The good and bad of moving from Los Angeles to Phoenix in 1989


Leaving Los Angeles, and coming back to Phoenix is one of the best decisions of my life. I grew up in Minneapolis, went to ASU, then moved to California, where I lived through most of the 1980s. I really hadn't planned to move back to Phoenix after my layoff in Los Angeles, I was just going to go see some old friends, good for the soul. So I visited Phoenix.

What I saw amazed me. The first thing that struck me was the lack of traffic, and the amount of easy parking. Even after all these years it still makes me happy. Yes, I know people in Phoenix who say that the traffic is awful, and parking is difficult, but all they're saying to me is that they've never seen how awful it can be. I used to always carry a book with me in my car when I got on the freeway in Los Angeles, and when traffic stopped, I would put the car in park and read for a while. Yes, in park. Not bumper-to-bumper inching along, but completely stopped, in park. You just waited for traffic to begin to move. I read a few books that way! So as you can imagine a big plus of moving back to Phoenix was to be able to not get constantly stuck in traffic jams, and know that I would always find a parking spot wherever I went. Yes, there were times in LA that I would go to the mall, drive around and around and around, and then simply go back home. No parking in the lots, on the street, at all.

The cost of living was so much lower than in California that it was as if they were giving stuff away. In an idle moment, I stopped at an apartment complex and inquired about the rent. My little California brain just about exploded! And then I heard the words "If you want to live on the golf course..." I could live on a golf course, in a beautiful apartment complex, for less than my horrible little hovel in California cost me! I signed a lease right then and there.

Of course, the thing that worried me in Phoenix is that there's not as much work there as in Los Angeles. I was looking for corporate work and I could just about count all of the tall buildings in Phoenix, whereas I could never count them in the greater Los Angeles area. Yeah, that worried me a lot, but I figured with the cost of living so low I could figure something out.

I did get a bit of culture shock moving to Phoenix. Now calm down here, I love Phoenix, but it felt, uh, kind of in the middle of nowhere. As if there should be tumbleweeds rolling down the street, and the sidewalks were rolled up at night. You gotta realize that LA was 24/7 commotion. I learned to slow down a bit myself and to this day I love the fact that in my neighborhood in Glendale the traffic lights on the half-mile streets switch over to blinking yellow in the wee hours. Not that I'm out much in the wee hours!

There were things that I took for granted in LA that most people in Phoenix hadn't even heard of in 1989, like being able to pay at the pump at a gas station. In LA, I was in and out like a pit stop. In Phoenix, someone had to walk out of the garage, take my credit card, talk about the weather, and so I learned to set aside a big chunk of time to buy gas, usually on the weekends. I'm a techno-nerd and I liked ATM machines, and stuff like that. I never went anywhere in Los Angeles where I had to stand in line if I didn't have to. Of course the lines were never all that long in Phoenix, but I had lost my taste for standing in line at all.

I was lucky, I did get a good job in Phoenix, at Valley Bank, right before they became Bank One. I worked in the tallest building in Phoenix, which was nice. And little by little the things that had made Los Angeles so attractive to me faded away. Of course I knew that there was no going back. A resume that says "Los Angeles" means a lot in Phoenix, but it doesn't work the other way around.

Like everything else, it's what you value. I valued someday being a homeowner (which I could never have done in California) and I really don't need to be close to the movie and TV studios. I could never get comfortable in Los Angeles, and Phoenix felt right to me, and it still does.

Image at the top of this post: At the Greens Apartments in 1990, right after I bought a nice new bicycle, for my commute to work. If you can stop looking at my short-shorts, you'll see the tee shirt said "California". I don't have that bike, those clothes, or that mustache anymore.
Become a PhD (Phoenix History Detective) with Brad today on Patreon!

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

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