How Californians have changed Arizona

It's been over thirty years now since I moved from Los Angeles to Phoenix, and it really is true, Californians have changed Arizona. Whether it's for the good or bad, of course, depends on your point of view. I'll say right now that I like the changes, even though I love Arizona.

I had many reasons why I left California, the two top ones being that I wanted to be able to buy a house, and also that I didn't sleep well because I always imagined earthquakes. It took me several years to get over imagining earthquakes when I moved to Arizona, about the same time that I bought the house that I'm still in.

My friends in California were sad for me when I left to go live in Arizona - it seemed that I had been exiled, like going to live on the dark side of the moon. And I did everything I could to make myself comfortable in my new desert world, including creating a backyard that reminded me of California, which I call my "Tropical Paradise". And of course I went back and forth to California all of the time, mostly to visit my favorite restaurants, including Joe's Cafe in Santa Barbara, and Sabroso in Canoga Park (they're still there, so please take me there!).

I brought a lot of my California thinking to Arizona, which became less and less obvious over the years, as Arizona changed. I was used to freeways, and Phoenix has built a LOT of them in the past few decades. I became a "clean air freak" while living in LA, and Phoenix started to create and enforce regulations for cleaner air. I've also seen a greater acceptance of people who have different cultures, different religions, different sexual preferences, speak different languages, have a different skin color. I took that for granted in Los Angeles, and wasn't prepared for how much Arizona wasn't so accepting. A good example of this was the cancellation of the Super Bowl from Arizona in 1993. You can Google that if you're interested.

Of course, some things that I liked about California haven't happened in Arizona, my favorite one being that in California cars stop for pedestrians, by law. I remember the first time I stepped into a crosswalk on Wilshire Boulevard and watched the traffic all stop for me.

It pleased me when I could start paying at the pump in Arizona the way I'd done for years in California. Nowadays I like to pay for things with my phone, and when I get a blank look from someone I'm reminded of how it felt very often when I moved to Arizona in 1989. I try to have a cheerful attitude about this, but as an old Californian, I really do wonder about the ponderously-slow pace that Arizona often has. I'm not in any particular hurry, but it's nice to just be able to do stuff, and move on. Yeah, impatient California people, always in a gul-dern hurry!

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