Historic Preservation: Finding Room for History in the Desert

When I left New York City for Tempe, Arizona, in August of 2001, I hoped to trade high-rises and high density for small town life. I dreamed of living in my own bungalow, a little place on the edge of the desert. So when I arrived, driving in my rental car under light-polluted skies along an endless expanse of new highway, I was for the moment disappointed. I drove down one of the town’s main streets, Rural Road, which crawled with fast food joints and the Brutalist architecture of Arizona State University’s graduate housing, searching for the origin of the street’s name. There was nothing rural about this town, half sprawling suburb, half East Coast-style urban renewal development. No matter, I thought. This is a college town. Somewhere, hiding behind the neon and the watered lawns, there must be one charming old neighborhood.

It took a few weeks before I found the place, tucked behind the brand-new downtown. The Maple Ash neighborhood comprises three streets of sweet, pre-1940 houses, mostly one-story and in a variety of architectural styles, from modern to Spanish mission. Students live here, as do a few owner-occupants, and although interrupted several times a day by the creak of a passing freight train, it’s a quiet neighborhood, a relic of the old Tempe. What shocked me was how little interest there was in preserving it. Tempe is the only municipality in the more than 2,000 square miles of the Phoenix metropolitan area without designated historic districts, and in my brief two-year sojourn to the Southwest, I regularly saw historic properties razed and replaced by multi-story apartment buildings and gated communities. I wondered why neighboring municipalities like Mesa and Phoenix were devoted to their historic sections, and why Tempe continued to demolish them, and found that politics, geography, and an outdated zoning code make the creation of historic districts a difficult project.

Redeveloping an Early Desert Outpost

Tempe was settled in the 1860s by enterprising families who used ancient Hohokum Indian irrigation canals from the Salt River to water their crops. Charles Trumbull Hayden, a town founding father, opened a ferry service to cross the river and a flour mill, which is one of the few remaining historic properties on the main drag of Mill Avenue. The town incorporated in 1871 as Hayden’s Ferry-until an English visitor claimed it reminded him of Ancient Greece’s Vale of Tempe, after which the current name stuck. The Normal School, now Arizona State University, opened in 1885, and the town continued to grow, experiencing its greatest boom after World War II. In the 1960s, however, Tempe began to suffer ailments common to many cities at that time-locally-owned businesses lost out to malls, main streets lost out to highways-and by its centennial in 1971, it was clear to local leaders that drastic measures were required to save downtown. John Akers, curator of History at the Tempe Historical Museum, says the once thriving Mill Avenue was nothing but “biker bars and druggie hangouts, with a few antique stores.”

So Tempe began a marathon redevelopment effort, reinvigorating the area with restaurants and movie theaters, retail shops and loft-style housing. (One of the newest projects, the Brickyard, resembles the abandoned factories of many East Coast downtowns and sells “renovated” lofts.) By most accounts successful, Tempe is now the fifth-largest city in Arizona, its downtown packed with pedestrians enjoying rejuvenated Mill Avenue. But many historic properties were lost to progress in the redevelopment shuffle.

Former Mayor Harry Mitchell recalled in an interview for the Tempe Historical Museum that “it was very easy to start redevelopment downtown because most people felt what should be done is just bulldoze everything and start all over.” Their sentiment permeated the civic improvement ideology, resulting in the kind of development readily seen in downtown Tempe today: the Arizona Cardinals’ football stadium, high-rise office buildings, Philadelphia-style townhouses-buildings that have greatly improved the city’s revenue, but which don’t complement the vernacular architecture of the Southwest, nor the surrounding Maple Ash neighborhood. Residents of Maple Ash, fearing for the survival of their humble homes in the face of this drastic architectural makeover, have organized to exert more community control over the fate of their neighborhood.

The City of Tempe notes on its website that “the Maple Ash neighborhood is the only remaining pre-1940 neighborhood in Tempe; the others have been displaced by expansion of the downtown commercial district and Arizona State University.” Given this acknowledgement of the area’s unique architectural value, one might think the city would do everything it can to maintain these few historic blocks. But awareness of historic preservation came late to Tempe and to neighborhood residents. Arizona was the last of the 48 continental states, incorporated in 1912, and it has a blurrier sense of history than older states. Although the National Historic Preservation Act passed Congress in 1966, the Arizona State Historic Preservation Act wasn’t passed until 1982, and by that time many buildings had been lost.

When redevelopment efforts began, many of the Maple Ash properties were owned by absentee landlords, who rented them out to students at neighboring Arizona State University, just a block east of the area. Maple Ash was then zoned for single-family residential use, keeping the lots shallow and thus unprofitable targets for redevelopment.

Tempe innovatively rezoned the area for multi-family dwellings, the highest density zoning in the city, “so owners could redevelop and fight off what was perceived as blight,” says Joe Nucci, the city’s Historic Preservation Officer. The neighborhood today is thriving, indicating the success of their approach. Very few lots, however, were redeveloped to the full extent that zoning allowed. Maple Ash is still a neighborhood of mostly one-story bungalows lingering quietly amidst all the noisy redevelopment that surrounds them.

A Pink Eyesore Galvanizes Maple Ash

Though the rezoning increased property values, it opened a Pandora’s box of urban planning problems. Initially, some of the area development was tasteful and respected the architectural history of the area. The Ash Grove Condominiums on Maple Avenue, for instance, retained two original houses in front of the development-an art moderne house from 1945 and a colonial revival from 1909-and built to the back. In 1986, however, developers razed several historic houses to build Pueblo Grande, a big, gleaming pink eyesore that offended long time residents and, according to Nucci, “galvanized the neighborhood into action.” Thus the Maple Ash Neighborhood Association was born.

Jenny Lucier, a founding member of MANA and a neighborhood resident for eighteen years, says MANA has responded to over 100 development proposals by the city, both in and around the neighborhood. “Not all of our interactions have been battles,” she says. “We try to be proactive.” Lucier points out that all of the current preservation activities owe their existence in part to former Mayor Mitchell, and that MANA has tried to continue their historically positive interaction with the government.

In November of 1995, city groups and neighborhood associations like MANA helped put the Tempe Historic Preservation Ordinance on the City Council’s agenda, and it was overwhelmingly passed, creating the Historic Preservation Commission and the Historic Preservation Officer, both firsts in Tempe. The ordinance aims to “provide protection for significant properties and archeological sites which represent important aspects of Tempe’s heritage; to enhance the character of the community by taking such properties and sites into account during development, and to assist owners in the preservation and restoration of their properties.” The ordinance states that property owners’ rights to redevelop, per city zoning codes, must be balanced with the community value of historic properties.

Unfortunately, it has proven an unsteady balance. Of the 458 historic properties listed on the Tempe Historical Museum’s website, more than 70 have been demolished. Even since the 1995 zoning overlay, historic properties have been destroyed, which is why MANA and others are eager to see official historic preservation districts on the city’s agenda. Currently, individual properties listed with the National Registry of Historic Places receive some protection from razing, and those listed with the State Registry even more, but the neighborhood as a whole remains subject to redevelopment. Says Preservation Officer Nucci, “Even registered properties can come down at any time.” Maple Ash residents fear that recent multi-story, mixed-use development on neighboring Mill Avenue and University Avenue will entice even more property owners in their neighborhood to develop according to the maximum zoning potential of their shallow lots, further destroying the integrity of the area.

Preservation Economics 101

One solution to this quandary is to officially designate the entire neighborhood as historic, but that would require the imposition of another zoning overlay, in essence reconstituting the original single-family zoning. Removing the option of multi-family development may substantially lessen property values-not an attractive economic prospect for the city or for residents. No one in city government doubts the economic benefits of historic preservation, but it’s difficult to predict whether property would prove more valuable under historic district status than it would with the current multi-family zoning left intact. Tony Felice, Redevelopment and Historic Preservationist for the adjacent City of Mesa, thinks it would; he says creating historic districts is “a slam dunk in terms of economic development. When a home is designated as historic, we’ve seen an increase in property values from 30 to 35 percent, often without even doing anything to the house.”

But while Mesa has successfully designated five districts as historic, Tempe still struggles to protect individual properties, let alone entire districts. Currently, Tempe’s Preservation Ordinance requires a 180-day waiting period for any property owner wishing to raze a building in the Maple Ash neighborhood. The purpose, says Jenny Lucier, “is to find alternatives, whether that means selling [the property] or proposing an adaptive reuse so they can meet their needs, or the last preference which is to move the building.” But still some buildings slip through the cracks. Making Maple Ash a historic district would ensure that Tempe’s ongoing war on blight would not result in further razing of historic properties.

Felice says that misconceptions about the process are what make the prospect daunting. Designating historic districts has “been extremely positive,” he says, “but it’s been a difficult and long road because of the myths about historic preservation that prevail. Historic preservation is not putting something in a jar of formaldehyde. It’s integrating [the property] into the future.”

Small City Blues

Preservation is especially problematic, however, when the only way to keep developing is to redevelop. While Mesa has 370 square miles of land to work with, and Scottsdale and Phoenix have 600 and 1,000 respectively, Tempe has only 40 square miles, bounded on all sides by incorporated municipalities. Nucci says that, since Tempe doesn’t grow, “our proportion of funds from the state doesn’t grow. State and federal revenue have become proportionally smaller while other communities have left us in the dust. Other cities continue to annex desert and agricultural space for residential opportunities.” It’s easier for cities like Scottsdale, Phoenix, and Mesa to designate historic districts given how much land they have to develop. In those cities, old buildings don’t have to come down to make way for new ones.

And though residents can see the success of redevelopment efforts-from 1992 to 2002, Tempe’s tax base grew from $2.1 million to $7.4 million, with a sales tax revenue increase of over 238 percent-it’s entirely possible that some of that growth would have occurred naturally, reflecting the economy of the last ten years. As John Akers notes, “the market would have done this anyway. The city didn’t have to start knocking down neighborhoods.”

While parts of Tempe’s older neighborhoods were being razed in the name of urban renewal, former Mayor Mitchell was himself interested in maintaining the historic urban feel of the city. “I think some of us on the [City] Council were very concerned with trying to save old buildings, and trying to create a basis from which we could create an identity downtown, besides just bulldozing,” he said.

Will Historic Preservation Ever Sell in Tempe?

Identity is a key issue in this ongoing seesaw between development and preservation. If a city is going to redevelop-to reinvent itself as a center of legitimate commerce instead of as a dying downtown lost to drugs and malls-then it must, to a certain extent, leave behind its old identity, including what many see as decaying old buildings.

Yet architecture is equally part and parcel of a city’s identity. Think of Savannah’s squares, San Francisco’s Victorians, or Brooklyn’s brownstones. Although one might not know it by a cursory drive down Mill Avenue, Tempe has some very beautiful buildings hidden on quiet side streets. Tempe could be known as more than just home to the Fiesta Bowl or Arizona State University. It could be known as a city with charming historic districts and well-preserved neighborhoods embracing a profitable revitalized downtown.

The question remains: how much are those buildings a part of Tempe’s identity now, and how much is the city willing to invest to ensure that they are part of Tempe’s future identity? Like many development questions, this one may come down to striking a balance between short-term profit and more substantial long-term gain.

The longer the Maple Ash properties remain standing, says Joe Nucci, the “more and more unique, and more profitable,” they become. What preservationists need now is for the value of historic properties to outpace the value of multi-family dwellings. “If the current trend of owner-occupancy continues so single family property values rise above the value of the zoning, and if the balance is right and everybody is ready, it could happen.”

By the time I left Tempe, on July 4, 2003, I’d seen the city complete its transformation: it looked like any number of Northeastern towns following the cookie-cutter approach to redevelopment. The downtown was an outdoor mall; the new housing which replaced the cottages was utilitarian and uncomplimentary. But the prevailing sentiment was that the development was good for the city and good for the people. In Arizona, itself such a new state, newness is what sells. MANA and other preservation groups will likely find it difficult to convince people that, for long-term economic success, and to preserve a sense of place, Tempe needs to hold on to its architectural history as it ventures into the future.