I guess I should have said more in my OP...
When I visited Phoenix in 2005 (and it was the only time I've ever been there), I felt that most of the place looked like it was built within the previous 30 years or so, minus of course the very few pre-war buildings I saw, and the historic territorial capitol building. I also felt like I saw a lot of vacant undeveloped areas.
So when I saw this while watching "Psycho" recently (starts at around 0:13, and then you see the pan over Phoenix, and then the camera "goes into" the room where the John Gavin and Janet Leigh characters are finishing up with their nooner):
• Video Link
... so I thought 'Wow, Phoenix at one time looked like that?? It looks so established.' Because when I went there in 2005, it didn't look like an established city at all; everything looked new or fairly new, and very spread out, with little development in between other developments. But if you look at that shot in the film, it looks like every block has development on it, with a few parking lots. And this was circa 1960. When I was there in 2005, I guess I had assumed that a lot of those vacant lots had never been built on before, but apparently, many of them probably were; things were just demolished. And that's why I like reading about a place's history; it explains why things are the way they are at the present time. I had just assumed that most of downtown Phoenix hadn't been developed, but instead, I learned that a lot of it was torn down.
So, it wasn't that Phoenix abandoned its downtown, it DESTROYED it. In the comments section in the articles, someone said, to paraphrase, "At least in LA, you can still see some old sections and imagine what it might've been like in the past, but you can't do that with Phoenix."
I don't know if it's the case, but I feel like a lot of the people who responded in this thread didn't even read the articles I linked. In the articles, you will see that downtown Phoenix looked like it did in the 1930s in the photo in the OP, and then by the early 1970s, you saw this:
And then by the 1980s, I guess it was the nadir of downtown Phoenix:
It looks like it was nuclear-bombed.
And now it looks like this:
Like it says in the article, there's development now, but a lot of it consists of superblocks.
The first several paragraphs of the Rogue Columnist Article part 1:
Quote:
When you see downtown Phoenix today, be kind. No other major city suffered the combination of bad luck, poor timing, lack of planning, vision and moneyed stewards, as well as outright civic vandalism. The only thing missing was a race riot, which happened elsewhere in the city during World War II and is not spoken about. First, definitions. Downtown runs from the railroad tracks to Fillmore and between Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. Any other definition — even though much of the local media are oblivious to this — is ahistorical, inaccurate and, as my sister-in-law would say, just wrong. Twenty-fourth Street and Camelback is not downtown. Central and Clarendon is not downtown.
If one were going to site the center of Phoenix today, one would pick Arcadia, with majestic Camelback Mountain nearby. But that was not the case with the original township in the 1870s. The town was centered in the great, fertile Salt River Valley, soon to be reclaimed by revolutionary waterworks from the Newlands Act and connected by railroads to the nation. It was here that downtown grew and for decades flourished. But Phoenix was small and isolated. It did not grow from 10,000 in 1910 to more than 185,000 in 1930 like Oklahoma City. In 1930, Seattle's population was more than 386,000 and Denver nearly 288,000. Phoenix held 48,118 souls in the same year and was far from any other metropolitan area.
It's a fascinating counterfactual to wonder what might have happened in downtown Phoenix if not for the Great Depression and World War II. The decades before 1940 were the golden age of American city building, including art deco architecture and the City Beautiful movement. One can see it in such buildings as the Luhrs Tower and Luhrs Building, the Professional Building and the Orpheum Lofts (and, north of downtown, in the Portland Parkway). Conventional wisdom holds that the Depression didn't hurt Phoenix much, but this is not true. With deflation and little building happening, it stopped downtown dead. This was continued by the material shortages of World War II. By the time the economy began the long post-war expansion, downtown was facing too many obstacles and didn't have many of the grand bones of the other cities I mentioned.
The distorting result of the region's abundant land showed up early. The territorial capitol (today's historic state capitol), built at the turn of the 20th century, was not located downtown, as was the case in, say, Denver and Atlanta. Instead, it was placed a mile west, through neighborhoods of charming Victorian houses. A city hall, band shell and Carnegie library (still standing) were also built outside the original township along Washington on the way to the capitol. When the beautiful post office-federal building at Van Buren and First Avenue had become obsolete, an attempt was made to replace it on that site with a multistory building. The result would have been a jewel for the city. Instead, a real-estate hustle and speculative land prices forced the government to place a much smaller new post office at Central and Fillmore. This remains a pleasing building — now part of the ASU campus — but at the time was far from the old downtown and a failure of will and vision.
The city built out in both directions and downtown was pulled north by the famed Hotel Westward Ho in 1928. The inability to create vertical density and focus for downtown was already evident. Another problem facing downtown: Arizona was a frontier state, the 48th star in the flag, with less than half a million population in 1940. It was capital poor. Phoenix was home to no major corporations; everything was small-scale except for agriculture. This would have profound consequences for downtown.
Still downtown thrived. Here is the state of play around 1940 (population 65,414 in 9.6 miles of city limits): At the southern foot of downtown are the busy Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroad tracks servicing the produce warehouses and Union Station. With agriculture the one big business, this is a huge employment center and like the rest of downtown, excluding these giant railroads, locally owned. With hundreds of thousands of acres under cultivation, agricultural operations get their seeds and equipment from companies located here, and ship a good portion of its produce from here. A handsome combined City Hall and Maricopa County Courthouse had been completed eleven years earlier at First Avenue between Washington and Jefferson. All the banks and radio stations (with their towers) are located downtown. The retail district is centered at Central and Washington, including all the department stores and scores of specialty retailers. Want to eat or drink? Downtown is full of restaurants and bars, many run by Greeks, including the legendary Saratoga. For motorists, this is where the neon entryways to the city converge. Pedestrians are shaded by blocks of awnings and overhangs. Downtown still had residential area, too. The imposing Victorian mansions on Monroe from Second Avenue to Seventh Avenue made up "Millionaires Row." Palm-lined streets of bungalows ran north of Van Buren.
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