The invisible telephone poles of Phoenix, Arizona


I took a photo of a telephone pole today. It's only a few blocks away from my house, and I'm sure that I've got passed it a million times. It's on a major street in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, and like most telephone poles it's completely invisible, and as near as I can figure, has been invisible for many decades.

This neighborhood was built in the 1970s and '80s, and mostly the wires are hidden underground. But this one is right up there, just like telephone poles used to look. It does its function, and fades into the background, in spite of how big it is.

Actually, I don't even know if it's a telephone pole. It might be electrical wires, but I just call everything that looks like that a telephone pole. Like all wooden telephone poles, it used to be a tree at one time. If you get up close to it, you can see the knots. There's a street light on it, so obviously there's electricity going to it. If you know about these things, please clue me in!

It's funny how we don't see electrical lines, or telephone poles until we look at a photograph. As far as I can tell it happens to everyone, even people like me who are fascinated with tiny detail. The wires tend to look unsightly, and a lot of times people use Photoshop to erase them from photos. I've even seen old postcards with the wires erased (I guess they used airbrushes back in the day!).

This pole sits on the western edge of what was once the Sahuaro Ranch, which was a square mile. I really don't know how long it's been there, but the college has been there since the '60s, and there were homes, presumably with electricity around here long before that. I wonder if there's a date stamped on it somewhere? If you know, please tell me and I'll take a closer look.

As a kid, I always noticed stuff like this, and when I would ask the adults they would have no idea what I was talking about, or looking at. I guess these things are mostly invisible!
Help support history adventuring, and see a lot of cool old photos of Phoenix on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

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