How to see the famous Paul Coze Phoenix Bird sculpture in modern Phoenix - yes, it's still there


If you're a fan of Phoenix history of the 1960s, you know about the sculpture that artist Paul Coze did of the Phoenix Bird for the Town and Country Shopping Center, at 20th Street and Camelback Road. You may even remember seeing it. And it may surprise you to find that you can still see it, it just takes a little bit of work. Come along with me. As of this writing, March 2018, it's there, on public display, in what I call "hidden in plain sight".

If you're a better driver than I am (and that wouldn't take much!) and keep your eyes on the road, you may have gone past it many times and never seen it. It's now on 21st Street and Camelback Road. Yes, it's there, and if you've never seen it there, really I can't blame you.

I "rediscovered it" about three years ago when I asked the Woman in My Life to help me look for it. At the time she was working right across the street, and had never seen it. I was convinced that it was there, so one day we went to look for it. Sure enough, there it is!

The Paul Coze Phoenix Bird sculpture at Town and Country. Located on Camelback Road and 21st Street in 2015. Difficult to see, but it's there.

No, it's not a conspiracy man. It's simply an unfortunate placement, a design that meant well. I'm a designer myself and I know that all too often designs fail. Luckily for me, I design on a computer where I can scrap it all and try again, but the design at 21st Street and Camelback is set in brick. I'm sure it looked good "on the drawing boards" but in practice the sculpture is nearly invisible from just about any angle.

It's not easy to see from the street, so I advise entering Town and Country at 21st Street, stashing your car, and getting out to see it. Look out for cars!

I'm thrilled that the nice people at Town and Country choose to keep, restore, and display this important piece of Phoenix history. And I love to be able to say, "yes, it's still there."
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. If you like Phoenix history and would like to help support my efforts to preserve and share precious digital historic images, please consider becoming a patron. Thank you!

Become a Patron!

Comments

  1. Clarke RiedyJanuary 14, 2020 at 5:46 PM

    I’m amazed there is no comment on this Brad. The reason for that is sad. Just after Public Art in the Arizona West was reaching a threshold where it could actively participate on a major scale and a new philosophy of “Placemaking” was being developed and debated, the Digital Age dawned upon the scene and plazas were replaced with websites, the public forum with innumerable chat rooms, and the marketplace has been falling to the online point of sale.

    Your observations of the CAD designed hardscape’s failure to comprehend the sight lines and exposures is analgous to the internet’s broadly distorted effects on the veracity of information.

    The problem with the real world is that it requires the commitment of a lifetime to secure its comprehension. The virtual world requires no such commitment really. A body of knowledge? A personal cosmology? We’re more inclined to just Google as needed. It’s all reduced to bits, compressed, Forget comprehension, we can scarcely be bothered to apprehend the facts. Let the algorithms handle the correlations.

    Art is a prayer to the immediate future asking, “Please find enough value to refrain from discarding this continuum of effort.” The hope is that one day enough understanding will be recovered to appreciate our best.

    ReplyDelete
  2. FastvardJanuary 15, 2020 at 3:17 PM

    Remembered it as a child and still look for it and know I am good again, until I need to see it next time.

    ReplyDelete
  3. jmbossFebruary 1, 2021 at 11:30 AM

    I would love to see the sculpture returned to its original location at the mall as it was in the 1960's.

    ReplyDelete

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