If I snuck inside the old kitchens, I wondered, would I find plates bearing the Tropics Motor Hotel logo? Would there be a box of old Hyatt Chalet matchbooks under the reservation desk? A dusty stack of Newton’s brochures in a storage closet? I coveted what I could use: glasses imprinted with the Old Faithful Inn logo. Sun Dancer Hotel mugs, silverware, stationary, pens.
I considered bringing a set of screwdrivers and a battery-powered drill to steal the signs but feared getting caught. Even though I thought of it more as an architectural salvage operation, cops would disagree. If not me, though, who would save them? Phoenix didn’t have a Mid-Century Modern preservation league back then. Unlike golf and sun-tanning, Googie didn’t rouse sufficient local interest. Bulldozers kept busy clearing the way for new buildings. Without me, I knew the signs, fixtures and décor would end up in a landfill, more scrap to be melted down for material. This stuff belonged in a museum. But to rescue it, I’d have to come at night when the illicit economy thrived.
To avoid the dangers of peak hours, I only explored in the morning: eight, nine, ten a.m. Even then cops drove by. It wasn’t a crime to walk with a camera, but somehow it felt like it. Because it required such fruitless and intense explanation, I never told friends about my explorations. I never even told my parents. What would they say? They wouldn’t confiscate my car keys, but they would likely lecture me on the dangers of my interests. When I went to Newton’s that morning, I was scheduled to be in a college class. No one knew where I was. If something happened, I hoped someone would piece the story together.
Jumping Newton’s fence was easy. I parked my truck on a side street. On the Inn’s more secluded west side, a cinderblock wall abutted a chain link fence topped with unruly spirals of razor wire, creating a double, back-to-back fortification.
I pulled myself up the cinderblock, found a gap in the barbs wide enough to place my feet then jumped. A forty foot dirt lot separated the street from the property. I leaned through a gap in the motel wall to study the wild garden of untended plants. It was silent, appeared empty. In case the homeless had encamped there, I walked softly atop the gravel. Raising my 35mm to my eye made me nervous, as if by lending one of my senses I forfeited the others. I hung the camera around my neck and listened for voices, breathing, shuffling feet. When fantasies rot, they smell like anything else: hot garbage cans, algae water.
Palm trees loaded with brown fronds rustled in the breeze. Pigeons flapped from the roof. I tiptoed across a patch of what was once the central lawn—four years worth of brittle die-off and blooms of Bermuda. A pair of blackened jeans laid matted to the ground, splayed as if their owner had fallen and evaporated.
In 1966 at the neighboring Travelodge, a robber once carved out the manager’s eye to prove how serious he was when he demanded money. In 1974, a thief shot another manager there; he later died at St Luke’s Hospital down the street.
I scanned the lot again, checking and rechecking. Icy fingers seemed to keep tickling my back. Occasionally the hiss of a passing car blew by on Van Buren, but tattered tarps blocked all views through the fence to the outside world. And that silence—it was more still than other mornings.
Amid a stand of derelict palms sat a dented white trailer. The dark arm of its tow hitch stood propped on cinder blocks. Aluminum foil covered its windows. Slowly I crept past it to the southern row of rooms. Pigeon shit splattered the walkway. Instead of boards, curtains covered the windows. When I tugged on the knobs, the doors didn’t budge. I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved.
One room’s door was open. I stopped and heard no movement. The silence emboldened me, so I pushed the door further to peer inside. It appeared lived-in. Mismatched blankets were heaped atop the bed. A small nightstand stood by a leather belt amid scattered tins of cat food that I hoped people hadn’t eaten. And beer cans everywhere, littering the orangish-brown carpet. I wanted a photo. I’d been too nervous to snap any. But fearing the occupant might be inside, I eased the door partially closed and stepped quickly across the lot. That was when the Dalmatian came galloping.
I pulled my socks as far up my calves as they’d go, as if cotton could protect me from canines, and I kept my eyes on the dog as I bent down. When I stomped my feet he retreated slightly. When I charged a few steps forward, he stood his ground. So I kept my back straight, waved my arms and yelled. Nothing happened. He stood there growling. I stood there yelling. We could have stood there forever. Finally I started throwing garbage at him. Cardboard. Beer bottles. Rock after rock. When he backed deeper into the yard I did what my body demanded and what my mind told me not to do. I ran.
Gripping the long metal base of the sign I’d picked up, I sprinted across the pool deck. Sprinted past the row of rooms, sprinted and knew how stupid I was for doing it. If guard dogs were like cougars, running would only trigger its predatory response.
At the building’s end I slipped through the fence. I kept expecting to feel teeth latch onto my ankle, to hear the sound of scrambling paws. I twirled and jogged backwards, looking for the dog, but he wasn’t there. I dropped the pole. Climbed the fence. Slipped between the barbed wire and snagged my shirt, shorts and forearm on the dusty razors. As I lifted myself onto the cinder block, the Dalmatian stepped through the hole and started at me from across the lot. He just stared.
For thirteen years I wished I’d snapped a few good photos, but in my haste, I hadn’t taken a single one.
When I moved back to Phoenix in June 2007, one of the first things I did was drive to VB. A lot had changed in the seven years I’d lived away. Used car lot replaced countless motel properties. Naked dirt stood in place of others. Some, like the old Arizona Palms, offered deals to airport travelers: “Two for $35.99,” the sign said. “Daily • Weekly • Kitchenettes • Pool.” Most had transformed into inexpensive apartments and transitional living facilities. Like the upscale Sands Hotel on 33rd, which became the United Methodist Outreach Ministry’s New Day Center, the largest family homeless shelter in Phoenix.
In April 2007, the city’s last three motels to offer hourly rates ceded their “Sexually Oriented Business” licenses, meaning no more hourly rates, no more signs advertising adult movies. The Log Cabin, the Classic Inn, and the Copa Motel, which, in an interesting twist, had been demolished the previous month—all three stood on VB. Police had built a case after a year-long investigation, and the City concluded what seemed obvious to all: that they were linked with prostitution.
The street was changing. Local groups unveiled plans to revitalize Van Buren by encouraging local business to open shop. As downtown gentrification crept east of Central Avenue along Motel Row, new attitudes came with it. The street fell within Phoenix Mayor Gordon’s “Opportunity Corridor,” a name he coined for an area filled with vacant lots, industrial sites and other under-utilized properties. It was ripe for redevelopment, what some commercial brokers called an emerging market. Redevelopment had long been waiting for a catalyst to ignite it here. That catalyst arrived in 2008 in the form of the city’s new light rail system, which travels down Washington Street, a quarter mile below VB.
Before the economic slump, Van Buren redevelopment had already started. In 2006, the 178-unit Escala Central City apartments began construction on the empty Phoenix Drive-In property, the Valley’s first drive-in movie theater. Escala was the first new housing project on east Van Buren in countless years, and some predicted it would be the first of many to come.
Once the motels surrendered their licenses, violent crime fell nearly forty-eight percent, and prostitution arrests decreased by more than seventy-one percent. In 2006, there were 203 prostitution arrests in the area around Van Buren and 24th. Between February 2006 and February 2007, cops made only eight prostitution arrests. And not a single homicide was reported in 2007; the previous year there were five.
I know, I know, I could hear my dad saying: “Things change—cities, people, fashion. Nothing to get sad about.” I studied ecology in college, so I understand that we live in a dynamic world, that