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Ambitions of a 'modern' city drove Phoenix leaders in the 1920s

One of the hardest things to do is to imagine the past without knowing the outcome, to try, like those who lived through the moment, to see the uncertain "now," the past as a historical present.

In 1920, Phoenix was still a small burg in the large desert, and the Valley was a spattering of flyspecks across the map: Glendale to the west, Chandler to the south. Scottsdale barely existed. There was no reason to assume that Phoenix and not Mesa, for instance, would become the big city. No reason to think that in a hundred years, the space between the specks would all be filled in to make a single metropolis.

Yet, perhaps there was a reason that it was Phoenix that grew: Its founders had a vision of Phoenix as a big-time city.

They were businessmen, and they were boosters. Yes, they wanted to get rich, but they also wanted to do so by making the city more prosperous, more populous, more modern.

"There's a part of them that is altruistic and wanting to make a better place," architect Douglas Sydnor says. "Like Dwight Heard or Walter Bimson. If they can make a profit along the way, that is also good. This town made thousands of people wealthy over real estate. It's what has driven this place a hundred years."

Or as attorney Grady Gammage Jr., puts it, "Phoenix was people who moved here who wanted to get other people to move here, so it really is a giant real-estate enterprise.

"I talk about Phoenix as the history of real-estate-scam artists. What's different about Phoenix is that business has been about finding ways to make the city grow and prosper. They had ambition for the city."

Architect and historical preservationist Don Ryden puts it this way: "This is a city of optimism. People like Walter Bimson did well by doing good."

In April 1911, the Commercial Club for a Greater Phoenix predicted the city would be for Arizona what Los Angeles was for Southern California and said, "Phoenix cannot fail to become the big city between LA and El Paso."

That was the ambition.

The reality just after World War I was something else.

Big hopes, small town

"The city grew rapidly between 1920 and 1940," historian Philip VanderMeer says, "but even then, population was only 65,000. It was not a big town."

But the dream nevertheless drove the more farsighted members of the city to make as much of that dream true as was possible. And it was the vision of those few city fathers that governed the shape of city growth to this day.

In the 1920s, the city grew skyward, with our first high-rise buildings, but it also grew outward: Neighborhoods now called "historic" were then as new as the latest Internet startup is today.

Standing there, in the dawn of the first real boom decade of the city, it was not possible to know which vision would prevail: upward or outward.

It was one of many things seen then as uncertainties, that in retrospect look like inconsistencies.

In the 1920s, it led to the building of our first skyscrapers: The Heard Building first, in 1920, at seven stories - familiar to many from the opening shots of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." The 10-story Luhrs Building followed in 1924, the Security Building in 1928, along with the Hotel San Carlos and the Westward Ho (which, at 16 stories, remained the tallest building in the city until 1960). In 1929, the 14-story Luhrs Tower arose at Central Avenue and Washington Street.

This striving for verticality may seem at odds with the subsequent horizontal growth of the city. But early city fathers had a particular model in mind for a city.

"They didn't want it to be a Western town," VanderMeer says. "It was not a cattle town, not a mining town; it was an agricultural-service area and they thought of this as modern. You can see this in statement after statement. They call it a 'modern American city.'

"That's what they wanted and designed it to look what they thought a modern city should look like. They built it to look like Philadelphia."

That was the dream. The reality was that in 1920, Phoenix was a burg of just 29,000 people, still smaller than Tucson. The metro population topped out at a bit more than 40,000, just a shade bigger than Apache Junction is today.

All 'American'

That emphasis on "modern" and "American" did contain some unfortunate undertones.

A 1920 city directory explains that "Phoenix is a modern town of 40,000 people and the best kind of people, too. A very small percentage of Mexicans, Negroes or foreigners."

In 1925, historian James McClintock wrote of the city, "Its people are proud that it is an American city in all the word 'American' means. The percentage of foreign population is relatively small, although the picturesque Mexican is much in evidence on all public occasions."

That year, Hispanic Catholics, tired of having to celebrate Mass in the basement of St. Mary's Church, opened St. Anthony's Chapel south of downtown.

This sort of attitude has a long history in Phoenix. In 1912, voters approved a commission-style city government, replacing the council and ward system that had served when the town was tiny. The elimination of the ward system meant the disenfranchisement of many of the city's poorer residents and its Hispanic, Black and Asian citizens.

As R.L. Dyer, secretary of the Good Government League said in 1914, "The Third and Fourth wards are composed of a class of people who do not meet with the high ideals of those here present." The new city government would be in the hands of "the right people."

Yet this modernization of government may not have been quite what its creators intended. Phoenix in 1914 hired William Farish as city manager. The position was a newly popular idea, and Farish was one of the first in the country. It was meant to bring efficiency to city management and eliminate cronyism.

Farish challenged the old system of political patronage. He cut costs and rewarded merit, collected license fees that some businessmen had managed to avoid, introduced competitive bidding and urged public ownership of utilities to ensure fairer rates.

For his sins, and for disregarding the "traditional qualification of political connections," city commissioners charged him with incompetence and fired him, and amended the city charter to allow themselves to maintain political patronage. Indeed, the post of city manager, meant to take politics out of city management, was turned into a patronage position itself. The problem persisted until after World War II, when the charter was changed once more.

Wetting our whistles

There were other sins that bedeviled the community. It was the era of Prohibition, and bootlegging was rampant. Even Barry Goldwater fessed up to making bathtub beer.

A newspaper account noted, "Now, though we are still distinctly a godly city in many ways - witness the fact that we don't dance on Sunday - the newest generation, and especially the prosperous young married set, has crowded the conservatives into an admission that making whoopee has its charms and that every self-respecting gentleman must have an intimate understanding of at least three kinds of cocktails, and access to the makings of a decent highball."

Legend has it that when police confiscated illegal booze, they dumped it down the drains in the basement of the Hotel San Carlos, and that an enterprising janitor at night would extract the dumped alcohol and sell it for a tidy sum, until the authorities caught on.

Gambling and prostitution also were rampant.

Another story tells us that in 1928, when funds ran out to complete the Security Building, developers raised funds by running a casino and brothel on the top floors for the final two weeks of construction to make ends meet.

Brothels were concentrated between Madison and Jackson streets and Center Street (now Central Avenue) and Fourth Street, and the occasional police roundup of prostitutes and madams constituted a de facto "tax" on the business.

The Arizona Republic reported that the red-light district contributed a "steady income to city hall."

The contradictions were a symptom of not quite knowing where all this would lead.

Reach the reporter at or 602-444-8823.

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The Heard Building in the 1920s, Central Avenue in Phoenix. Courtesy of Library of Congress

The Heard Building in the 1920s, Central Avenue in Phoenix.

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