Phoenix history locked up in boxes, stored away, and forgotten


If you've ever seen the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, you know that the hero, Indiana Jones, is a believer that certain things belong in museums. And by that he meant on display, with access for everyone, not locked up in a box, stored away, and forgotten.

In the last few years of working on my digital collection of images of Phoenix, I have come to realize that a lot of precious history is being lost, possibility forever, by people who don't quite know what to do with it. And it comes in many forms - there are people who are afraid to share photos they have for fear of copyright violation, there are people who are storing things away in garages, etc., and whose heirs will only see “ebay value”. There are museums which, for lack of funds, are unable to display things and have them locked away in boxes, in storage.

Since I'm a Photoshop person and a web designer, I am comfortable with scanning, optimizing, and uploading images. I have thousands that I have posted over the years. Because to me, the web is a museum, open to everyone.


Image above: Loring's Bazar (yes, that's how he spelled it), in 1880, corner of Cactus Alley on Washington (between Central and 1st Street nowadays, south side of Washington).
Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please become a patron.

Become a Patron!

Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 17, 2016 at 1:50 AM

    Thank You for the always fun and interesting history of Phoenix!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more