Unfinished business in Phoenix, Arizona - the Collier Center


If you ever walked out of the America West, or U.S. Airways, or Talking Stick Resort Arena, on Jefferson, anytime from the '90s up to the present day, and wondered why the two blocks on either side of 2nd Street looked kinda incomplete, it's because they are.

The original design of the Collier Center, which is shown in this model on the 2nd floor of the Bank of America Building, included three more towers, one of which was to be a hotel. Of course, the Bank of America building was completed, and some smaller buildings, but the rest of the project was never finished. In fact, the block to the west (Block 23) is still just a parking lot.
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 and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona
I visited the Collier Center for the first time just a few days ago and this model gave me a real sense of time-traveling. It's from the 1990s, and as you can see, the idea was to have a high-rise hotel on the northeast corner of 3rd Street and Jefferson. It was a great location - the parcel of land extended out because of the curve created in the 1980s as Jefferson curved around the south building of the Phoenix Civic Plaza. So people could stay at the hotel, and go to a basketball game, or a baseball game, or go to the Civic Plaza. It seemed to make sense.

Of course, the hotel was never built. I have no idea why, I just know that architects hate this kind of stuff. Of course it's never too late, and it's possible that there are plans to complete this project. If you wander past it, on 3rd Street, you'll see that the concrete was set and that construction was beginning. Maybe they'll try again. And personally, I'd like to see those second-story palm trees and the reflecting pool!

Looking west at the Collier Center model from 3rd Street, Phoenix, Arizona.

Image at the top of this post: Looking north at the Collier Center model from Jefferson at 2nd Street, Phoenix, Arizona.

Comments

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