Walking from Glendale to Peoria, Arizona


Yesterday I walked from Glendale, Arizona to Peoria, Arizona. They are two suburbs of Phoenix that originally were five miles apart. So, if you know the Phoenix area, and you know a little bit about its history, you would have been impressed if I told you that I walked from one little town to another 100 years ago. Yesterday, you wouldn't have been impressed, because the two cities meet in the center of 67th Avenue.

That is, when you walk across 67th Avenue, you start in Glendale, and when you get halfway you're in Peoria. I've lived in Glendale for a long time, and I've even seen the Peoria police cars turn left, while the Glendale police cars turn right. But make no mistake, if needs be, the two cities help each other out. It isn't as if the Glendale police would chase you to the city limits and stop!

When I lived in Los Angeles, it was a crazy patchwork of little towns that had grown together. Just a few decades before I lived there there were open spaces between the towns, but since those spaces have been gone for so long it's hard to say the moment when you leave Van Nuys and enter Canoga Park, for example. In fact, when I lived there I heard someone say that it was very convenient that the city of Los Angeles had divided itself up like that! I guess if you don't know the history, it looks like that.

Anyway, that's what happens with big cities, the towns that once were miles away grow to each other and touch. If I tried to walk from downtown Glendale, which is at 59th Avenue and Glendale, to downtown Peoria, which is at 83rd Avenue and Peoria, my little weak ankles wouldn't never make it. But going from the Glendale City Limits to the Peoria City Limits now just means crossing a street.

Nothing much changes as I cross the street. My phone tells me that I'm no longer in Glendale, and I'm told that the city sales tax is different (I don't pay attention to that kind of stuff!). There's a "Welcome to Peoria" sign that I walk past on my way to get my coffee at McDonald's, but otherwise Peoria looks just like Glendale.

But I get to say that I walked from one city to another, just to get my coffee in the morning!

Image at the top of this post: McDonald's in Peoria, Arizona. You can see Glendale if you look out the window, looking east.
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