Photography by Werner Segarra GG George, an ardent champion for historic neighborhood preservation, in her 1932 Spanish Colonial home on Palm Lane in Phoenix

Preservationists have spent the last 25 years reclaiming what had become some of the Valley’s most dilapidated neighborhoods. But with the economic meltdown and government incentives drying up, is historic
preservation in the city becoming, well, history?

It was late summer 1969, and GG George was on her way to drop off fabric for a charity clothing drive at a house off Moreland Street near Downtown Phoenix, the sort of civic-minded errand that seems somehow quaint today but almost too pat for a young housewife bustling about town in the era before Ms. magazine.

Although most of the elaborate mansions that once adorned “Millionaire’s Row” near Central Avenue – a magnificent brood of High Victorian-, Queen Anne- and Eastlake Shingle-style manses that had garnered comparisons to Nob Hill in San Francisco – had long been torn down, there were still some remarkable Craftsman bungalows and Italianate-style homes a few blocks west. It was clear the neighborhood had been struggling against urban neglect, but even that didn’t seem to account for all of the empty lots and vacant houses George was passing.

“I asked the woman where I was dropping off my fabric what was going on, and she said, ‘They’re buying up all these houses; they want to put a freeway through here,’” George recalls. “And my response – because this has always been my attitude – was, ‘What are we going to do about it?’”

It was a bold reaction for a woman who had only recently moved into the area. George had been born in upstate New York, but her father was an engineer who designed power plants and moved from job to job, so by the time George was 3, the family had lived in 36 states. They eventually settled in Houston, where George attended Lee College, but it seems a wanderlust born of her itinerant early childhood kicked in, and she applied to be a stewardess for Pan Am.

“I used to wear my hat and uniform and go to schools and tell girls how they, too, could become stewardesses, because that’s what every girl wanted to be,” she says. She flew mostly to Latin America, scrimping and eating hot dogs for a month so she could buy duty-free perfume in Panama.

She met her husband, married and “retired” from the airline, as women were expected to do. The couple moved to Phoenix in 1966 and three years later bought a 1932 Spanish Colonial three-bedroom at 11th Avenue and Palm Lane for a price that George would prefer not to see in print. Suffice it to say, it was less than what most new cars cost nowadays. Were the house on the market today, it’s not hard to imagine prospective buyers gushing over the huge gothic-arched window in the living room, coved ceilings and original mahogany doors. But the previous owners seemed to have had more contemporary ambitions for it.

GG George has lived in her historic Encanto district home (above and below left) for 41 years – longer than any of its previous owners.

“Everything was turquoise,” George says, from the plaster walls to the baseboards to the fireplace’s original cast-concrete hearth.

In fact, it wasn’t long after George had set about tearing out the wall-to-wall shag carpet (again, turquoise) and refinishing the original hardwood floors that she learned about the plan to drive the final link of Interstate 10 right through the heart of some of central Phoenix’s most historic neighborhoods, a mile from her house no less, and she was appalled when she saw the plan itself: a 100-foot-tall skyway with massive spiral “helicoils” serving as on-off ramps. She helped lead the charge against construction, and with the unexpected but vocal support of Eugene Pulliam, former publisher of The Arizona Republic, opponents managed to delay the project for almost a decade. By that time, a federally mandated impact study required that the elevated design be scrapped in favor of a more “humane” sunken roadway complete with a deck-park tunnel between Third Street and Third Avenue. But hundreds of historic houses were lost in the process anyway.

Although George has now lived in her home longer than any of its previous owners – 41 years – it doesn’t seem quite right to say that she ever settled there. Beneath a poised and impeccable demeanor punctuated occasionally by a sly wit, George bears a sort of restless determination. It seems to account for how, at an age she will only describe as “unlisted,” she manages to juggle a six-day workweek as proprietor of a high-end fabric store in Scottsdale with a slew of volunteer positions, such as her seat on the Encanto Village Planning Committee, the vice-presidency of the Phoenix Historic Neighborhoods Coalition, and presidency of the Encanto Citizens Association, the first historic neighborhood association in the city, which she spearheaded in 1973.

Today, George is arguably the grande dame of historic preservation in Phoenix, having helped to lay the groundwork and foster the movement that would eventually transform some of the city’s oldest and most blighted neighborhoods into the kind of real estate where a meticulously restored, 850-square-foot bungalow might fetch $300,000. Every year, hundreds of locals turn out for historic home tours and the chance to ogle such seemingly insignificant period details as original built-in ironing boards and long-defunct milk doors. By almost any measure, the past few decades have been a triumph for George’s cause. But today, that may all be coming to an end.

It’s no secret that Phoenix has more of a reputation for bulldozing its history than for saving it; the surprise might be just how successful preservationists have been. In the past 25 years, Phoenix has designated nearly three-dozen residential historic districts encompassing thousands of homes and placed more than 200 individual properties under historic protection. But the meltdown in the local real-estate market and its domino effect on state and city budgets aims to have a dramatic effect on the future of historic preservation in the city.

In retrospect, GG George was only slightly ahead of public sentiment in the kind of skepticism that kept her from seeing those looping helicoils as proud monuments to progress and civilization – the Eiffel Tower of their time, as some boosters billed them.

Celebrations of the city’s centennial in 1970 traded heavily on promoting Phoenix as a city of the future, with Arizona Highways publishing aerial photos of a sprawling desert metropolis, as if there were something to celebrate in the sprawl itself. A portfolio in PHOENIX magazine titled “A City on the Rise” showcased the gleaming new additions to the skyline with an introduction that reveled in the city’s “clean-cut, modern high-rise buildings” and “the concrete and steel forms of our modern, luxurious apartments.” An ad featuring the First National Bank of Arizona’s new 27-story, glass-and-concrete box tower (now home to Wells Fargo) portrayed it as a candle on the city’s birthday cake.

But over the next decade, residents began to show signs that they were conflicted about this headlong rush toward tomorrow. It was, in fact, a decisive citywide vote in 1973 that halted construction of the I-10 through Downtown, though voters reversed their decision two years later. What was becoming clear to some was that the city of the future looked an awful lot like any other city of the future, with its highways, strip malls and boxy, knock-off modernist architecture. Phoenix, it seemed, was on its way to becoming one of the most generic cities in America.

All across the country, historic preservationists began to wage a battle against the creeping homogeneity of modern American culture, seeking to protect what made their cities “distinctive” and gave them a “sense of place.” In order to do that, they often had to turn toward the type of architecture that pre-dated the advent of fast-food chains and shopping malls; in other words, they had to leave suburbia and head downtown again, back to an urban core that often had been left to molder under the effects of drugs, poverty and crime.

Real estate agent Vicki Vanderhoff (above) and her Tudor Revival home (below left) in the Willo historic district

The only problem for Phoenix was that the city didn’t have much of an urban core to return to. The first survey of historically significant buildings, commissioned by the city in 1979, admitted as much while still valiantly straining to make its case: “The absence of large neighborhoods of elaborate Victorian houses, the relative newness of even the oldest parts of Phoenix, and the lack of association with major dramatic events in American history should not be seen as invalidating historic preservation as a significant force in Phoenix,” the survey’s authors wrote. “Indeed, in a place like Phoenix that is so overwhelmingly new, the recognition and protection of older features of the city takes on a particular importance. Old buildings and neighborhoods provide a connection with the past that might otherwise be totally lacking.”  

It took several more years for this sentiment to sink in, but once it did, the city set about making historical designations at a fevered pitch. In 1986, new zoning overlays were adopted specifically to protect historically significant properties, and an office of historic preservation was created at City Hall. Phoenix designated its first two historic districts, Roosevelt and Coronado, that year. Thanks to a series of major bond funds passed by voters that would earmark more than $25 million for preservation, over the next couple decades Phoenix would not only protect scores of individual landmarks but would establish an average of almost two residential historic districts every year.

It’s an irony that seems lost on many of the city’s most ardent champions of preservation that a majority of the districts they helped create were themselves the precursors to the type of metastasizing sprawl that gave their cause its sense of urgency in the first place. Because what most of the historic district residents seek to preserve, in effect, are the city’s first suburbs.

The completion of the Roosevelt Dam in 1911 ensured a steady supply of water to the Valley, and the population boom that followed, coupled with a rise in automobile sales, spurred developers to begin envisioning new “residential parks” in the orange groves and virgin desert north of Phoenix, toward the city limits at McDowell Road and beyond. A brochure for the exclusive Palmcroft development, where curved palm-lined streets were illuminated with chic neoclassical streetlamps touted its location near McDowell Road and Seventh Avenue as “just far enough away from congested areas to be quiet and clean.”

Though the scale of the homes varied by class, the pattern in many of these developments was more or less the same, whether in posh Encanto, the upper-middle-class Willo and FQ Story, or the more working-class subdivisions that now comprise Fairview Place and Coronado (where, in the interest of full disclosure, I happen to live). The building boom of the 1920s produced a range of romantic, Hollywood-inspired, period-revival styles, the two most popular of which made for some odd juxtapositions: Spanish Colonial and English Tudor. Construction virtually halted by 1932, only to be revived by the creation of the Federal Housing Administration and government-backed mortgages in the late 1930s. By then tastes had changed, and in any case, the FHA wanted homes to be more affordable and functional, stripped of any unnecessary ornamentation. Enter the ranch.