Let’s Play a Game, Tucson

Let’s play a little game to see how you feel about new development in Tucson. We’ll call it Progress Roulette. Try your best to remember your answers:

1. Let’s say you live in a quite neighborhood, just on the outskirts of the hustle and bustle of the city and campus. Would you be okay with the city allowing developers to build a corridor of shopping and service buildings along one of the streets on the edge of your neighborhood? (Yes/No)
2. Your favorite locally owned bookstore in town is going to be sold and rebranded by a young out-of-town owner because the current owner thinks Tucson is getting “too busy”. Is this going to be a good thing for Tucson’s small business community, or a bad thing? (Yes/No)
3. Let’s say a new hotel is going to be built in downtown Tucson. It’s going to be built by two architects out of Los Angeles, and will incorporate popular, modern architectural elements. Would you support a modern hotel in downtown Tucson? (Yes/No)
4. A new wave of out-of-towners are coming to Tucson from another state’s biggest city that has become too overpopulated and too expensive for their taste. These out-of-towners begin opening restaurants that mimic their city’s personality and tastes. Are you okay with them changing Tucson’s culture? (Yes/No)
5. An incoming luxury hotel wants to add a massive neon sign to its architectural design. While the hotel will not stand very tall, the bright sign will still be easily seen over the tops of our short ranch styled homes. Would you let the hotel get away with it? (Yes/No)
6. A large public park has been green lighted by the city. Unfortunately, the city wants to build it on a historical sight built by some of Tucson’s early inhabitants. While the city claims it will build the park in such a way that the standing historical buildings will be preserved, the structures will also be flanked by play-structures and sports fields. Are you okay with the infringement of history? (Yes/No)
7. A new highway is slated to be built off of the edge of Tucson, through untouched desert, up one of Tucson’s forested mountains, and to a hard to access lake. Are you be okay with the city paving over the desert? (Yes/No)

So, let’s see how you fared:

1. In 1916, the street now known as 4th Avenue was officially converted into a shopping corridor with the opening of the underpass—bringing shopping and services into the then quiet suburb neighborhood now known as the 4th Ave District.
2. In 1976 the owner of Livingston’s Used Books sold the shop to his son Bob Oldfather, who then moved from Colorado to Tucson to rebrand the store as Bookmans.
3. Hotel Congress was built in 1918. The hotel was beautiful, and brought a popular architectural style at the time known as Neo-Renaissance to Tucson thanks to its L.A. designers.
4. With the invention of the air conditioner came the beginning of Tucson’s biggest population boom. People were coming from far and wide to settle in this new and exciting city, many of them coming from Chicago, IL. These out-of-towners didn’t open Mexican restaurants, or western themed steakhouses, they opened (big city) Chicago themed Italian restaurants like Bazil’s, Caruso’s, Mama’s Pizza, Luke’s Italian Beef and countless others.
5. The city’s biggest most audacious sign does not belong to the new AC Hotel in downtown, or even the more luxurious Ritz Carlton. The city’s most fabulous signage belongs to the Tucson Inn & Suites, which was built in 1953. The now iconic sign has been folded into many of Tucson’s advertising and marketing packages.
6. In a city that can’t stand the idea of allowing the future to encroach on the past, it is amazing that Fort Lowell Park exists. The thought of all those little kids spilling Gatorade and orange slices all over the grounds of what once was a pre-civil war era United States Army fortification probably made a few historians cringe.
7. Lastly, in 1933 Catalina Highway was carved through the Tucson desert, tearing up a strip of delicate high Sonoran forest ecosystem on its way up to Mount Lemmon. This led to the development of Summerhaven, and the most southern ski run in the United States.

This article is not a call to bulldoze everything in sight; to disregard historic sites and neighborhoods, and blindly pursue future developments. It is simply a reminder that “Growth” and “Culture” are not mutually exclusive. Both are simply points in time, ever evolving, ever changing. The Tucson we love today had to be developed and built at some point in time. Old buildings were torn down, neighborhoods were changed, new-comers came in (including ourselves), and desert was scraped and platted. Today’s nostalgia was yesterday’s innovation.

So, today we stand at a crossroads. We must protect and respect where we came from, serve our city’s current needs as best as we can in the present, and plan for the future. What future landmarks are we denying today, what past will future Tucsonan’s remember? Maybe it’s not for us to know, maybe it’s for us to find out.