Once I saw the black and white photos in Hess’ book, these notions gripped me with an evangelical force. I fantasized about walking into a coffee shop, waving to the waitress and saying, “Hey Peggy, howya doin’? Cup of coffee when you get a minute,” and having her wink and say, “Sure thing, sugar,” as I seated myself at the Formica counter between a guy in a checked fedora and a woman in cat eye glasses and a rhinestone cardigan. There, in view of a parking lot filled with finned cars, I would read the paper. I was twenty years old. I never read the paper, not even for school work. But planted in that shiny metal swiveling chair I would feed myself pieces of fried eggs and ham without taking my eyes off the newsprint.
This was the other part of Googie’s allure: I associated the aesthetic with my parents, and the older I got, the harder I clung to them against the ravaging current of time. Even though I wasn’t aware of it back when I was taking photos, I seemed to think that by experiencing old drive-ins and diners, I could experience my parents as they were at my age. I’m glad I never realized this back then, because it seems more delusional than romantic: thinking that the taste of a lime Ricky, or even knowing what one was, could facilitate such intimacy. Yet that’s exactly what I wanted.
The movie Short Cuts came out in 1993, Pulp Fiction and Reality Bites in 1994. When I watched them again sometime in ’95, I noticed certain scenes were set in Googie coffee shops. In Pulp Fiction, Travolta sits opposite Samuel L. Jackson in a pink vinyl booth and offers him bacon. “Pigs are filthy animals,” Jackson says. “I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got enough sense to disregard its own feces.” I did some research. The shop was called the Hawthorne Grill, originally named Holly’s. Armét and Davis designed it. And it sent my mind racing: if these places were still open, my little dream was doable. I had to find them.
With my native Phoenix a mere three hundred and seventy-five miles from Los Angeles, Googie had spilled easily into the city. Once I started searching, I found numerous examples: Christown Lanes bowling alley on 19th Avenue and Bethany Home Road; the Herman & Sons Pianos store on 20th Street and Camelback; a Methodist church behind Los Arcos Mall; a Tiki Dairy Queen on 70th Street and McDowell. There were scattered Googie car washes and car dealerships too, and a tall white building on Central Avenue that resembled a giant punch card. But it was East Van Buren that housed the densest cluster.
Named after the eighth US President, the street runs east and west through downtown Phoenix. City founder Jack Swilling built his farm between 32nd and 36th streets south of Van Buren in 1867. From those early days until the 1920s, it remained a quiet rural road on the northern edge of town connecting Phoenix to adjacent Mesa and Tempe. As the automobile grew in popularity, the road’s location made it such an important corridor that, after WWII, four highways converged on it: highways 60, 70, 80, and 89. People traveling between the East Coast and southern California, Sonora, Mexico, and Alberta, Canada traversed Swilling’s old road.
During the twenties and thirties, locals built auto camps, huts, and cottages to capitalize on the traffic. These places more closely resembled campgrounds than motels, bearing such names as Camp Phoenix, Camp Montezuma, and Autopia. Camp Joy, one of the first, sat on 22nd Street in what was then the country beyond the city’s eastern boundary. “Rates $1.00 a Day and Up,” its postcard advertised. “Present this card to manager and he will do his best to please you.” As auto-travelers became more sophisticated, so did their demands, and the trend soon shifted from camps to autocourts, to hotels and motor hotels—later shortened to motels. Soon motels and their ilk stood side-by-side, one after the other, competing with each other and numerous souvenir stands for tourist dollars. Piano bars and dance halls popped up, then coffee shops, steak houses, even a boxing and wrestling arena. Signs lined the highways coming in to the Valley, announcing the bargains and services that awaited travelers.
Van Buren became known as Motel Row. “The Pyramid Motel,” one postcard said, located “in the heart of Motel Row.” Businesses advertised: Kitchenettes. Baby cribs. Telephone in each room. Singles, doubles, family suites. Texas length Queen size twin bed. Filtered and heated pool. Hi-fi, radio, free color TV. Hot water in winter, refrigeration in summer. Thermostatic heat. Panel ray heat. Steam heat. Central forced air heat. Electronic baseboard heat. Refrigerated cooling. Florescent lights. Private patios. Private sun deck. Shuffleboard. Putting green. Newsstand. Dining room, banquet room, cocktail lounge, excellent café. Wall to wall carpeting. Ceramic tile baths. Modern lobby. Coffee served at no charge. Car-ports. Near airport. Minutes from downtown. Bus stop at door. Spacious, beautifully landscaped grounds. Informal resort atmosphere. Designed with an accent on vacation luxury. All major credit cards honored.
By the mid-fifties, competition grew fierce. Pools and free breakfast became outdated weapons in the commercial arms race. To differentiate themselves from the pack, businesses erected bright Googie signage, sweeping boomerang lobby roofs and devised various gimmicks to lure customers. The Ramada Inn on 38th Street built a trolley on a track to shuttle guests to their rooms. Not to be outdone, the Hiway House on 32nd installed a miniature train for kids to ride. As in Las Vegas, Van Buren motels decked themselves in exotic themes to wow visitors. There were the Western themed motels like the Stagecoach and Frontier. There were the early Americana themed motels like the Log Cabin and Old Faithful, the Arabian-themed Bagdad, Caravan and Pyramid motels, and the Mexican-themed Sombrero, El Rancho, Mission, and Montezuma. Some upscale resort hotels left large areas relatively vacant in their center so they could build casinos in case the state legalized gambling; it never did. Googie fell out of fashion in the mid-sixties, replaced by less gaudy architectural styles, but new motels went up on Van Buren reflecting the Polynesian fad sweeping the nation: the Tropics, Tahiti, Coconut Grove, Samoan Village, and the crème de la crème, the grand Kon Tiki Hotel, where celebrities like James Brown stayed while passing through town. There were over 150 tourist lodges on east Van Buren between the mid-thirties and mid-sixties, making it arguably Phoenix’s best known and most traveled street. With its reputation for charm and class, citizens considered it the pride of the city, and Newton’s Prime Rib was one of the best restaurants.
During my seven years living out of state, I occasionally thought of Newton’s. Hearing the term “steak house” reminded me of it. An ugly bar in Oregon reminded me of it too—a tan box with a neon red Schlitz sign mounted on off-white flagcrete. For some reason, the tiki bar scene in Goodfellas also reminded me of it. Although Newton’s restaurant wasn’t Googie—no parabolic roof or starburst motifs—it exhibited all of the grand gaudiness of the era: grey cinder block walls traced with thick iron accents and light fixtures; a brightly colored interior and bright outdoor signage; and cylindrical metal lighting that hung outside, the matted surfaces of which were perforated with holes like those on a diner’s heat lamp. Newton’s was Atomic Era-meets-Excalibur. Sometimes I’d see old advertisements in print magazines—tinted photos of beehived women and men with skinny ties eating inside dim restaurants with red velvet walls—and I’d wonder: what state was the building in now? How much more decrepit, if it was even there at all? I Googled the name Newton’s but found nothing. I vowed that the next time I visited family in Phoenix, I’d drive by and see. Then I forgot to when I made the trip home. When I got back to Oregon I told myself: next time. But I did mention the place to my parents while visiting them.
The three of us were standing around their kitchen that day. Like many longtime Phoenicians, both my parents had eaten at Newton’s. During my days photographing Van Buren, I didn’t tell them about jumping the fence to enter the property, but when I mentioned Newton’s in passing, Mom said, “Oh yeah, that used to be the place to eat in town. Everyone went there, all the city’s bigwigs