How to enjoy the scenic beauty of Phoenix, Arizona


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 fifth story of the east building of the original Phoenix Baptist Hospital (now Abrazos), I saw a lot. Come and take a look with me.

The mountain pass between South Mountain and the Estrellas.

The face of Montezuma, Estrella Mountains.

The first thing I look for is what I call the "Invisible Mountain Pass" - the pass between the western edge of South Mountain and the Estrellas. I didn't even know that it existed until a couple of years ago, and now I look at it all of the time. And along the Estrellas I look for the face of Montezuma. If you know that story, I'm sure you can see him, still sleeping, waiting for the day when the Hidalgos will leave this land and return it to the people (Akimel O'odham).


The 300 Bowl building in 2017

Ad for the 300 Bowl at Christown in the 1960s

I could also see the architecture of the old 300 Bowl. I've always been fascinated by architecture, and I get a big kick out of what is usually called "Googy". It must have been amazing to see when it was new in the 1960s.



Of course I always look for downtown Phoenix. The downtown skyline of cities where I've lived are like the faces of old friends, I never tire of looking at them. Yes, they change over the years, but I still know them.

And of course the ten-year-old in me just loves seeing the Light Rail. Seeing the trains go by reminds me of every Science Fiction movie I ever saw where people were transported in something sleek like that. If what you're seeing is how bad the traffic is going by, or the parking lots, or the billboard for STDs, I'm sorry, but I understand.

I could go on and on, but as you can probably guess by now I wasn't even close to seeing everything I wanted to see when the door opened and the doctor came in. I turned around, stood up, smiled brightly, and started paying attention to what the grownups were interested in. The doctor seemed very pleased with my health, which is good, and I was very pleased to be able to spend some time enjoying the scenic beauty of my favorite city.

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