When there was a traffic light at the bottom of a river bed in Tempe, Arizona


Of all of the things that made me feel that I was no longer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I moved to Phoenix, was stopping at a traffic light at the bottom of a river bed in Tempe, Arizona. It's such a vivid memory for me that a few days ago I started wondering if it was just my imagination. It's been a LONG time since I went to ASU, so I checked with my number one PhD (Phoenix history detective) and he asked around. Yes, it's true.

Before the northbound bridge on Mill Avenue was built, the northbound traffic simply drove down into the river bed. And although my memories are from the 1980s, this went back as far as the 1960s, when traffic had just overwhelmed the two-lane Mill Avenue bridge, built in 1931.

Of course, there was no water down in the river bed, and there hadn't been in 1885, when the Arizona Canal was completed, except of course when the dams up on the Salt River flooded, which they did every few years. And since it was a whole lot cheaper to simply clean up and fix the road after a flood than to build an expensive bridge, this is what they did for years and years.



The intersection down in the river bottom, although I've never found it on any map, was Mill Avenue and River Bed Road. The only documentation I have of it is from a 1964 newspaper article, which was directing people on where to park during an event at the stadium.


By the time I got to Phoenix, commuting to Tempe to go to ASU, River Bed Road was four lanes wide, and had a traffic light. I just thought that it was absolutely ridiculous, but no one asked me. I never had any reason to drive on River Bed Road, but I recall sitting there at a red light on Mill Avenue.

If you're curious exactly where River Bed Road, it's where the sidewalk on the south side of Tempe Town Lake is now. That is, two spans north of where the bridge meets the southern bank. So it really wasn't at the very bottom of the river, just south of where the river bottoms out. A lot of land has been reclaimed since then, and nowadays you don't need to drive down into the river anymore. Don't cross when flooded!

1966
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