We couldn’t possibly take a photo this cool, so we stole it from their Facebook.
When I was a kid, downtown Phoenix was a ghost town. The Suns still played at the Madhouse on McDowell and there were mostly trains and warehouses downtown, with the occasional skyscraper. I kind of imagine there was a lot of bum-rape and pee smell too, but I can’t back that up. When the Suns started construction on a new, state-of-the-art arena in 1990, the city was buzzing. Were we finally going to get a downtown district? Were new businesses going to come in and inject money and fun into the area and attract residents back into the core of this sprawl? We were all dying to find out. So, how did it go?
It went okay.
New skyscrapers started going up slowly and businesses moved in, kicking out the vagrants and the hobos and the warehouses (but not the bum piss smell). In a brilliant move in 1996, the Coyotes brought hockey…a sport on ice…to Phoenix, the hottest major city in North America. In 1998 the Bank One Ballpark (now Chase Field, a stupid name that I refuse to say) opened and brought professional baseball to downtown Phoenix. 3 major sports teams, the fifth biggest city in the nation, a bustling population with a housing boom, and a bit less bum-rape. So how was downtown at the end of the century?
Ehhhh.
See, here’s what downtown Phoenix didn’t get back then: unlike shopping centers in developing suburbs and stripmalls with grocery stores, unlike open-air malls with movie theaters and BevMos, unlike what any Phoenix real estate moguls had previously found success with, a downtown area can’t just sprout up by throwing money at it. It’s landlocked. It’s not going anywhere. There’s no incentive to make it better when we can just keep moving outwards and further away from the decay of a city that was never as much of an urban center as a loose affiliation of farming communities tied together by sporadic-but-sudden growth.
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