History Adventuring

I like old photos of Phoenix, and many of them have people in them. My interest started with identifying the buildings (I always wanted to be an architect, but I couldn't do the math), and then I started noticing the people. And it occurred me that these were real people, in real places, in real time. Like the people you see walking around on Google Street View. Yesterday I had the privilege of looking at some of the most fantastic family photos that I've ever seen of historic Phoenix, the Hanny family, in the 1890s. It all centers around Vic Hanny, who started the clothing store in Territorial Phoenix, and whose name is on the restaurant on 1st Street and Adams, which used to be a clothing store. I have a boxful of photos sitting next to me right now, and I'm scanning as I write this. I love looking at photos like this, and I respect privacy, because some people don't want any of their family photos to be ever put on the internet. I won't argue with people,

Ever since I was a kid, I've had a fascination with the names of things. Yeah, I know a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I like learning names. And also like learning what people call things, which can be different from their "official" names. I'll see if I can explain. I noticed it recently when a friend of mine from California visited. On the freeway, as I gave directions, I used the term "HOV Lane". I could tell he knew what I meant, but I also sensed a bit of hesitation. That made me wonder what people call it in California? The Diamond Lane? The Car Pool Lane?  Something else? Do people in Arizona call it something else? Am I just weird? And really, I have no preference other than good communication, so I like to know what people call stuff. Of course, some people point me to a textbook, or Google, or something like that. And there I can find out the "official names" but I can rarely find out what people call stuff. It&#

The road in Phoenix called Camelback is named after a mountain in the city that appears to be in the shape of a camel, lying down. If you've lived in Phoenix, or visited much, this "mountain" (actually it's just kind of a big hill) is very visible. The mountain itself is along a range called the Phoenix Mountains that stretches from 19th Avenue to 64th Street. Between 44th Street and 64th Street is Camelback Mountain. The best view of it, in order to see the camel's back, is from the south. The head of the camel points west, and the camel's back (the hump) is to your right. Good views of it can be seen from the airport, and from the I-10 freeway. I've lived in Phoenix for a long time, and the mountains that surround the valley (which is called the Salt River Valley) are like the faces of friends to me. A lot of things change in Phoenix, but the mountains remain the same. I've been trying to learn all of the names of them over the past few years,

I like collecting old photos of Phoenix, and sharing them on Facebook, and one of the most common things I've always heard has to do with some description of the Phoenix that never was. As an old Marketing guy, I have a theory about this. It has to do with how information is presented in advertising and promotion. And while I wouldn't go as far as to say that "In Advertising there's no such thing as a lie, only the expedient exaggeration" (Cary Grant said that in "North by Northwest"), I do understand that when we try to reconstruct the past based on only information that has been carefully presented, by the Chamber of Commerce, or advertising agencies, it's easy to imagine that it really was like that. That everything was perfect back then. Now waitaminute, I don't want to be an "Adam Ruins Everything" kind of person. I'm as happy as the next person with what I call the "West of the Imagination", I don't need t

Like most people, I love cars, and I hate traffic. Sitting in a car, inching along, is just torture for me. I haven't seen a lot of traffic, especially in Phoenix, doing what is called a "grid lock" - which means that the streets are so jammed in all directions that there's no getting out of it, no matter where you turn, but I remember it happening a lot when I lived in Los Angeles. Whenever I see photos of cars from the 1950s, they're in a perfect situation, maybe driving along a scenic highway, or being admired by people in an ad. But the reality of places like Phoenix after WWII, and up through the fifties is that the cities really hadn't adapted to cars. And the horrific traffic started back when cars were first invented. Double-parking in Phoenix in the 1930s, next to the "No Double Parking" sign. Time-travel with me to Phoenix in the 1920s. Cars are becoming so common that parking has becoming nearly impossible. Efforts are being ma

If you were a kid living in Phoenix, Arizona between 1954 and 1989, you probably watched a local children's show called "Wallace and Ladmo". "Wallace" was Bill Thompson, and "Ladmo" was Ladimir Kwiatkowski. They worked together, and they were friends. Wallace (Bill Thompson) on the top, Ladmo (Ladimir Kwiatkowski) in the top hat, and Pat McMahon (in the character of Gerald) After Ladmo died, in 1994, his friend Wallace planted a tree at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, which is in Superior, east of Phoenix. It's the Ladmo Tree, and you can go see it. It's a pistachio tree, and it's not very big, so you will probably need to have someone there show you where it is. And if you're wondering if there's a connection between Bill Thompson (Wallace) and Boyce Thompson, there is. William Boyce Thompson was Bill's great-uncle. William Boyce Thompson, founder of the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, and great-uncle of Bill Thompson (&q

I finally got to meet with the author of the book "Vanishing Phoenix", Rob Melikian, yesterday, and I have to admit that it was kind of a relief to find that since he wrote that book, years ago, he's changing his point of view a bit. I'm not writing a book, I'm just collecting photos and information, and I guess the title of what I'm doing would be something like "Yeah, it's still there". Because I'm discovering a lot of "Non-Vanished Phoenix" - you just have to look for it. And more and more people are doing that, which makes me happy. For years and years I've heard people say, "too bad it's gone" to which I say, "No, it's not, it's still there." There are thousands of historic buildings in Phoenix. Take a look at this list of the Phoenix Historic Property Register , and those are the buildings that are just on this list. You can see a LOT more, just by looking. I'm not selling anyth

Every once in a while I hear about how city planners have screwed up again. They may be building a freeway to nowhere, or they may be building a neighborhood "out in the middle of nowhere". These people apparently have secret meetings where they plan how a city will grow, and they can predict everything, and are either geniuses with their foresight or they are idiots, or are absolutely criminal. And then at a certain point in my life, I realized that there's really no one like that in charge. There's no group of people who have control of how a city is built. There are, of course, people in places (probably right now) talking about the future of Phoenix, and there are people who are hoping that they can do the right thing for the future, and I'm sure people who are hoping that they can make a lot of money by having things go their way. And not surprisingly, it's the people interested in money that make things happen. Real Estate Companies. Now waitaminu

I always wanted to live in the suburbs, which I do. In my younger days I lived in some pretty harsh and crowded conditions, but I knew that I was going to work hard, get promoted, and someday live away from the noise and confusion. It surprises people when I tell them that if they don't live in the original Phoenix city limits (from 7th Avenue to 7th Street and from Van Buren to where the railroad tracks are), they're actually in the suburbs. And there's a reason why people wanted to move out of town when they could afford it. Time-travel with me. 1913 ad promoting the suburbs of Phoenix By the time Dwight and Maie Heard started their company, the Suburban Land Company, in the 1890s, Phoenix had been growing, and getting more crowded. It's hard to imagine today, but there really were no rules. Businesses could throw garbage out into the alleys, horses were everywhere, along with the smell of the stuff that they, uh, leave behind. Water ran through the muddy

If you're a fan of Phoenix history, you know that Central Avenue, around where the Westward Ho is, at Fillmore, was once a beautiful neighborhood, with mansions. At the beginning of the 1900s, Phoenix started growing north, and this area, north of Van Buren, was considered one of the best neighborhoods. Of course now it's all just commercial buildings, and that was inevitable, as Phoenix grew, but what really caused the downfall of the neighborhood was the building of a gigantic "high-rise" hotel, the Westward Ho. Nowadays it's hard to imagine how bad this would have been for a neighborhood, because the Westward Ho is now considered one of the architectural gems of Phoenix. But when it was built, in 1928, it was suddenly a gigantic "big box" building that looked down on all of the houses from miles around. And having strangers looking down into your backyard isn't exactly what most people want! Of course nowadays there are laws protecting neig

The first buildings in Phoenix, Arizona were made out of adobe. That is, the dirt found in the desert (and there's a lot of dirt there!) mixed with water, made into blocks, and stacked on top of each other. They were the buildings that the Hohokam people made, and were the most economical way to build for the early pioneers of Phoenix. When the railroad made it to Phoenix in 1887 (17 years after the town was platted), bricks and other building materials became more economical, and the building of adobe structures was pretty much discontinued. Before the railroad, building materials (other than adobe) had to be brought down from Prescott, or places like that, laboriously with carts and oxen. Just like today, old buildings were left when they were no longer used. It's a whole lot cheaper to just leave something to fall down on its own than to hire people to do a demolition. And the adobe buildings just melted, anyway. The photo at the top of this post, from 1890, is typica

I'm interested in Phoenix history, and I like to get the help of experts. Luckily, there are a LOT of them out there. And I don't mean Professors at schools, or tour guides, or people like that (although they're fine). I mean people who have lived in Phoenix, people who recognize the difference between Camelback Mountain and the Papago Buttes, without really going to too much effort. People who have seen these places, know these places, and more importantly, love these places. I stumbled into this when I started posting old photos of Phoenix many years ago on a Social Media network that I was learning about called Google+. It was a much smaller, and thoughtful, group than most of the Facebook stuff I'd seen. I use Facebook, but I never saw it as being anything other than places to see pictures of cats (which I like) or "cringe-worthy" comments like "that's what she said!". So I stayed with Google+ until last December, when I noticed that the

My fascination with Phoenix history is what I call the "in-between" history. If you're more dramatic than I am, you could call it "hidden history" or "forgotten history" or even "history that isn't taught in school". If you consider yourself knowledgeable about Phoenix history, and know nothing about it, or very little, don't be surprised, and please don't be offended. OK, you can set aside your history books, take off your graduation cap (you know, the kind that looks like you're balancing a board on the top of your head), and relax. No, there won't be a test, and everything won't be arranged in a particular order. It's a mess. Because that's what really history is. And no, it's not a conspiracy man. This stuff isn't hidden away, it's just been forgotten, neglected, shuffled aside. It doesn't fit in nicely to school curriculums, it doesn't make for a "page-turning novel of suspens

As someone who grew up in Minnesota, one of the most bizarre things that I did when I moved to Phoenix was to water a lawn with flood irrigation. It's still being used nowadays, although it's not as common as it once was. If you've used it, you're probably saying, "no big deal, it's been a common thing in Phoenix for many years". If you haven't used it, or even seen it, I gotta start by telling you that there's a valve in the middle of the yard. Yeah, my friends back home had no idea what I was talking about. I'll see if I can explain it. When I rented the tiny converted garage in Tempe, Arizona, while I was going to ASU, I noticed that everything was dead. The grass was dead, the trees were dead. So one day I went out with the hose and watered a bit. I got a call from my landlord, who had noticed the spike in his water bill, and he said that it would be fine if I wanted to take care of the landscaping, but I should instead use irrigation,

After years and years of careful research, I have discovered that everywhere that people live is awful, and wonderful. Take any given city, and you can find lots of reasons not to live there. You really don't have to look very hard to find how terrible a city is, either it's too crowded, or there isn't enough going on there, or the restaurants are no good, or the team hasn't won enough games, the list goes on and on. And I often wonder why people live where they do? And what I see through their eyes often surprises me. I've lived in some amazing cities in my life, and I've always wanted to see them through the eyes of people who love them. So I found the locals. Now waitaminute, by locals I don't necessarily mean only the people who were born there. There are a lot of those people who really don't like where they live, and they're only there because, well, there are a lot of reasons, each one more depressing than the next. Instead I mean the l

I was at a routine checkup last Friday, and after the nurse took my blood pressure (I'm fine, healthy as a horse) as she was leaving I casually mentioned that I was going to look out the window. I don't remember the exact the response, but it's typical of what I've heard all of my life, which is that there's nothing to see. I've lived in some amazing places in my life, and one of those places is Phoenix, Arizona. And there's so much to see that I've had difficulty understanding people who see nothing. And now I know that there's not "seeing nothing", they're just looking at different things than I do. I've been weird this way since I was a little kid, and it looks like I'm never going to change. I am trying to understand what the grownups are looking at, and mostly it makes me sad. These people live in an ugly world, or at the very least a dull one, with nothing to see. But when I looked out of the window (which was the fif

I've spent a lot of time in Apache Junction. I have a friend who lives there, and I visit as often as I can, and I've spent a lot of time house-and-dog-sitting. And I enjoy Apache Junction a lot. If you've never seen what I've seen, I'd like to share it with you, so please walk with me. And that's where you start. Get out of your car, and more than that, get out of your car mentality. If your first thought is to drive somewhere, and drive somewhere else, and then drive somewhere else, that's fine, but you'll never see what I'm seeing. Lace up your shoes. And no, I don't mean your hiking boots, we aren't going to see if we can find the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. That doesn't matter to me. If you walk with me, you'll see the magical world that the grownups never understood when I was a kid walking around my Grandma's neighborhood in Minneapolis. If you can remember that fascination, you know what I mean. There's a quality o

Like most people, I enjoy wearing my school colors. I graduated from Arizona State University, and that makes me a Sun Devil. The term "Sun Devil" by the way, refers to the Sun Angel Foundation, which has supported ASU Athletics for over fifty years now. But being a Sun Devil, and wearing my school colors, means much more to me than whatever game is being played at my old Alma Mater. I never played football, and I really can't tell you the names of people who did. I recall going to a game or two, but I never considered the term "Sun Devil" as meaning only people who played sports at my school. It was everyone who went there, including me. I still feel that way. I'm an old Marketing guy (my degree was in Graphic Design with a minor in Advertising) so I understand the importance of promoting the sale of tickets to sporting events at colleges. It's big business, and it brings in a LOT of much-needed money to schools, much more than people would just

I started my collection of historic Phoenix photos with publicity photos from Valley National Bank. They had been created to distribute to newspapers, etc. to promote the company. By the time I got there, it was becoming Bank One, and part of the job of the Marketing Department at that time was to clear out all of the old stuff that said Valley Bank. And it had been sitting there for years! The storage room had stuff that had been there since the building was new, in 1973, and like any storage area, no one had bothered to throw away old worthless stuff. But now that the name of the company was changing, anything that said Valley Bank had to go, including publicity photos. By the way, Valley Center, which was the Bank One Building when I was there in the '90s, is now Chase Tower. It's at Central and Monroe. Tallest building in Arizona, you can't miss it (I sound like a Marketing person, which I am!). I've always been interested in Phoenix history, and it seemed a sh

I like trees. I grew up in Minneapolis, and have lived in Phoenix and Southern California all of my adult life, and I just feel better around trees. And one of my favorite types of trees is eucalyptus. Eucalyptus trees have been in Phoenix since territorial times. They're native to Australia, and come in a lot of varieties. The ones that most people recognize are the ones in the photo up there, which are at the Arizona Canal at 7th Street and Northern. And they get HUGE! And not only do they get huge, their branches are weak, and it doesn't take much for them to snap off a branch, so they're best planted well away from your house. They're great as windbreaks, and parks, but I can't recommend planting them if you have a tiny suburban lot like I do. In fact, the idiots who built my neighborhood planted two (2!) eucalyptus trees in the tiny "post office stamp"-sized spaces in front of each house, and after about ten years they were WAY too big for the sp

It's the first week of April, and here in the Phoenix area the weather is just glorious. I just got home from walking to the corner and it's 82 degrees right now. And it's just perfect with a bit of shade, and it's just awful in the glaring sun. As someone who has walked a lot (not wilderness hiking, just urban hiking) I seek shade. I know where to find it because I pay attention to the time of day, the season, and I look for trees. If you haven't done much urban hiking, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, if you have, you do. The difference between an area with a bit of shade from trees, and the glaring sun of the desert, reflected on concrete and asphalt, is appreciable. Even areas of grass with no trees offer little relief from the heat of the sun. I'm no expert on math, but out in the sun 82 degrees is uncomfortable, and walking in a bit of dappled shade is heavenly. And that leads me to Parking Lot Trees. I first heard the term &quo

I've always enjoyed looking at old maps, and one of my favorite things is seeing when California was shown as an island, like in the map shown here. Now waitaminute, California was never an island, so don't go looking for some hidden history about its geology. And it's not a conspiracy, man, it just has to do with how maps have been created up until very recently, from eye-level, and making educated guesses about how it would look from a bird's-eye view. Time-travel with me to old California when it was New Spain. To get there, we would sail from Spain, across the Atlantic Ocean, around the tip of South America (Cape Horn) and then along the western coast of South America, and along what is now Central America, and Mexico. If that seems a strange way to go nowadays, consider that there was no Panama Canal back then, and there certainly wasn't any way to fly. We take flight for granted now, but there was no way to do it back then, not even in balloons yet. S

It's the first week of April, and here in the Phoenix area the weather is just spectacular. It's what I call "Chamber of Commerce Weather". It just couldn't be nicer, bright blue skies, in the fifties in the morning, high seventies for the high, maybe as high as eighty, and mostly mid-seventies all day. It's the kind of day that makes me go outside and just say, over and over, "This is nice!" But this is Phoenix, and it doesn't last. The summers are awful. Don't get me wrong, I love Phoenix, but even its greatest admirers will admit that the summers are terrible. Not just hot, but "fry an egg on the sidewalk" hot. And I'm not just talking about record temperatures, that can get above 120 degrees, I mean burning hot for months and months, with temperatures over 100, and even in the middle of the night stifling heat. Even at 3 am, the desert doesn't cool off in the summer. I collect old photos of Phoenix, and I had ofte