The Papago Freeway

PAPAGO The FREEWAY TWENTY-FOUR YEARS' DELAY MAY PROVE FORTUNATE.

Our meetings and their place had none of the depth nor panache of Gertrude Stein's soirees at 27 rue de Fleurus. Yet we had our moments as a generation lost in the idealism of the '60s and our own extremes; war and peace, Bechet or Beethoven, Goldwater versus Fulbright, tipsy and sober, and our address, the Chanticlare Apartments, no matter its misspelling, certainly added a flourish of Paris to the doings of lower midtown Phoenix. Writers and politicians, one-time artists and sometimes models, wives and lovers, we lived and visited and partied at this white stucco cube on 1217 North Third Street. It was two floors of a dozen apart-ments of no particular individuality beyond the tenants. Front doors were slabs of Mediterranean blue, and eighty-five dollars a month bought nouveau-chic, damp-wipe motel furniture, and that crisp rusty smell of centrally refrigerated air. Two regulars were state legislators, who became congressmen, and an investigative reporter, who went on to martyrdom. George Maharis and Martin Milner parked the studio's Corvette outside during the television filming of Route 66, and it would have been un-Hollywood to point out that the highway really didn't come any closer than Flagstaff. Our Garden of Allah. Mr. Greenbaum didn't have his name on his mailbox because his dead brother had been a medium-sized gangster, and somebody might remember. Some left to get married, and others came back between divorces. Always there were Friday night gatherings at Larry's, after work to whenever, and a twenty dollar bill bought all the booze with enough left over to mend Saturday's survivors. I think our moment disappeared before we were quite done with it. A thing that had been lurking for years as some nebulous city development, suddenly developed. A freeway would cause demolition of the Chanticlare. A final Friday night party. The pool was drained. Blue doors were left open before emptiness and Phoenix could look into somebody else's bathroom. In a couple of days the bulldozers and wrecking balls and crow-bars and sledges had taken the building apart and honored yet another right-of-way purchase of a parcel for the Papago Freeway.

Then, absolutely nothing else happened. No excavation. No construction. No Papago Freeway. What had been drafted and planned since 1960 (with some urban visionaries predicting a need for 300 freeway miles for Phoenix and Maricopa County by 1980) and announced by then Mayor Milt Graham in 1969 ("The tie that binds our community together," he told a civic meeting) had come to a controversial halt by 1973.

And ten years later, with the Papago Freeway a barren, dusty twenty-mile scar across the belly of Phoenix, the project had become what Doug MacEachern, assistant editor of Phoenix Magazine, reported as: "a confusion of transportation so twisted that Phoenix may never completely straighten it out."

Yet it has been straightened out.

The Papago Freeway, finally, thankfully, to the near delirium of crush-hour motor-ists, is rolling. It is being graded, cut, drained, paved, and banked along its original course from the butt end of Interstate 10 and Dysart Road on the west side, across the city's cardinal divide of Central Avenue to 20th Street. Here its eight lanes will loop south (hence a sub-title, Inner Loop), hook into the existing Maricopa Freeway, and be completed in five years.

Then, say the politicians and highway engineers, the Papago Freeway will become the benchmark of a coordinated meld of freeways and expressways for a newer and wiser Phoenix. With none of yesterday's chaos. With full application of today's learnings. A freeway that's all the better to serve tomorrow and for longer.

But how and why that full generation of disorder and delay?

It may well be that the Papago Freeway with its promise of modern mobility was stalled by no single event, but immobilized by a series of circumstances. And, who knows, maybe for the eventual and indirect good of the community.

"No planned benefits," is how Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard says it. "But making virtues of necessity."

In 1969, however, nobody was talking virtues or necessities, only growth and federal acceptance (to say nothing of federal financing) of the Papago Freeway as a link of Interstate 10, the cross-country artery and civil defense highway reaching from Los Angeles, California, to Jackson-ville, Florida.

The 1969-model Papago-as accepted by the Federal Bureau of Public Roads, as supported by Eugene C. Pulliam, publisher of The Arizona Republic and The Phoenix Gazette and probably the city's most effective power broker-would be an elevated facility.

The approaches would be an average twenty-five feet above ground level. Across the center of the city-a fourteen-block span from Seventh Avenue across Central Avenue to Seventh Street-they would arch to more than 100 feet above sidewalks and surface streets. With the freeway would come twin helices, those spiralling access-egress ramps that made Los Angeles infamous.

That plan earned immediate, albeit minority, opposition. Here's a bad case of the noisy, dirty, smelly Los Angeles uglies, shouted one critic. A psychological and social barricade that will divide the city into have and have-not districts as surely as the Berlin Wall, claimed another.

Some, the architects, the urban planners, were against an elevated freeway. Others, those more concerned with the less technical preservation of down-home sleepiness of a city they did not want enlarged, were just against freeways. Not that it mattered. Charter Government, a somewhat dictatorial but well-intentioned municipal administration, wasn't listening to isolated and barely organized protests anyway.

But then, Publisher Pulliam started listening. To his wife.

Nina Pulliam, goes the story, was appalled by the sight of the aborted, dead-ended, and jutting Embarcadero Freeway in the San Francisco she loved. Not coincidentally, the Embarcadero was an elevated facility.

And Pulliam was beginning to suspect that a freeway across Phoenix might indeed assault the desert esthetics and life-style of his city (and as the mayor-maker who developed Charter Government, it certainly could be considered His City) as effectively as a pickup truck among covered wagons.

His decision was made, and a campaign was drafted. Reporters were assigned. Freeway opponents suddenly found they had a powerful ear and an ally in a publisher, his staff, and two newspapers that were the only printed communications game in town.

"There was no question we were trying to kill the freeway," remembers one reporter. But the end-cancellation of a viaduct that would look more Coney Island roller coaster than desert freeway-seemed to justify the means. "One could question the heavy-handed way of doing it. I don't think one could question the validity of doing it."

And with the Papago Freeway tacked to the shirttail of a routine bond election, one of the great exercises of opinion-bending by an American newspaper went the full, furious distance.

Nineteen seventy-three. After a month of daily horror stories and editorials and photographs and cartoons of freeway intrusions on other cities, Phoenix voters rejected the Papago Freeway, three to two.

Nineteen seventy-four. Arab oil embargoes. Gasoline lines, locally and nationwide, caused in large part by America's dedication to life, liberty, and the pursuit of

PAPAGO FREEWAY

happiness in gas slurping automobiles. Greater awareness of air pollution controls and a search for alternative sources of energy and transportation. So, went the general thinking, if regression to trolley cars or an advance to monorail be a possibility of upcoming mass transit, why bother with new freeways?

Nineteen seventy-five. Another vote. This time an alternative, a depressed freeway, had been suggested. A second referendum smiled, but barely, on this version-59,000 ayes to 51,000 nays.

Nineteen seventy-nine. Those electric cars, BARTS, bullet trains, monorails, subways, bus grids, Tijuana Trolleys, people movers, and other quick fixes of mass transit had not materialized in Phoenix. America, quite clearly, was no longer hostage to the motor car. It was happily married to it.

The city had bulged and spread and grown. If noticeably big city Phoenix was to fully accommodate culture, industry,

Arizona Highways Magazine/37

PAPAGO

and a seven-digit population, it would have to build freeways.

A third public vote reaffirmed support for the depressed Papago Freeway by three to one. (Pulliam died in 1975, and his newspapers were held in looser reins and regard.) Delays and debates, however, were far from done. Old concerns rose anew concerning the path of the freeway, the Moreland Corridor, a block-wide swath between midtown Moreland and Culver. Clearing it already had cancelled much of an old residential section of the city and continued to threaten historical buildings. Digging it, complained archeologists, would certainly destroy prehistoric ruins.

And not just any old ruins, but Hohokam villages dating back to A.D. 500 including La Ciudad (The City), one square mile of 106 houses, canals, burial sites, and ball courts. (See Arizona Highways Magazine, February, 1984.) More legal challenges to freeway routing, more studies and debates, more hesitation-and well into 1983, while a city's traffic bubbled.

In the end there was a state and federal grant of one million three hundred thousand dollars for an emergency excavation. The eleven-month dig went to the eleventh hour with Arizona State University teams moving out on a Sunday and bulldozers of Kokosing Construction Company, Incorporated, moving in on Monday.

To Gordon Weiner, professor of history at Arizona State University, and president of Arizona Past & Future Foundation, the group that launched the legal challenge on behalf of the Hohokam sites, the excavation was "a quick and dirty operation."

He would have preferred a freeway detour and total exploration and preservation of the sites, even if that meant decades or centuries to gently uncover all that was there.

On the other hand, he says, the threat of construction certainly concentrated attention on the area and that effectively squashed some negative beliefs that the sites had already been destroyed by urbanization. So from freeway hassle and division, says Weiner, "came a more careful look at both sites and major historical discoveries."

The dig proved that the Hohokams were first in the free world to cultivate barley "which calls for a rewriting of that portion of prehistory." It revealed the quality and quantity of their construction and that "filled in a necessary, missing gap of the intricacies of the social life of this particular Indian.

"The bureaucrats are more sensitive and now know that unless they take adequate Take care of these (historic) projects at early planning stages then they are in for a fight," he says.

Cost estimates for the slowpoke Papago Freeway have inflated to $700 million from $50 million budgeted in 1969. Phoenix, with a metropolitan population of 1.5 million, can claim only thirty-five miles of freeway while San Diego (population 1.5 million) has 160, Cleveland (2.8 million) 182, and Los Angeles (9.8 million) an unending 700 miles.

And there can be little civic pride in knowing that for more than a decade, the only missing link in the Interstate 10 chain from California to Florida has been a 20mile stretch across Phoenix.

But the tedious delay was not without benefits. "If, as proposed, we had blindly accepted an elevated freeway," said one city spokesman, "we eventually would have cringed before an eyesore about as sociable as the Great Wall of China."

The interim also has seen broader development of and closer attention to alternativative methods of mass transportation. Freeways, as was the general acceptance twenty years ago, are no longer considered panaceas by any city. Depending on population concentrations and movements, the national vogue is to a blend of freeways, bus grids, and light rail.

"Environmental studies (of the early '70s) took into account alternative forms of transportation, and fifty-foot medians are part of the (Papago) freeway for the possible use of light rail sometime in the future," explained Owen Ford, acting state engineer. "So it will probably be a better and more efficient freeway because we've taken some additional time to look and blend it in with the Phoenix street system and taken care of the environmental problems, sound, and interference with the community."

Yesterday, continues Ford, there was a certain ruthlessness about highway construction. The problems of sound and exhaust pollution and community inconvenience were realized but weren't allowed to stand in the way. "Highway engineers, traditionally, with the job they had to do in the early '50s, would knock on a door and say: 'Here we are, you've got to move,'" he recalls. "But we've gone from that approach to a system, a process where, although it takes a great deal longer to carry out, all facets of the community have an opportunity to be heard and for their input to be considered.

FREEWAY

"Without a delay, it (Papago Freeway) would have been constructed without noise walls and berms to protect facilities immediately adjacent to the freeway. To do it later would have been very expensive. Very, very expensive. And inconvenient."

When a civil engineer with Los Angeles County, Bill Ordway knew a freeway system considered to be the most efficient in the nation. "My personal view is that Los Angeles, as it has grown, simply has to have an extensive freeway system," he says. "You need these arteries if you want any kind of mobility, and a freeway is just a super street without stoplights."

Now, as director of the Arizona Department of Transportation, Ordway believes that Phoenix has grown to need such arteries. For although the city, unlike Los Angeles, did not grow up with the automobile, it certainly has grown to embrace it. "So it (the Papago) is a moment of maturity. People are basically saying: 'We want automotive transportation.' "And I don't think they (freeways) will dehumanize the city of Phoenix. They will tend to tie us together, make it easier to go from one part of the city to the other. So it will enhance the quality of life because it will enhance mobility."

"We'll have HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes for buses and car pools. From a visual standpoint, through the heart of town as a depression instead of an elevation, this will be a far less obstructive facility. Environmentally there is less impact. It's more neighborly, I guess. It just doesn't hurt you with noise and visual impact."

Charles Montooth, an architect with Taliesin West and a member of the original Papago project, shares Ordway's analysis of fortune falling from delay. "Yes, I do think we have been fortunate," he states. "We have had an opportunity to consider some of the other costs, the human costs of putting in a transportation system. Now it's time to look at freeways plus light rail plus an expanded bus system."

To many politicians and civic observers, the Papago Freeway stands as a monument to a moment when politics pivoted in the city of Phoenix.

"I'm no Fancy Dan political scientist or sociologist," says Jim Walsh, "but I see a real relationship between the freeway issue and the government of the City of Phoenix today." Walsh is an attorney. He was among the first to fight city hall and the freeway by requesting, by formal letter to the mayor, that the people be polled via the 1973 ballot.

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PAPAGO

text continued from page 38 "In the past, there were too few people controlling the direction of the city and those that were, were in for their own self-interest."

Then came 1969 and the Papago Freeway, the first citizen protests, and eventually a landslide of community opinion.

"People involved in the issue back then learned a sense of powerfulness instead of powerlessness," adds Walsh. "As a result of the freeway issue, Phoenix started talking about what sort of shape or design it should have. We went to the urban village concept. We went from a monolithic form of government to a multicentered source of power."

One of the city's new leaders is attorney Terry Goddard. He was elected mayor at thirty-seven, which means he grew up with the Papago Freeway. As a resident of 11th Avenue and Culver, he also grew up alongside its path. And as a citizen disturbed by the danger to Hohokam sites, Goddard, son of former Arizona Governor Sam Goddard, became a member and then counsel for the Arizona Past & Future group. Then he became mayor of Phoenix. Now he must examine the Papago Freeway in a new community light, not the least of which is a concern to stabilize the Moreland Corridor and clean up "a cut that has been opened and growing weeds since 1968.

"I think, in retrospect, we have had some benefits from the delay of the Papago Freeway," he states. "There was the blatant failure of the early (elevated) system and a design of the early '50s that was for a city of 100,000 people.

"I think we have an opportunity at this point to put resources that other cities are now using to repair their freeway systems into a light rail rapid transit system. And I heartily think that ten years from now we will end up way ahead of cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, and other cities developing problems with their freeway system."

Houston's freeways, he says, are currently 150 percent overapplied with constant congestion. Los Angeles and other cities, he feels, have been dehumanized by their networks.

As with Professor Weiner, a friend, Goddard firmly believes that a quiet bonus of the Papago's drawn out issue was "the threat of destruction that produced a sense of preservation and neighborhood spirit."

True. The danger begat public awareness that demanded studies that resulted in full reprieves for great chunks of the city's past. Historic districts, Kenilworth, Roosevelt, Encanto, and Chelsea Place, were plotted and declared. Buildings-from Kenilworth School where Barry Goldwater studied in short pants, through the 1911 home on East Willetta of soldier and pioneer historian James McClintock, to a 1927 Pay'N'Takit grocery store on Roosevelt were given the protection of listings in historic registers.

And in some instances, the route of a supposedly intractable freeway was even realigned to swerve like a slalom skier around historic churches and schools.

Societies sprouted. Encanto Citizens Association. Heritage Foundation of Arizona. Roosevelt Action Association. Regular historical tours were instituted and a full sense of history was raised.

There has, however, been destruction for the Papago, and in the end, some 2000 parcels costing an estimated $110 million will be gobbled by the progress of a freeway. In more human terms, that means once proud little homes, built in the '40s and before, mom and pop stores, service stations, office blocks, dozens of apartment buildings just like our Chanticlare, preschools, a full community, in fact, for an estimated 3000 citizens of Phoenix, has disappeared.

FREEWAY

So in setback there was progress, and within the apparent misfortunes of the Papago Freeway there have been advantages. For one corridor resident, the delay provided elbow room to petition two presidents and several governors and hold off her move for two decades. To the family that grew by four stepchildren, to the eighty-three-year-old blind woman terrified at moving, to the old-timer demanding a move to where there would be room to store his antique truck, there were years instead of months for the state's relocation personnel to find just the right accommodations with minimal trauma.

The Moreland Corridor was a very old portion of Phoenix. So were its residents. In those early months, when served state notice to move, they spoke a common plea. "Let me stay. I've lived here all my life. I want to die here." Then came years of delays that allowed such mercy.