Dear readers,
We’re in the process of making a few changes to the Vanishing Phoenix site to serve you better. Thank you for your patience and we would still love to hear your comments, questions and ideas.
Welcome to Vanishing Phoenix. We hope you enjoy exploring the history of this remarkabale city with us. To keep update with our latest posts, please subscribe to our RSS feed.
‘Preservation Action will consider itself successful when historic preservation is deeply ingrained in our culture, embraced by the nation’s citizenry and its elected officials, from town hall to Capitol Hill. In our vision, every American has recognized the need to become a steward of our historic and cultural resources.
In our vision, our communities are stronger, more livable and exhibit a greater sense of place because these officials, supported and encouraged by the citizenry, have assumed a leadership role in initiating legislation that includes historic preservation as an integral part in creating and sustaining our communities.’ – an excerpt from Preservation Action’s mission statement.
The mission of Preservation Action, a national grassroots preservation organization, has gotten the recipe for preservation right. It’s so important to encourage the residents of a city to get engaged in preservation and the legislation and elected official support will follow.
As we will be displaying on this website, we’ve lost hundreds of beautiful buildings in Phoenix over the course of history. We can’t blame the government or even the developers and business owners who actually demolished the buildings. No, change isn’t going to come until we, the residents of Phoenix, also take responsibility for all the demolition that takes place here.
It’s no one’s fault but our own. Once we recognize that we have a voice in what goes on in our city, we can then raise that voice to speak out against things like the short-sighted demolition spurred by our own city government or the profit-motivated demolition that occurs because of developers.
The first step to organizing residents around historic preservation is to raise awareness. Here are three easy ways to raise your awareness of these issues:
1. Become a fan Arizona Preservation Foundation on Facebook, and while you’re at it you can check out the APF website. Jim McPherson does a great job keeping APF fans up to date on the latest on endangered buildings, development plans and all things having to do with historic preservation in the state.
2. Attend a Phoenix Historic Neighborhoods Coalition meeting. They meet the third Thursdays of every month at 7pm in the Phoenix Elementary School District #1 Governing Board Room (1817 N 7th St.). Also, get to know the buildings on their Phoenix Most Endangered Dozen Historic Places for 2010 list.
3. Peruse through the vast annals of information on historic buildings (focusing on the mid-century modern era) on the Modern Phoenix Neighborhood Network. It’s a great way to bone up on the back stories of the buildings all around you.
Once we take responsibility for all the buildings we’ve lost, we can get together and stop it from happening again and again.
Photo Credit: A postcard of the Sahara Hotel in downtown Phoenix in the process of being torn down. Image from oldsads.org.
Courtesy Robert Melikian
When I first heard Rob Melikian’s presentation of Vanishing Phoenix based on his book at May’s Places, Spaces and Faces Community Dinner, I was shocked. My blood started boiling as Rob calmly showed us photograph after photograph of beautiful buildings that were systematically destroyed due mostly to greed and the desire of those who recently came into money to build new monuments to themselves. Meanwhile, our city slowly lost it’s identity, it’s walkability, it’s density and of course, it’s history until what we’re left with is just a handful of historic buildings that have survived Phoenix’s thirst for newness.
Sadly our abject disregard for preserving history is thriving today and we continue to lose historic buildings frequently. The purpose of this site is not merely to look back and lament what we’ve lost. We want to resurrect the memory of all that we’ve lost so that we learn a lesson this time. We want you to see that Phoenix does indeed have history and that it once was what we’re craving today of our city – urban, walkable, and community-oriented. But most of all, we want you to become aware of what we’ve lost, of what some are capable of destroying if we don’t take a stand. And we want to show that there is value to preserving historic buildings and to make you inquire, what would our city look like had the people of Phoenix actually taken a stand for preservation and those buildings still stood today?
You may be thinking, what use is it to go back and say what if? Well, it’s useful only in that it brings to our imagination the value that historic buildings bring to a city and how they can completely change the character and development of that city. We want to establish the positive impact of preserving historic buildings in the hearts and minds of Phoenix residents in order to put a stop to our still-strong ethic of choosing convenience over preservation.
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Preserving Visceral Connections to Phoenix’s History
On Tuesday, Yuri wrote about the Central School building which stood on the site that the Hotel San Carlos now sits on. Sure it’s one thing to preserve and cherish the historic hotel, but why is it important to commemorate what was there before? One reason is that it adds depth, richness, and perspective to our present experience.
The well that stands today at the Hotel San Carlos, which was part of the original adobe schoolhouse, is a visceral connection to that period in our history, when Phoenix was just a territory and was establishing the first schools for its children. Besides the physical well, the ghost stories that have arisen because of it are also a wonderful way to keep the memories of that time alive.
It’s true that sometimes we can’t save entire buildings, either due to their irreparable condition or lack of money to rehabilitate a whole building. Even in the worst cases, there is always at least one physical element that can be saved and incorporated into a new building, the more visible the better. Having a physical reminder of times past is an immediate way to connect to our history.
We need to do a better job in Phoenix of finding ways to honor our past while living in the present and embracing the future. One essential way of doing this is by preserving historic buildings and reusing them. If this is not possible, then at least we can save parts of the building. Honoring the past doesn’t always have to cost a great deal of money, but it does require some thoughtfulness and a recognition of the value that history brings to our lives today.