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I'd say roosevelt has a pretty good explanation of why houses in the encanto area has basements,I don't know of any houses in mesa that do.my house is early 60's & it doesn't.
I'd say roosevelt has a pretty good explanation of why houses in the encanto area has basements,I don't know of any houses in mesa that do.my house is early 60's & it doesn't.
Where I live in Mesa (near the Mormon Temple); quite a few homes near me have true basements/cellars. Admittedly; they are mostly pre WW II............
I moved here in 1971 and remember Lincoln Drive was jsut 2 lanes and my cousins son called it the "Whee" rd because it was hilly not flat like it is now. I also rmember the big rains in winter/spring of '72/'73 and watching crazy people tubing down Hayden Rd in the flood water before they put in the greenbelt. Kush was coach at ASU and we used to be able to climb up the buttes to party and watch the games...times gone by
What great memories! Phoenix was pretty cool back in the 1970's... what happened?
Guess I'm too young for any knowledge of the Cental Ave dairy. (Nice to know I'm still too young for something) It's fun to see the old ads from generations before the "Got Milk?" campaign, though. Message hasn't changed--Drink more milk!
We got dairy products delivered from Kruft when I was a kid. And I seem to have mental image remnants of a dairy operation around 19th Ave & Glendale; or maybe that's just a false memory implanted by evil milk producers.
On a different subject, but related to early 1900's Phoenix; my grandmother grew up in a small community called Riverside, which I think was somewhere along the north side of the Salt River west of downtown, but I don't know how far west. Her dad had a small grocery or general store. If anybody knows anything about "Riverside" I'd be interested to learn it.
"North side of the Salt River west of downtown." Can you imagine how cool Phoenix would be if we had built in on the banks of the Salt River instead of building a damn dam above Apache Lake and choking off the river? Think San Antonio, Texas or ?.
Anybody else go to the big used book store on the south edge of the city in the 60s? Any idea where it was? It was like a big ole warehouse jammed with books, a sort of low rent Bookman's.
I'm trying to remember where we used to go horse riding in the desert when we lived here in 64-65 and ten years later. It was somewhere on the north side not the south. Was there a place on Shea? I was offered a job as a "lady wrangler" but, perhaps unfortunately, I chose to go back to college. The boys would ride off to visit with girlfriends and didn't get the work done. The woman who owned the place thought a girl might be more reliable. I would have been, anyway.
When we lived in Phoenix the first time we knew people who had been here in the Territorial days. That was amazing. One neighbor in his 80s took my father and brother down Fishcreek Hill in a harrowing drive where he acted as if he were driving horses instead of a car that needed his hands on the steering wheel a bit more securely and his eyes a bit more on the road. He drove a wagon with dynamite to build Roosevelt Dam and he drove a stagecoach. A distant cousin of my mother had gone to gatherings at the Territorial Governor's house, which was really cool but back then society was very small and it wouldn't have taken a lot to get invited or to know the man and his wife. It wasn't as hot then and she only used her swamp cooler a few months of the year. It also wasn't as planted up so was good for people with allergies and lung problems unlike today. I can't live here today. I'm sick just visiting from both the plants and the pollution.
Is there a map online that shows the city as it was in the early 60s? I remember we came during a recession and there were abandoned housing developments in the desert that were just ghostly roads and lots and for sale signs. Uptown was just being built. We lived in a very safe neighborhood that appears to be as nice today, although minus orange trees that dropped green fruit onto the road that we kicked as we rode our bikes. There were no mansions anywhere around then but our house was the largest I have ever lived in before or since. It was easily twice as large as the house we moved to next in Illinois because they were going for a song in that bust period in Phoenix, and even so we lost money on it when we left and the bust was still continuing. My father's job didn't work out but it was an eye opening experience that changed our lives.
I saw a boy on a skateboard yesterday going up a road I had taken from school and that reminded me that my father got us the newest thing from CA--wooden skateboards we used on the sidewalks, only a slightly more modern version of what he had made as a child with, of course, a skate and a board. I like the continuity.
We came at Easter and when we got off the plane it was like we were entering a tropical paradise. (Yes, I'm quite aware it's in the desert. But that's how it seemed as the wall of floral scents hit us as we walked down the stairs to the airport tarmac and how it seemed as we stared in amazement at the plants all the way to our house. We even had a little fig tree with sun warmed figs. Wow.) I had culture and climate shock the whole time I lived here in the 60s but we came back for Easter vacations for years after we moved away, when Old Scotsdale was my personal highlight of any visit, until the pollution became ugly. By the time we lived here in the mid 70s it was sad and ugly. It took me all these years to come back. Maybe technology will save Phoenix. All is not lost. Look at Lake Erie. It was so bad it caught on fire and yet it was brought back from the brink.
We left because as my father told people over and over who asked how he could move from such a gorgeous place, "You can't eat scenery." Now I'm the one caught in the grip of a recession and in deep trouble. Everything old is new again. But it's fun to remember what made it special before. I thank the contributors to this thread.
That stagecoach driver sounds like my grandfather!! He was born in Italy in 1893 and brought to the U.S. with his older brother, as a toddler by my great-grandparents. Three more boys were born to that family after they arrived in the U.S. Most of the them are buried in Bisbee, AZ. At 14, he was an apprentice electrition on the Copper Queen Hotel. He decided he wanted to be an electrician after he saw so many men die in mining accidents in Bisbee. Later, after he married my {Irish Catholic] grandmother in Globe, AZ, he became a stagecoach (limosine) driver for a time. He ended up owning a scrap metal company in Phoenix and had one son and one daughter.
Phoenix has grown so much. It is supposed to be the fastest growing metro area in the US for the next 20+ years. I am thinking that buying land in Phoenix metro area would be a great idea.
A few more thoughts on basements. Since houses were elevated off the ground with wood beams it was very cheap to put in a basement, they were simply a square hole in the gound with concrete steps leading out to a simple almost horizontal wooden door outside at the back of the house. Many people used the basement for storing food before refrigeration, it was the coolest place you could be. Also, coal was still used for heating so the furnace would be down there along with the hot water heater that blew up a lot in old Phoenix. Better to blow in the basement than the wall between the kitchen and dining room, which is where a lot of hot water tanks were placed.
All houses I have been in that were built in the 1900 - 1920 era had basements, all over Phoenix, not just the Encanto area. The floor of the houses were about 15 inches off the ground for air circulation and the basements usually had the hot water heater in them. Later the basements held the old air conditioners in the 1930's that used water towers outside. There was also a flooding problem in early Phoenix so houses usually had steps at the front porch. During the Depression, people would rent out the basements.
I remember some old houses in the area north of Roosevelt between 24th street and 16th street that had basements. Most of them looked a lot older than the then-recent (late 1950s construction) ranch-style homes in the neighborhoods. When I was a kid, the Cub Scouts had a bottle collection drive (remember those?) You would go door to door and ask people to donate their glass soda bottles, which could be turned in at the grocery store for a small return on the deposit you paid when you bought them and returned to the local bottling plant (recycling, 1960s style). I pulled a cart for miles collecting bottle donations to raise money for our scout pack, and remember being invited into a fairly creepy house in that area that had a basement by the elderly owner. I remember thinking how weird it was to have a room underground, with exposed timbers and a bare lightbulb swinging crazily on a cord from the ceiling. Boxes of damp, mildewed-smelling old draperies. Big sacks of rock salt for the water softener torn open and spilled out on the linoleum floor. The sudden realization that the owner was standing in the doorway between me and safety as I gathered up the bottles...and no one knew I was there. Luckily, the basement owner was neither a serial killer or a molester and I survived to tell thee. I probably would have knowingly risked going into the home of a serial killer (if that term had been used back then) to collect bottles because I wanted the top prize (a cub scout knife) so durn much.
It's amazing they things we did back then and survived - playing in the streets, riding bicycles with no helmets, riding in cars with no seat belts, much less shoulder harnesses, playing pick-up baseball games in vacant lots filled with big rocks and broken glass (sliding into home could be a life-threatening experience back then), spending endless hours in the sun without sunblock, trick-or-treating without parental accompaniment and accepting (and even eating) homemade cookies, popcorn balls, and caramel apples from total strangers.
I'd never let my kids do any of that now, but life seemed safer in the early 1960s here.
It's amazing they things we did back then and survived -
this has been going around, but worth seeing again:
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned
HOW TODEAL WITH IT ALL!
And YOU are one of them!CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. and while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!
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Phoenix Memories
) It's fun to see the old ads from generations before the "Got Milk?" campaign, though. Message hasn't changed--Drink more milk!
