The Arizona Falls, Phoenix, Arizona


Yesterday I visited the Arizona Falls. It's on the Arizona Canal just east of 56th Street at Indian School Road. It's been there since 1885, and if you've never noticed it, and if you kinda don't believe me that it's really there, I can't blame you. But it is.

The Arizona Falls in 1885, Camelback Mountain is in the background.

The Arizona Falls in 1895. From a postcard.

I've always had a fascination for the canals of Phoenix. I've never lived anywhere that has canals, and most of the people I know confuse them with storm drains. They're not. Canals bring water into the city, drains carry it away. Phoenix, of course, has both. And of course all cities have ways to bring water in, but it's usually covered up. My favorite example is the gigantic aqueduct that brings water to Los Angeles from the Owens Valley. It's just pipes, so it's not much to look at. Phoenix canals are different, they're beautiful, and they have always been meant to be seen. From the day that they were built, they proclaimed that here was proof of life in the desert, that Phoenix could be an oasis.


The Arizona Canal, and the Arizona Falls, in 1908. From a postcard.

When I visit the Arizona Falls I try to imagine what it all looked like in 1885. Raw desert as far as the eye could see. And although the desert looked the same then as it did now, people didn't see it as "scenic" - they saw it as a terrible place, hot and dry. A good place to die, no place to live. And then I imagine it just a few years after the completion of the canal, which goes from waaayy east of Scottsdale, to west of where I'm writing this right now, in Glendale. And it began the real transformation of the desert into an oasis. Because there were trees planted there. Instead of dust dirt and sand, there was life, and the trees proved it, marching for miles and miles along the canal.


The Arizona Canal in the 1920s

The Arizona Falls was a place that people visited just to see it. People had picnics there. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of darned kids didn't do death-defying jumps there. It must have been amazing to see.

Of course, it started being taken for granted not long afterwards, and the Arizona Falls became a place for generating power, hidden under a building for decades. Then the building fell into disrepair, and the Arizona Falls became just another "backwater", just another place that had once been beautiful that had been utilitarian, and then forgotten. When you go there, you'll see the remnants of the old machinery that was inside of that building, which is thankfully gone now.

Yes, I know the Arizona Falls isn't Niagra Falls. It's not even close. And it isn't even close to the falls near where I grew up in Minneapolis, called the Minnehaha Falls. But the fact that it's even there, right in the middle of the desert, is what amazes me. It's worth a look.

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