Block 23, Territorial City Hall, Phoenix, Arizona


If you've been following the story of Block 23 in Phoenix, you may have read about the plans to build a grocery store there. As of this writing, April 2016, it's just been announced, but no construction has begun. Block 23, by the way is between Washington and Jefferson and 1st and 2nd Streets.

If you lived in territorial Phoenix, you would have called Block 23 City Hall Plaza. This chunk of land was set aside when the city was platted in 1870, and until the late 1920s it was a public space, mostly filled with trees, a fountain, and a gazebo where generations of Phoenicians gathered to socialize, and to watch parades.

Of course Phoenix has always had growing pains, so by the time the new City Hall/Maricopa County Courthouse was planned to be built over on Washington and 1st Avenue (now Historic City Hall), the old Territorial Court House was really in need of being retired. And so the city turned over Block 23 to commercial use, and a gigantic theater was built there, called the Fox. The old-timers must have been outraged, but Phoenix was no longer a tiny town. Of course, they were probably outraged back in 1893, when they started seeing numbers instead of names on maps of Phoenix. The map above, by the way, was created by a company called Sanborn, which did very careful labelling of buildings for fire insurance purposes. Note how 2nd Street has Maricopa (the original name) in parenthesis, and Montezuma is now labelled as 1st Street.

If you lived in Phoenix between 1931 and 1975, you will remember the Fox Theater, which was on the northwest corner of Block 23. And if you lived in Phoenix between 1953 and 2008, you will remember the JC Penney's building, which the city of Phoenix took over in the 1970s, about the time the city bus terminal replaced the demolished Fox Theater.

Nowadays Block 23 is just a parking lot. People who remember Phoenix know how important this place has been historically, and how it's changed over the years, just like most of Phoenix.

Block 23 in 1888. You, and the horses, are looking east from 1st Street between Washington and Jefferson, at the Territorial City Hall building.

Thank you to everyone who helps support this blog by being a patron on Patreon! Recently added to the top rewards tiers: "Then and now" images of Historic Phoenix

Become a Patron!

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

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

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