Phoenix — Parks and Recreation

You'll like Living in PHOENIX

"Phoenix is such a happy place!" said a recent visitor to Arizona's capital.

She's right. Phoenicians are an unusually happy people; and the explanation is simply that they have an unusual amount to be happy about. Add together one of the world's most salubrious climates, a vigorous prosperity, a most surprisingly cosmopolitan culture, a future rife with opportunity. Set them down in the heart of a lush green oasis in a glorious, mountain-fringed desert, and dome them over with a sky that can be described only as Arizona blue. You have Phoenix.

Ever since the end of World War II, Phoenix and Arizona's Salt River Valley have constituted one of the nation's fastest growing areas. This growth has been balanced and well-ordered, not simply an increase in population and a piecemeal, ramshackle burgeoning.

Phoenix has succeeded amazingly well in providing for its tens of thousands of new citizens in regard to jobs, schools, housing, churches, recreation, cultural facilities, financial institutions, medical services, transportation, retail and wholesale outlets and virtually every other aspect of modern living that can be mentioned.

The Salt River Valley embraces a unique combination of the cosmopolitan metropolis, thriving industrial center, rich agricultural area, delightful resort and vacationland, ideal retirement place, famous health haven, and land of tremendous opportunity. Yet it still retains a full measure of the charm of the mañana-esque, easygoing Southwest. Phoenix is situated in the heart of the valley, south, and slightly west of the geographical center of Arizona, at an altitude of 1083 feet. The Salt River, on the banks of which the city stands, now is a wide, dry bed, its waters impounded behind a series of dams to the east to be released as needed through one of the country's great irrigation systems to make the desert bloom.

In and around Phoenix there are over 485,000 acres of highly productive irrigated farm land. In the springtime the air of the valley is heady with the perfume of millions of orange and other citrus blossoms in the extensive groves. Vast fields of cotton, vegetables of all sorts, grains, hays, flowers, melons, date palms, olive trees and other crops stretch a vari-colored quilt around Phoenix and its neighboring towns. From them for many years the