Peoria: Tranquility Lost

This is a tale of two city seals. The old seal is thoroughly tra-ditional, featuring a saguaro, a sunset, and a lush green field. The new one is abstract. Four small squares are arranged as a dia-mond and out of it grow winglike palm fronds waving in the breeze. Both read CITY OF PEORIA. In April of 1991, Peoria City Manager Dennis Frederickson began sending out stationery emblazoned with the new seal. All hell broke loose.

Snapped a' city councilwoman, "If that is Peoria, then Peoria has no meaning." A street poll by The Peoria Times found an-noyance and bafflement. One Peorian said the new seal looked like "a bunch of bananas," and another quipped that it was "three holy spirits over a checkerboard."

Petitions flew. Frederickson became suddenly unemployed - thanks in part to his adoption of the seal without asking the city council. In a newspaper interview, the seal's designer made a ref-erence to "hayseeds," and Peorians proudly began sporting but-tons that read, "I'm a hayseed."

All this wasn't just a trivial small-town contretemps. It was a fascinating illustration of the tensions that sometimes erupt when a quiet farm town is captured by the urban gravity of a huge city Phoenix, in this case and transformed into a booming suburb almost overnight.

PEORIA A CITY IN TRANSITION

In 1970 Peoria had a population of 4,792. In 1980 the number had swollen to 12,351, and by 1990 it had risen to 50,618. For the year 2010, planners have projected 136,000, a figure that sounds realistic only if Peoria locates the brake pedal.

All the satellites in Phoenix's orbit are growing like crazy, but none has been buffeted more than Peoria by the forces of change. Opportunity has come to the town, but its innocence and tranquility are history.

The town was founded in 1886 by a colony of four families that came out west from Peoria, Illinois, convinced by one William J. Murphy that the Salt River Valley of central Arizona could be a farmer's Eden. Murphy had just finished building the Arizona Canal and was entitled to the profits from whatever water rights he could sell.

The industrious Midwesterners quickly made the tiny community self-sufficient and productive. The first one-room school appeared in 1891, and the Peoria Presbyterian Church was founded the next year, with nine charter members.

In 1920 an Arizona history book proclaimed there was no better illustration of prosperity in the Valley of the Sun than Peoria and predicted that "Peoria, Arizona, is destined to occupy the same important position in this state that Peoria does in Illinois."

Phoenix, what little there was of it, was a long 15 miles away. For many Peoria families, it might as well have been 150 miles. Peoria City Councilman Johnny Osuna, born in 1934, says he was "eight or nine" when his family first took him into Phoenix. Cotton was the centerpiece of Peoria's economy. Priscilla Cook, who with her late husband, Orville, cultivated 375 acres, remembers when the town had three busy gins. "When they were running day and night, it looked like it was snowing, there was so much lint in the air," she says. "People didn't like it, but they realized it was their livelihood."

Cook, who has lived in Peoria since 1929, found the town an idyllic place in which to grow up and later to raise her own children. “Everybody knew each other and looked out for each other. One time, when our son was 10, he went to Pat Coor, the barber, and said he wanted a Mohawk haircut. Pat called and said, ‘Priscilla, your son wants a Mohawk. Do you know about this?’ I said ‘Yes, he has our permission.’ How many places today The West Valley town’s original seal (OPPOSITE PAGE) was replaced briefly by a controversial more abstract design (RIGHT).

would you find a barber who would be willing to do that?" If life was good for the farm owners, it was less so for the farm workers, most of whom were Mexican-American and poor. Some of the grammar schools were segregated until the 1950s, and the concept of multicultur-alism was a long way off.

"In 1944 I was 10 years old and still not fluent in English," recalls Johnny Osuna. "One day the teacher asked me for a nickel, and she gave me a peanut butter sandwich. When I tasted it, I couldn't eat itI'd never had food like that before!" Osuna trashed the sandwich and left school to eat lunch at the Peoria Cafe, as he usually did. Apparently there was some new policy forbidding off-campus lunch, which Osuna didn't understand. The teacher tracked him to the café, picked him up by the hair, slapped him, and threw him against a wall.

A bread delivery man who watched Osuna's thrashing followed him back to school, got his name and address, and urged the boy's mother to report the teacher. "She got fired," says Osuna, "and right after that I got put into an integrated class. I began to see Caucasian children,

"'I'd like to get some acreage out here someday,' says Kory Murphy

many of whom are my friends to this day." Edmund Tang, a former mayor, says that such ethnic friction in the little community has been rare. "When I was growing up here, we were the only Chinese family in town, and I never once felt any discrimination. During World War II, when I was in high school, they enrolled 30 Japanese-American kids because everything west of Grand Avenue was off-limits to them [Luke Air Force Base was nearby]. We all played together; there was no discrimination. It was a great experience.

"Peoria has always been about people helping people, concern, and tolerance. I really have treasured that."

The growing pains erupted in 1960 when an army of construction trucks rumbled not into Peoria but the new retirement village of Sun City next door. This in turn began bringing more families with young children to Peoria because there were jobs building homes and providing services to Sun Citians. But the Peoria Unified School District encompassed all those new homes in Sun City, and what at first looked like a property-tax windfall became a cold freeze for Peoria. Sun City, says Peoria Mayor Ken Forgia, defeated about 18 bond issues for Peoria schools in the 1960s and early '70s. Part of the reason was that some of the Sun Citians had been told, incorrectly, that their new homes would be in no school district, and they felt betrayed. Others, just transplanted to Arizona, couldn't be persuaded that they shared any responsibility for educating a generation of strangers. "Our family was right in the middle of that," Forgia recalls. "We had four kids, and the schools were so overcrowded they were on double shifts. Some of them would leave for school before dawn, and the others wouldn't get home until night." In 1974 Peoria finally managed to expel Sun City from the district, saying good riddance to $100 million in assessed valuation along with that troublesome torrent of "no" votes. It was bitter medicine, but it saved the school system, which had long been the town's pride. In 1991 test scores for every grade in Peoria schools ranked at least 10 percentile points above the national average. "It's ironic," says Forgia, "but the school district itself caused some of the growth that was overloading it. One of the reasons families were moving here was the excellent reputation of the schools." Peoria's next problem was a coincidence of trends. Small-scale farming was becoming less and less viable, so, in the 1970s, Peoria's farmers began selling their land to be plowed into subdivisions. The town's population boomed, and the boom neatly coincided with the tax revolt fanning across the country from California. City services lagged far behind growth and never caught up. Peoria today sprawls over 67 square miles but has no police substations. In area, the town is larger than Minneapolis, St. Louis, or San Francisco. In some ways Peoria has prepared for the city it will become with startling prescience. At downtown's edge, three blocks from rows of tiny family businesses dating that date to the 1920s and '30s, a gleaming $30 million municipal government complex in an architectural style that might be called Prairie School Revival has arisen. It's a surreal sight: fields of cotton and alfalfa surround it on three sides. In 1990 City Hall workers had to battle an invasion of woolly worms from the cotton fields. Peorians, not surprisingly, are feuding over their municipal showplace, too. Forgia, who ran for office on a 'I still think the people are what make Peoria. I hope we never lose the small-town identity,'

says Priscilla Cook

(ABOVE) inside the Peoria Presbyterian Church, which was built in the late 19th century.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Some of the congregation gather in front of the Presbyterian church.

spend-more-wisely platform, thinks it looks like “something you'd see in Washington, D.C.” He doesn't intend that as praise. Osuna, however, says, “We've taken a lot of flak over it, but I think history will prove we were right to do it.” Meanwhile, petitions are flying to keep the city council from doing anything like it again.

Jana Thorson, a reporter who covers City Hall for The Peoria Times, says that conflict is inevitable in fast-growing Arizona cities, but it's more dramatic in Peoria because of the unbelievable pace of the growth. “Every community goes through growing pains, but you don't see as much controversy because the old politicians move on or die off. Here, the old guard is still on the council, fighting the progressives, and you see it in every meeting. Every vote is three to three, with the mayor having to cast the deciding vote.” She adds, with a laugh: “This is a great first job for a journalist.”

Growth is healthy in all living organ-

Isms, including cities. It's far from ideal, though, when a city grows 956 percent in 20 years, as Peoria has. Inevitably, it means too many strangers, too little planning, no agreed-upon vision of what the community should be.

In 956-percent Peoria, Priscilla Cook feels a lifetime of love for the town on one hand, wistful sadness on the other. Since the death of her husband in 1991, she has become a one-woman ambassador for Peoria, vigorously promoting it in the present tense but also working to preserve the memories of what it was through her work in the fledgling Peoria Historical Society.

“The changes are good in a way and painful in a way,” she says. “It's wonderful now to be able to shop at home. We used to have to go to downtown Phoenix to shop for clothes. But I also miss the small town. At one time, Peoria was known as the rose capital of the world. But roses can only be grown on the same land for so long. We used to produce lettuce, vegetables, melons. We used to have a produce stand, but it burned down five years ago, and it wasn't rebuilt. It makes me sad to see subdivisions where farms used to be.” The upside is that in Peoria, as in any booming Arizona city, you can invent yourself, become whatever you choose, without the molasses of entrenched power holding you back. “There are great opportunities for newcomers here if they want to get involved,” says Mayor Forgia. “At one time, we had five people on the city council who'd been here less than 10 years.” By the way, that new city seal already resides in the dustbin of history. The city council simmered over it for a year and in July, 1992, voted to trash it.