A fascination for the modern in Phoenix, Arizona


Phoenix has always amazed me at how modern it is. I moved to there from Minneapolis in 1977, and it was as if I was suddenly in the future, and it's remained that way for me. I follow the new, and the modern.

Of course, since I collect old photos of Phoenix, many people imagine that I want Phoenix to not be so modern, to keep the old buildings, the old roads, the old stuff. But I don't want that, I lived in that kind of neighborhood, and to me it was awful. I'll see if I can explain.

The neighborhood that I grew up in, in Minneapolis, was built in the 1920s. By the time we moved there, in 1964, it was well on its way to being overwhelmed, and by the 1970s, the tiny streets and tiny businesses were absolutely jammed.  I learned to drive on streets that were painfully narrow, and always lined with LOTS of parked cars. Then I moved to Phoenix.

Everything there was so new, so big, and so clean! I quickly discovered that the roads were always going to be under construction, being widened, having storm drains installed, the list goes on and on. And I had never seen anything like that, wide streets with multiple lanes, turning lanes with their own signal, and more than anything else, space. Space to park your car, space to back out without constantly worrying about running into another car, the kind of space that existed in my 1920s Minneapolis neighborhood when it was new.

When I go history adventuring with people who remember when older parts of Phoenix were new, I'm fascinated. I have a friend in California who once took me through her neighborhood in Los Angeles in the 1950s and it was just awesome to see it through her eyes. When I moved to California it was so crowded and congested that it just made me miserable, and I wanted to go back to Phoenix, which I did.

I stopped my trike in front of the QT that's being built on 75th Avenue and Peoria, in a suburb of Phoenix called Peoria, this morning. It's not open yet, but any day now it will be. There are older gas stations and convenience stores nearby which have been there for a long time, and have long since been overwhelmed. They were the latest thing back in the day, but now they're too small, and of course they were built before ADA (Americans with Disabilities) laws were around, so their accomodations for disabled people are all retrofitted.

I'm not a historian, I'm a time-traveler, and I love to get unstuck in time. I like to imagine being there when the first skyscraper in Phoenix was built, when the first freeway opened up, that sort of thing. I do those kinds of things in my imagination, but I will be there IRL (In Real Life) when the QT opens up. It will be wonderful!
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