A study group for Phoenix history on Facebook


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 Google+ Social Media site had become a ghost town, and that while there were a lot of followers of my Phoenix page, I could tell that it wasn't getting a lot of views. So asked for suggestions, and creating a group on Facebook was suggested to me. I went kicking and screaming. I didn't want "Facebook comments" - I didn't want flame wars, I didn't want drama. I wanted to learn more about Phoenix, and to my surprise, I've found it on Facebook. As of this writing, the Phoenix page on Facebook has been there for four months.

My Phoenix Historical Images page on Facebook is limited to allow only Admins (that's me) to post, but anyone can comment. And while I've seen a bit of spam, and some comments that look as if they may have been posted while "tipping a few", I've been impressed by the information that has been shared. It could be as simple as someone correcting my sense of direction (I always like to know as precisely as possible where and when a photo was taken, and what direction the photographer was looking).

I enjoy this immensely. I'm not selling anything, and I'm not trying to lecture. I'm sharing. The images that I post on the Phoenix page are my "raw information", and once I feel pretty comfortable with them, I try to pull it all together here on this blog. I want to walk in these places, I want to feel what these people felt (well, maybe not the summers before air conditioning was invented!).

The people who help me I call PhDs (Phoenix History Detectives) and as far as I can tell, they're as crazy as I am. Mostly they're like me, with no agenda other than hoping to share correct information. They tend to not be satisfied with "back in the day..." or "somewhere near...", and I understand. Vague information, which is usually not researched at all, and is based on something that someone overheard that someone said that someone thought they heard, is useless to people like me, and my PhDs. We don't want to start arguments, we just want to know, and share what we know.

If this makes sense to you, I encourage you to speak up. Believe me, I won't be offended if you tell me that Central Avenue and Washington don't intersect (I've written that, by mistake, several times). I appreciate the nasty sarcasm to be kept to a minimum, but I do want you to comment. I update captions and my file names. On the other hand, please don't feel that you have to comment, or anything. If you just like looking at photos of old Phoenix, please do so. I just love doing that, too.

This is just too much fun!

Image at the top of this post: looking south from the Westward Ho at downtown Phoenix in the 1940s.

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 go to patreon.com/Phoenix HistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

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