Time-traveling by looking at sidewalks


As someone who enjoys walking, and has spent his whole life in cities, with sidewalks, I often look down and see the date stamp on the concrete, and it makes me ponder the history of that area.

The neighborhood where I live in Glendale, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) was built in the early 1980s. I know that the house that I'm in was built in 1985. And so the sidewalks, which were built at the same time, are date stamped right around that time. Several of the date stamps, as you can see by the photo at the top of this post, have the "4" drawn in, as presumably they didn't have that number handy when the concrete was wet. The concrete seems have held up fine for decades, although part of the date stamp being drawn like that makes me wonder just how great the quality control was for "New System Concrete Inc." I'm sure it's fine. DBA Construction Inc., which updated the corners in 2019, seems to have been more organized.

I've always enjoyed looking at the date stamps on sidewalks. The oldest ones that I've seen in Phoenix are downtown, on Monroe in front of the two old churches there. I haven't taken a look in years, so the concrete may have been replaced. Concrete doesn't last forever, you know, not even in the desert!



As I was out walking this morning, I noticed that Double L.L. Contracting actually did have a "4" for their 1984 date stamp. As while I taking that picture, I looked up and tried to imagine what the neighborhood looked like while the concrete was still wet. I'm sure you could have seen a long way, past the new houses. Old-timers must have walked by shaking their heads, remembering when all of this was open land, or farmland, or desert. I'm not really sure what was here. I do know that it was the original northwest corner of the Sahuaro Ranch, which went from Olive to Peoria and from 59th Avenue to 67th Avenue, when William Bartlett owned it. Of course over the years most of the land was sold off, which produced the suburbia which is where I live. A small amount of the historic ranch has been preserved nearby, and when I get tired of sidewalks, and suburbia, I walk over there.

Thank you for walking with me, and looking at sidewalks!
If you liked this article, and would like to see more, please consider becoming a patron of History Adventuring on Patreon. If you're already a patron, thank you! You make this happen!

 Click here to become a Patron!
History adventuring posts are shared there daily. The basic tier is a dollar a month, and the PhD tier, which includes "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos, is five dollars a month, and is discounted for seniors, veterans, and students.

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