How now, brown cloud? As State agencies struggle to clean up the harmful pollution that hangs over the Phoenix skyline, the recent rash of haboobs stirs up even more trouble. — why won’t the brown cloud just blow away?
Every day people venture into Arizona’s wilderness ill-equipped to contend with its dangers. So we asked two “survivormen” to school us in the art of staying alive in mettle-testing scenarios, from wandering alone in the desert without water to fending off hypothermia to encountering the venomous fangs of a rattler. It’s everything you always wanted to know about edible twigs and dung-befouled water, but were afraid to ask.
During World War II, the remote western Arizona desert proved an ideal place for the U.S. Army to test a bizarre weapon designed to blind and baffle the enemy. Camp Bouse was a top secret base established in 1943 as part of the California-Arizona Maneuver Area to prepare tanks and troops for the war in Europe. Commanded by General George Patton, the base accommodated 5,000 soldiers and was
Southern Californians flocked to a western Arizona town for quickie marriages and backroom gambling in the 1930s until a failed statewide gambling referendum gave the house edge to Las Vegas.
I f you’re not a snowbird searching for a bucolic trailer park to pass the winter, there’s little reason to linger in Salome. A funky, forgotten hamlet of 1,690, it sits about 60 miles off the California border like a serene retiree bundled up against the desert winds. There are no department stores or tourist haunts, and absolutely nothing to suggest that Salome once briefly challenged Las Vegas as the gambling capital of the West.
A mural project and new gallery on 16th Street add flavor to First Friday art walks.
It starts with a vaguely familiar face, painted in black-and-gray on the side of a building at the corner of 16th and Windsor streets. The portrait of a young Mexican man with a dark mustache and sunglasses makes passersby stop and say, “I swear I know that guy!” before seeing that the image segues into sugar skulls and jagged abstract patterns of silver and green.
Valley filmmakers court stardom with their Cave Creek-shot oddball feature.
Valley-bred filmmakers Ryan Page and Chris Pomerenke cast well-regarded Hollywood actors in their latest and most ambitious production, but the movie is hardly lacking for homegrown Arizona talent.
“You see those girls?” Page asks, pointing to the editing bay where the duo’s soon-to-be-unleashed cornpone comedy Queens of Country is getting a final layer of post-production polish. “Those girls in the scene? They’re hookers we found in the back of the Phoenix New Times. ’Cause where else are you gonna find hookers, right?”
More archival photos of Jay Newton’s defunct, faux-Brit steakhouse Beef Eaters.
Museum Piece: The Alvarado district was founded in the early 1900s by newspaperman Dwight B. Heard when he built a 6,000-square-foot home at Monte Vista Road and Central Avenue and purchased the surrounding 160 acres.
A groundbreaking coalition aims to preserve acres of wild Valley land and the plentiful wildlife, tourism and heritage it supports.
Following a decade of massive and unprecedented growth, a question emerges: How does one protect the pristine land that makes Arizona so appealing? A broad coalition of Valley organizations has the answer: Designate it as wilderness.
A Valley rock-music institution is reborn – sort of – near the original music venue that made the “Tempe sound” famous.
The old Long Wong’s on Mill was more than a place to score cheap hot wings and cheaper beer – it was also an iconic, nationally-acclaimed music venue where ’90s-era rock junkies could get a regular fix of emerging bands like the Gin Blossoms, The Refreshments and Dead
Fretzy’s Unfiltered Ale
When Greg Fretz and George Hancock opened Phoenix Ale Brewery last fall, it became the 26th craft brewery in Arizona. That might seem like an ample number for a single state, but comparatively speaking, it’s paltry. The beer-crazy berg of San Diego boasts 33 breweries, and Portland, Oregon – no suds slouch itself – has 29. By craft-brew standards, the Valley and its 4.2 million residents are criminally underserved.
A new player on Lower Grand Avenue has just upped the resurgent neighborhood’s cool factor.
On a recent day at the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, a handful of students stood at work benches making guitars, while cars outside cruised Grand Avenue past a jumble of old buildings and iconic neighborhood hideaways like the Bikini Lounge.
A former state legislator has written a book chronicling Scottsdale’s transformation from hick town to hip city.
Almost 70 years ago, a 12-year-old boy by the name of Paul R. Messinger moved to Scottsdale with his parents. He went to school and worked on a 20-acre family-owned dairy and poultry ranch on the corner of Indian School and Miller roads, dreaming of one day starting a business of his own.
“Back then, we grew up in an era when we felt that we could do anything,” Messinger says.
From maverick men to ceiling-shattering women, Arizona has no shortage of colorful characters that helped shape our great state.
Charles Poston
Not your average temple-building Zoroastrian silver prospector, Charles Poston, a.k.a. the “Father of Arizona,” literally put Arizona on the map. The former California gold rusher relocated to the Southwest to explore the mineral potential of lands obtained from Mexico in 1853. Three years later, he secured funding to start the Sonora Mining and Exploration Company in the town of Tubac, located in what was then called the New Mexico Territory. Poston served as mayor, judge and treasurer of Tubac, which prospered as a silver mining outpost until Apache attacks forced its abandonment during the Civil War.
Boosters heralded the Carnegie Library as an “ornament to the city’’ when it opened in Downtown Phoenix in 1908, giving residents their first permanent public library. Today, the red brick building is one of the city’s historic jewels and will share the spotlight as adjacent Washington Street undergoes a pedestrian-friendly makeover to celebrate the state’s Centennial.
