be brought in, on trains, from places like California. In California, however, there were ports with a constant supply of everything people needed. And that made everything cheaper there, from building materials to food. Ships from all over the world unloaded their goods right there, and if you were living on the coast, you got the best price. If you were living further inland, such as in Phoenix, you paid a high premium. That's true of any isolated community, with a poor infrastructure, which Phoenix was until after World War II. Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon Click here to become a Patron! History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then an...

If you live in Phoenix, you probably read the newspaper called The Arizona Republic. If you lived in Phoenix before the 1930s, it was called the Arizona Republican. If this puzzles you, it just has to do with the history of the Republican Party after the Civil War in the United States. As you can imagine, times have changed. Time-travel with me. At the risk of over-simplification, the Democratic Party in the United States was established to protect States' rights, and the Republican Party was established to protect the power of the Federal Government. To throw it into stark historical relief, in the 1800s some states wanted to protect their right to have slavery, and the Federal Government disagreed. The party of Abraham Lincoln, the Republicans, were dedicated to preserving the Union of the United States, even if it took going to war against the Confederate states. If you know your Arizona history, you know that the Territory of Arizona was Confederate during the Civil War....

Ventura, California got its name from the Mission that was built there, in 1872, by the Franciscans. The full name is Mission San Buenaventura, which is Spanish for Saint Bonadventure. Saint Bonadventure was a 13th Century Franciscan, and Bonadventure means "Good Fortune" in Italian. Like most of the cities in California, Ventura has been shorted in modern use. In fact, Los Angeles was, believe it or not, originally called "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles." Like Ventura, it was established when California was part of New Spain. I've heard Ventura pronounced "Ven-Tura" and "Ven-CHura", and while both are OK, most locals seem to prefer the first one. The Franciscans, by the way, built Missions all of the way from San Diego to San Francisco. San Francisco was named for Saint Francis of Assisi, who gave the name to the order. Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like the...

The two most common misconceptions about the Phoenix, Arizona area are 1) it never rains there (it's a desert, after all!), and 2) the valley is completely flat. But people who know Real Estate know that these things are not true, and it has driven the value of land in the Phoenix, Arizona area for over 100 years. The Salt River valley tilts gently from northeast to southwest. If you just imagine it as a gigantic pool table, the water runs towards the Salt River (south) and towards Tres Rios (west). Yes, it's a very slight tilt, and it wouldn't matter much if the valley didn't get the type of torrential rains it gets every summer, and if the snow didn't melt in the area just northeast of it, which is one of the largest watersheds on planet earth. And that means that Phoenix has been struggling with severe flooding since it began, in 1870. There has been an enormous amount of flood control engineered in the valley, including the gigantic dam on the Salt River,...

My interest in historical information is just a hobby of mine, it's not my living. So I give it away as soon as I find it. And I do that by posting stuff on the web. I get a big kick out of learning stuff, and consider it payment enough if people help me, which they do. I started thinking like this when I started working on my family genealogy, twenty years ago. When the internet was invented, I noticed that it made things so much easier to communicate with people elsewhere on the planet, and compare notes. Understanding history is sometimes like doing detective work, you are always looking for that one clue that will lead to more understanding. And the currency of this exchange is just a please and a thank you. Many times someone can help you simply by telling you that a street name had changed. And most of the time the favor can't be directly repaid, so you go looking for someone else to help. I call this "linear kindness". Unfortunately, not everyone feels t...

If you've ever thought that it would be nice to take a stroll on the beach and walk all of the way from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and were wondering if it was legal, don't worry, it's fine, and perfectly legal. Well, most of the way. You can walk in front of the most expensive beach houses in Malibu and you aren't trespassing. That's because private property lines only extend to the tide line. Yeah, that's pretty vague, but a private property owner, no matter how rich, can't own the Pacific Ocean. A lot of people walk along the beaches of California. These people are correctly called "transients", which just means that they keep moving along. Yes, they can be homeless people, or hobos, or whatever you want to call them. If you've lived in beach towns, like Santa Barbara, you've seen a lot of them, especially if you're like me and like to go to the beach early in the morning. If you're going to walk the beaches of California...

There are few places on planet earth that have made me feel more at home than Calabasas, California, even though I've never lived there, and never will. I live in Arizona, so when I refer to Calabasas, I just say "Los Angeles". But it's my Los Angeles. And actually, it's not Los Angeles at all. My Los Angeles is centered in Thousand Oaks, and goes from Santa Barbara to Woodland Hills. If you know your California geography, you will be saying "huh?", but when you're there, it all flows together. Other than seeing more surfers than usual along the Ventura county line, it's all the same. The reason that I moved to Phoenix is that I wanted to buy a house, which I did. In California, in my late twenties, despite having a good-paying corporate job, I despaired of ever being a homeowner. A lot of people were buying houses up in the desert, in places like Palmdale, and commuting their lives away. And when people suggested that I look at buying a...

If you're like me, and you like looking at old photos of Phoenix, Arizona, you may be puzzled as to why so many of the buildings, especially downtown, are gone. It seems like there was some kind of conspiracy that the city went on some great rampage and destroyed a vibrant downtown area. The truth, unfortunately, is much more grim, and much more complex. I never saw a vibrant downtown Phoenix. The downtown Phoenix that I first saw looked kind'a like the photo above. And the city had already been working as fast as it could to clear out these areas, which had become some of the seediest, dirtiest, most crime-infested areas that you could imagine. Whatever went wrong with downtown Phoenix began happening in the late 1960s. By the 1970s it was not only an embarrassment to the city, it was dangerous. Even up through the 1990s, when I worked downtown, there were still plenty of places where it was unwise to walk past. The flophouse across the street from where I worked (which...

If you've read your Arizona history, you know that long before the pioneers of Phoenix, like Jack Swilling, and John Y.T. Smith, arrived, Arizona had been a battlefield. It was a place of war between Indian tribes, and they were bitter enemies. And if you've never read about that, it's not surprising. It's horrible. And although it's part of Arizona history, it really doesn't do to dwell on it too much nowadays. The war ended a long time ago, and those who had been enemies became enemies no longer. I collect old photos of Phoenix and post them on a Google+ page, and everything I see makes me want to learn more. Last year, with encouragement from my Indian friends, I started posting, and writing, about the Phoenix Indian School . Because, even though there are a lot of photos of it, and even though there is a major street in Phoenix by that name, no one seems to talk about it. And those who do tend to just display ignorance, which saddens me. Take a look a...

Everyone knows about the Spanish Inquisition. If you're like me, you've heard of Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor, who lived in the 1400s. You also may have visited some of the Missions that were built in the 1700s in California. And yes, there is a connection. And while there are many things that people don't talk about, I will. Time-travel with me to the Dark Ages. Friar Tomás de Torquemada The Dark Ages in Europe, also called the Medieval Era, can also be called The Age of Faith. No, I'm not defending the Spanish Inquisition, I'm looking at it from their point of view. And while ultimately the Age of Faith gave way to the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, that doesn't help you to understand the history of California. For that, you will have to understand Faith, a Faith that was stronger than the fear of death. When the United States of America was established, it embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment. That is, humanism, truths that were...

One of the things that the Chamber of Commerce doesn't like to dwell on is the heat in the summer in Phoenix, Arizona. And if you've ever lived through a Phoenix summer, you can understand. I've lived through a lot of them, and the blistering heat isn't something that I sit around with my out-of-town guests and talk about, when they visit, in January. But the high temperatures of Phoenix in the summer are a reality. And while most of the historical documentation that I find about Phoenix doesn't really talk much about it (can you blame them?), let's face it, Phoenix gets unbearably hot in the summer. The article above mentions the temperature getting up to 109 on June 13th, 1909. I've searched a lot in the archives of the Library of Congress for mentions of the weather in Phoenix, and haven't found much. And that's understandable - the newspaper wanted to promote Phoenix, not indicate that it unbearably hot, and besides, air conditioning would...

In my lifetime I have seen rebellion as seen as very cool, and also seen as evil. And rebellion has always been a backlash to conformity. Let's time-travel back to the 1960s. The 1960s were a time of rebellion in America. Led mostly by young people, the protests were against the status quo, which included the war in Vietnam. Comparing the rebellious 1960s to the much more stable and law-abiding 1950s gives a vivid view of the attitudes at the time. This was a time of protesting the oppression of big government, and big business. And it did change the world. America's involvement in Vietnam ended in 1975. New laws were passed to protect the rights of the individual. The rebellious spirit was seen on TV and in movies. Popular heroes at the time were antagonist to the police, and car chases became almost a symbol of rebelling against the system. Take a look at "Smokey and the Bandit". The hero was the bandit, and Smokey (which was slang for a highway patrolman - w...

If you've lived in the Phoenix, Arizona area for a while you may have wondered if there is a connection between Goodyear tires, The Goodyear Blimp, cotton in Arizona, and the town of Goodyear. There is. It all starts with the explosive demand for rubber tires during World War I. Back then cotton was used to reinforce rubber tires, and the best cotton for it was wildly expensive as it was only grown in the middle east. But the Goodyear company decided that it would try to grow that type of cotton in an area of the US that had a very similar climate to the middle east - Phoenix, Arizona. 1917 ad for the Cotton Department of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Phoenix, Arizona. They were successful, to put it mildly. So much so that Cotton became one of the five "Cs" of the Arizona economy, along with Copper, Cattle, Citrus, and Climate. And as the demand for rubber tires with the new-fangled invention of the "automobile" grew, Goodyear, and Arizona c...

Nowadays, when I mention that I lived in parts of California where I spoke some Spanish, I usually see a typical reaction. People who know me as the corporate guy, living in suburbia, are sometimes shocked when they hear that I lived in some pretty rough neighborhoods in my youth, like Canoga Park, California. I wasn't there long, but it was long enough for me to get a taste of what the world looks like to people who speak a foreign language in America. My apartment in Canoga Park, which was close to where I worked in a fashionable and expensive part of the San Fernando Valley called Woodland Hills, was relatively affordable. I was getting a decent salary from the place I worked, and my future looked bright for promotion. In the meantime, I lived in Canoga Park. And mostly it was just a place to hang my hat. I can't say that I spent all that much time there. I was either at work, at the gym, or at my girlfriend's. But sometimes I just had to be there, and boredom would...

One of things that I noticed when I moved back to Phoenix from Los Angeles was the luxury of space. Not only big skies, but wide streets, plenty of parking, plenty of room to move. Even the gas stations amazed me, with the generous amount of room around the pumps, and most often a huge expanse of land between it and the road, with nothing but landscaping. For people who grew up in Phoenix, and have never lived anywhere else, this seems to be invisible to them. But I remember the narrow streets of Minneapolis, where I grew up, and the crowded spaces of Los Angeles. I have never lived in really crowded places, like Manhattan, or Tokyo, and that kind of stuff makes my mind boggle! When I left Los Angeles, the city had just placed a maximum on the number of people who could legally live in a one-bedroom apartment: twelve. Twelve. And the apartment complex where I lived had one (1) parking space for me. If someone else parked in it, I had to drive around the neighborhood for quite a...

Most houses built in the Phoenix area after the 1970s have stucco. This type of construction is referred to as a "balloon frame", which is made of wood, covered with mesh, and then covered over with a fine plaster called stucco. I'm interested in old photos of Phoenix, and architecture from all eras. And, maybe because of that, people assume that I dislike modern architecture, and stucco. I don't dislike modern architecture, and I don't dislike stucco. I do dislike seeing the integrity of design being damaged by well-meaning people who, for whatever reason, have taken a dislike to it. I'm not a historian, I'm a time-traveler. And that means that when I look at a neighborhood from another era, I want to feel as if I were actually there when the houses were new. When I go to a car show, I want to see the cars as if they were in the dealer's new car showroom. If I've learned anything from my time-traveling, it's that people tend to get ti...

Phoenix, Arizona utilizes freeways and several types of surface streets for its traffic. A reluctance to build freeways in the 1970s and 80s was overcome in the 1990s and is the reason why Phoenix has some of the widest, best-designed, and safest freeways in the country. In addition to these modern, well-designed freeways, the valley boasts very wide main streets. All of these streets have at least two lanes in each direction, and a dedicated turning lane in the center. This allows these streets to be used as "mini-freeways". No parking is allowed along these main roads, and most have long "exit ramps" for smooth turning into shopping centers, etc. Although it can seem confusing at first, if they are treated with the same respect given to freeways, they are fast and safe. The far left lane is the fast lane, and slower traffic should stay to the right. The speed limit is posted at 40 miles per hour, but, like on the freeways, five to ten miles per hour above t...

If you drive around much in the Phoenix, Arizona area, you become aware of the "becomes". For example, Dunlap becomes Olive here in Glendale. But my favorite "become" is when Glendale Avenue becomes Lincoln Drive. To understand this, you have to know about a man named John C. Lincoln, the Camelback Inn, and a temperance colony from 1892 named Glendale. Looking north up 58th Drive (1st Avenue then) from Grand Avenue at Glendale, Arizona A temperance colony is a group of people who have decided to live where intoxicating beverages are not sold. And while the idea of a temperance colony didn't last, the community of Glendale did. And as it thrived and grew, the road to it, from Central Avenue, was named Glendale Avenue. Camelback Inn in the 1930s. The road to it, which was from Scottsdale Road, was named after John C. Lincoln. In the 1930s, way on the east side of the valley, a wealthy entrepreneur named John C. Lincoln (yep, the same guy who bu...

In order for the new townsite of Phoenix, Arizona to be divided and sold into lots, it needed to be purchased from the Federal Government. Probate Judge John T. Alsap did that in 1867. Just as today, bureaucratic red tape held everything up for a very long time, and it wasn't until December of 1870 that lots began to be offered for sale. And they sold well! Luckily for John Alsap, who had signed for $400 (a considerable amount in that day). So for three years, he owned all of Phoenix, at least on paper. Alsap was quite influential in the founding of Phoenix. He was the first Territorial Treasurer of Arizona, the first Probate Judge of Maricopa County, the first mayor of the city of Phoenix, and four times member of the Arizona Legislature, twice from Yavapai County, and twice from Maricopa County, being President of the Council in the 5th, and Speaker of the House in the 18th Legislative Sessions. Become a PhD (Phoenix History Detective) today on Patreon! Click here ...

Since I'm a collector of old photos of Phoenix, and am interested in history, I see a lot of mistakes. I see mistakes in books, on the web, just about everywhere. It's usually some garbled information that got passed down with the "copy and paste syndrome" - where people fail to go back and check facts against original documents. I understand it's human nature to be trusting of information and just copy it and post it, or publish it. My first reaction when someone gives me some historical information is to double-check the documentation. I know that mistakes happen, and I try not to add to their continuation. So I pride myself on the precision of what I post, especially about Phoenix. And usually when someone questions me about something I've posted, claiming that it's wrong, I answer politely that I thank them, but really, I usually can tell that they're doing the "I read on the internet somewhere..." or "I always heard that......

When I think of 1776, I think of the Declaration of Independence, the 4th of July, George Washington, that kind of stuff. I really never thought about California, but I am now. Walk with me. It's 1776 and we are going to walk from the oldest Mission in California, which is in San Diego, to the newest one, which has just been completed in San Francisco. It's a dangerous road, but we are holy men, with faith. We are Franciscan Friars. There is a place to stop about every thirty miles, which is what is considered a good day's ride on a horse. We do have horses, but we are walking alongside of them, as they are carrying enough. The road that we are walking on will come to be known as the King's Highway, El Camino Real. We are in New Spain. Along the way, we meet the natives, which is what we call the Indians we meet. If they have been introduced to Christianity, we call them neophytes. Mostly we are speaking in Spanish, but of course, we read Latin, and are learnin...

If you're an old-timer living in the Phoenix, Arizona area, that is, for more than a couple of years, you probably have noticed the constant change. It seems like "every ten minutes" there is a new building. There is always road construction. Like Los Angeles, Phoenix began as a sleepy little town. And like LA, it has grown. But unlike LA, it still has room to grow. Los Angeles reached its limit long ago, hemmed in by mountains on one side, and by the ocean on the other. It is not a lack of the progressive spirit that limits LA, it has just run out of room to grow. The history of Phoenix is all about people who believed in progress. These people were "unrealistically optimistic" that a great city would someday grow in the desert. You can point to Darrell Duppa, who named the city after the mythical Phoenix bird that grew out of the ashes. You can look at Dwight Heard, real estate wizard from the turn of the century through the 1920s. And then came Walter ...

If you live in suburban Phoenix, like I do, and have ever driven past the house you were looking for, even if it's your own, you know that Phoenix is a sea of same-looking houses. But it's not a civic regulation that all of the houses have to match each other exactly in a community, and in all communities, it comes down to not wanting to be the "oddball house" that won't sell. Yes, Phoenix is driven by the real-estate market. And if your house is strange, even its location won't save it from being passed over by potential buyers. And it isn't just the real estate people who are dictating this. Get involved with any discussion about the look of a house in Phoenix and you will find that "everyone" insists on beige stucco. Ad for townhouses at 77 E. Missouri in 1976. Some of these units have been kept in their original condition, out of respect for the time period. A stylish Phoenix home interior from 1973 The larger effect of ...

Although you won't find these street names on maps, Melinda's Alley , Wall Street, and Cactus Way were recognizable addresses during the early years of Phoenix. And yes, there were houses and businesses on them. The reason for this is the gigantic scale of the layout of the blocks of Phoenix going back to 1870. While this huge scale works fine for the skyscrapers of today, when Phoenix was young, these spaces were divided up for a more "human scale". As you can see on the map, Wall Street and Cactus Way were the in-between streets between 1st Avenue and 1st Street. If you're old enough to remember when the Greyhound Bus Terminal was on Jefferson, you could have walked the alley (Cactus Way) north to Washington. Traces of Melinda's Alley are still visible, running east and west through Heritage Square and even as far west as the northern edge of the Adams Hotel (the Renaissance Phoenix Downtown Hotel) and north of the Heard Building. Of course now it...

If you were a kid in 1916, you have fond memories of Donfrio's Cactus Candy at Washington and Cactus Way (just east of Central on the south side of Washington). The building itself, called the Ellingson building, which was from territorial times, survived until it was torn down in the 1970s. At the time the building was taken down, brick by brick, and put in storage, because of its historic significance, to be rebuilt elsewhere later. This never happened. Parts of this building are still in private collections to this day. The Ellingson Building in 1899 (the beige building at left). You're looking west on Washington from 1st Street. The Ellingson Building in 1916 The Ellingson Building in the 1950s The Ellingson Building in the 1960s