Riding a bicycle to work in old-time Phoenix

Something that I was fortunate to do, from 1989 to 1991, was to ride a bicycle to work in Phoenix. It sounds a lot more impressive than it was, as I wasn't one of those daredevils who bikes for miles and miles dodging traffic. I was lucky enough to have a job that was just a few blocks away from my apartment.

I've always been an athletic man, but I like my comforts, so when people heard that I rode a bike to work, most of them thought that I was some kind of "Iron Man". And since most of the people I know had never done this, they really couldn't imagine it.

By the way, I learned how to gently roll my dress clothes up and put them in a bag, and the place where I worked had a gym, which included a locker room. I wasn't drenched in sweat, I had merely pedaled leisurely for a few blocks, so I put on my dress clothes and rode the elevator to work. The place was called "Corporate Center", by the way, which was (and presumably still is) just north of Peoria Avenue, east of the I-17 freeway. If you want to see my commute, look for the Greens Apartments (where that pic at the top of this post was taken).

Since it was in Phoenix, people would often ask me if it ever got too hot for me to ride (it didn't), but no one ever, ever, asked me if it got too cold (it did). The desert can get to freezing, and even below freezing in December and January, and since I hate being cold, on those days I'd drive my car.

And the lesson I've learned from this is that people in modern Phoenix can't possibly imagine what it felt like to live in old-time Phoenix. Their memories as children are blurred, but most people immediately get into a climate bubble once they're old enough to drive. At least the corporate people that I knew did. Theirs was a world with heat and air conditioning in their homes, cars, and workplaces. The only extremes of temperature that they would feel would be if the sun had made the chrome on their car so hot that it burned. Getting into a car in the morning, especially if it had been in a garage, never felt cold.

But I hated cold, and that's the main reason I left Minneapolis when I was 19. And it was only last winter that I decided to see how it felt to get all bundled up first thing in the morning and do some pedaling around. I've discovered things that I'd never thought about, like ear muffs (the cold wind is painful on your ears!).

And it's the same now as it was thirty years ago, people are impressed, thinking that I'm some kind of super-dooper athlete. But I'm not, I'm just enjoying the beautiful Phoenix weather!

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

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