Visiting the location of the Train Depot in Peoria, Arizona


Although the building itself of the Peoria Train Depot was moved to the Scottsdale Railroad Museum in 1974, its location, near 83rd Avenue and Peoria Avenue, remains, mostly empty. I go there quite often.


If you've ever been to the Walmart on 79th Avenue and Peoria, and looked west, across Cotton Crossing, you can see the last remaining building, still sitting there, all alone. Why it's still there, or what it's used for nowadays, I have no idea. It sits on Market Street, surrounded by dirt and weeds.


It's an ordinary old building, nothing special about it at all, and presumably it was filled with stuff brought in by the trains that could be distributed to the local consumers. Just ordinary marketing stuff, hence the name of the street.

The photo at the top of this post I found while looking through the Duke University Libraries Digital Collection. The collection is all about billboards, but that's not what I'm looking at mostly. I'm looking at the backgrounds. And this is what the view was from 83rd Avenue and Peoria looking southeast in the 1960s.

There's a sense of place there, and if you go there and see someone standing there just looking around, it's me. This is the kind of history that I like.






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