GEORGEWORLD LLC: BUILDING PHOENIX FREEWAYS

March 29, 2010

How freeways remade Phoenix

The Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first, in the 1960s.

Motoring around metro Phoenix today, it's difficult to comprehend that this was not always a huge agglomeration of real-estate ventures connected by freeways. In fact, Phoenix didn't want them, would have been better off without many of them, yet couldn't avoid their eventual triumph.

In 1950, when Phoenix came in as America's 100th most populous city, it occupied a mere 17 square miles, with a population density of more than 6,200 per square mile, around what you'd find in today's Seattle or Portland. In other words, a real small city: cohesive, walkable, sustainable and scalable. Remnants of the old city exist, but much has been annihilated, not least by the freeways.

By 1960, the city of Phoenix had 439,170 people and nearly 188 square miles. It was a big city of the automobile age, the old streetcars long gone, and federally subsidized sprawl under way. Around this time, the state Highway Department adopted an ambitious freeway plan prepared by Wilbur Smith & Associates, one of the nation's leading highway transportation planning firms. It envisioned much of the system eventually built. The engineers had wanted to build freeways in Phoenix since the late 1940s. One route would have gone directly in front of the Hotel Westward Ho.

But most Phoenicians were horrified. They weren't enamored with the small Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first (it wound around at Durango Street to become the Maricopa Freeway, rammed through powerless barrios).

An urban legend persists that Eugene C. Pulliam single-handedly defeated the freeway plan in the early 1970s. Although the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette were indeed powerful in those days and not afraid to crusade (sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes not), freeways were widely resisted.

Phoenicians then didn't want to become another Los Angeles in this bad way, and they had a chance to avoid the fate. LA had shown (and Robert Moses' New York before it) that freeways didn't solve traffic congestion — they generated it through the phenomenon called induced demand. We didn't want worse smog. We didn't want to lose our views to concrete and the citrus groves to further sprawl. Of particular alarm was the 100-foot-high Papago Freeway Inner Loop planned across central Phoenix, with monstrous "helicoils" discharging traffic onto Third Avenue and Third Street.

Again, this is almost unimaginable to today's Phoenicians — that there would be a center city worth caring about and people who did care about it; that we would worry about losing the views and oasis/agriculture that made Phoenix so magical; that we could look 400 miles west and see failed transportation policy at its worst. So when the Papago Inner Loop was stopped in the 1970s, it was done so by popular vote, and — amazingly compared with today's polarization — the opposition crossed party lines.

LA wasn't the only cautionary example. Across the nation, freeways had divided cities, torn out historic neighborhoods, and contributed to blight. As a result, Portland stopped a freeway that would have cut through downtown along the Willamette River, today one of the city's beautiful focal points. Republican Gov. Tom McCall was a major opponent. Seattle saw a freeway revolt, too. In New York City, Jane Jacobs famously defeated a Moses plan for a freeway across lower Manhattan. But the road-building sectors were powerful and Phoenix's victory was temporary.

The Wilbur Smith plan had already done damage, even if most of it remained lines on a map. The Inner Loop corridor, especially between 15th Avenue and 16th Street, contained some of the city's most historic and lovely homes, as well as Kenilworth School. The area between McDowell and Roosevelt, and Central and 15th Avenues was one complete neighborhood, and included the Moreland and Portland Parkways — Moreland being especially beautiful with a canopy of old shade trees and lined by middle-class apartments. They were convenient to downtown.

Despite these advantages, investment in the area started to decline after the 1960 plan was unveiled. Loans became hard, if not impossible, to come by. Middle-class flight began — after all, a freeway was coming through. Transportation officials dithered through the 1960s — they didn't move with Moses-like speed to slam the freeway through, but they didn't stop it either. An alternative to connect the proposed Interstate 10 from the west at the Durango curve went nowhere.

Many people was conflicted. But Phoenix officials failed to do anything to protect these priceless and vulnerable neighborhoods. (The same kind of damage would later be done farther north with the one freeway that was stopped, the Paradise Parkway).

When the vote stopped the Papago Inner Loop, Phoenix reached a historic crossroads. Unfortunately, it made the wrong choice. Instead of beefing up transit and commuter rail, as well as finding the right policies and incentives to preserve agriculture and slow sprawl, officials did nothing. Sprawl building continued. Transit was ignored, indeed, many mayors, including the 1960s golden boy Milt Graham, were hostile to it.

Traffic got worse. The surface street network was overwhelmed, even as thousands of shade trees were felled to widen major arterials. Freeways became inevitable, with the slight concession of putting the Papago underground for six blocks through central Phoenix and sidestepping Kenilworth. The region ended up building one of the more extensive freeway networks in the nation. Most of the magic was lost. Phoenix got all of LA's bad and none of its good.

The outcome was probably unavoidable. This was the apex of the auto age, when gasoline was cheap and the damage caused by sprawl and endless driving not well understood. Especially for the men in authority at the time, the rebellion against the "dirty city" of the industrial age and the promise of suburbia was strong. As with the CAP, most didn't comprehend that the results of the freeway system would destroy so much of the beauty and soul of Phoenix.

There were other forces at work: First, hundreds of thousands of newcomers had arrived, with no historical ties or commitment to the place. Second, real-estate interests profiting from sprawl became a powerful lobby favoring freeways. Third, the combination of old Arizona politics, "rugged individualism" and the newer hard right were particularly hostile to any alternatives to freeways, much less constraining "a man's right to do what he wants with his land."

Even before the 1990s freeway program began in full-swing, freeways were being built, with big help from Washington. Black Canyon was started in the 1950s, a two-lanes-each-way, grade-depressed expressway (a "baby freeway," my great aunt, the former LA dress designer, said condescendingly). It was extended east and south as the Maricopa Freeway — horridly elevated, but few cared about the views of poor people living there. By the late 1970s, the Superstition Freeway had reached Dobson, beginning the destruction of downtown Mesa. In those days, at least, the cut bordering the Superstition was covered with cooling grass.

One intriguing quirk is that the metro Phoenix freeway system that has so enriched the landed elite has been paid for by a sales tax that falls hardest on the working poor and middle class. Most cities have loops and spurs (e.g. I-405) that are part of the Interstate Highway System and have been paid for mostly with federal gas tax and other dollars. Phoenix's resistance to freeways may have cut off Interstate funding.

Not in Phoenix, aside from the two main Interstates. This is astonishing, and not merely a result that Phoenix's Hamlet mentality delayed freeway building. For example, Charlotte is finishing a loop I-485 outer belt with federal funding. But by the time Phoenix realized it required freeways, the congressional delegation was dominated by lawmakers who won't being home "pork." Thus, your federal tax dollars have gone to build transportation projects elsewhere, while your local tax dollars have been used to make otherwise worthless desert or worth-less farm land into gold for the powerful development interests.

Now the reckoning. Because transportation dollars went to, for example, enrich the LDS farmers in the East Valley who converted their crops to subdivisions, infrastructure is wildly distorted. I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson was inadequate when it was opened; now it's lethally overcrowded. Freeways also contributed to the disastrous group-think that all Phoenix really needs is to keep building subdivisions and everything else will take care of itself. And although freeways made developers rich, they also created a urban problems that are public costs being pushed ever further into the future.

The freeway building continues. The South Mountain Freeway is complete and outer loops are under way. Phoenix is the last major metropolitan area in the country to continue its dependence on this 1930s transportation technology (begun in New York by Robert Moses). Seattle has removed its Alaskan Way Viaduct. Meanwhile, LA has stopped building freeways and has one of the nation's largest systems of commuter rail and light rail, as well as subways.

In Phoenix, congestion, the heat island, pollution, inconvenience and ugliness keep getting worse. Now we face the consequences of in climate change — and metro Phoenix has no Plan B. It is only "studying" commuter rail. Light rail has attracted private investment but extending the 1985 transportation tax was stuck in the Legislature as of 2023.

Freeways Gallery (click on image to enlarge):

The national interstate highway map in 1958. Only I-17 between Phoenix and Flagstaff had been completed. Note that I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson was intended as a four-lane freeway but it was built as a rural two-lane interstate. The state still hasn't completed the widening as of 2023.

The original Wilbur Smith Plan. Most of it was eventually built, with additions of the Loop 303 and the South Mountain Freeway.

Building a portion of the Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first, in the early 1960s.

A postcard view of Black Canyon Freeway. Greenwood Memorial Cemetery is to the left, along Van Buren Street, and beyond that mostly farmland.

Cars whisk by on Black Canyon beside the iconic Goodyear sign and a billboard for the Legend City amusement park.

This 1960s view of Black Canyon shows the below-grade-level profile of most of the freeway.

It's 1968 and construction of the Broadway curve segment of the Maricopa Freeway is under way. The Maricopa Freeway towered over its route, demolishing historic barrios.

In 1975, before the area around Baseline Road and to the south was built up, Interstate 10's descent into the (then) verdant Salt River Valley was an eye-catcher. At night it was spectacular.

A "helicoil" rendering. The two giant off ramps would have deposited traffic from the elevated Papago Freeway Inner Loop onto Third Street and Third Avenue.

The destruction of the corridor that would carry the Inner Loop. Some 3,000 houses, many irreplaceable historic structures, were lost.

Inner Loop construction in the 1990s. Shady Moreland Parkway is gone. Although the freeway was below grade, it would take years and heroic efforts by preservationists to bring back the historic neighborhoods nearly destroyed by the project.

"The Stack" where I-17 and I-10 come together west of downtown. The view is southeast with Greenwood Memorial Lawn Cemetery.

The Piestewa Freeway (Arizona 51) northbound. It was originally proposed as spur Interstate 510 but Phoenician's resistance killed the plan (and the funding). Then it was Squaw Peak Parkway with a large and controversial public art pottery project. Finally it turned into an ordinary freeway, funded with regressive sales taxes.

Driving through the crash-ridden tunnel under the deck park. An alternative proposal, to connect I-10 to the Maricopa Freeway at the Durango curve, went nowhere.

This plaque shows how Phoenix's resistance kept I-10 from being completed years after most major Interstates. But now Phoenix has one of the most extensive freeway networks in the country.