Avenue (where patrons entered through the back door and kitchen), and Newton’s. Mom pointed to Dad and said, “He used to go there on business all the time.”
In the corner of the kitchen, leaning against the counter, Dad smiled. “Business was an excuse to eat,” he said. “Prime rib. I loved their prime rib.” Dad’s eyes grew distant as he described his meal: the thick red meat marbled with fat; the rich sour cream horseradish sauce; baked potato on the side.
I said, “Well what did the interior look like?” Neither Mom nor Dad could remember details, only that it was garish.
“But the food,” Dad said, nodding his head. “Phenomenal.” He crossed his arms across his chest and stared into the distance.
Mom looked at him in his culinary rapture, then looked at me with her brows scrunched. She said, “Whatever happened to that place?”
During the sixties, increasing numbers of travelers began flying rather than driving. Cheap desert and a demand for housing pushed the burgeoning population to Phoenix’s edges, transferring business from downtown to the burbs. The more chic, affluent districts of the newly decentralized metropolis migrated northward, leaving once classy downtown joints like Newton’s and Durant’s wanting for business. It was a pattern repeating itself across the United States. The new interstates delivered the lethal blows.
First the Feds built I-17 in 1969. Faster, more modern, it featured its own set of services. And as in so many cities, as the interstate siphoned away traffic, the old commercial strip fell into disrepair. Fewer vacationers rented rooms. Few stopped for dinner or recharged at coffee shops. They didn’t even drive the road. The Caravan Inn once touted its Oasis restaurant as “one of Phoenix’s most popular dining places.” By the time the Feds finished their piecemeal construction of Phoenix’s I-10 in the eighties, the Oasis no longer existed. Approximately twenty functioning motels remained, and Phoenix’s version of the Vegas Strip, our Great White Way, had become what the locals called the Boulevard of Blowjobs.
Desperate for customers, motels installed mirrored ceilings, waterbeds and closed-circuit pornography. Signs advertised adult movies and hourly rates. A few places featured Magic Fingers vibrating beds. In turn, innkeepers facilitated the street’s transformation from nationally renowned vacation destination to locally feared red light district. Crime rates soared.
On the street and in police blotters, Van Buren became known as VB, and related news stories centered largely on drug deals, robbery, murder and prostitution. As a kid, it was the butt of all my friends’ and my drug jokes. “Let’s go score some crack on VB,” we’d say, or, “Hey, I saw your mom the other night. She was strutting VB.” The name seemed close to VD for a reason.
When I discovered the street’s architectural splendors, the Sun Dancer was closed. The Kon Tiki was closed. The Tropics Motor Hotel’s coffee shop no longer served coffee or had functioning doors. Same with the cafes at the Sands and Desert Rose. Newton’s Inn and its prime rib restaurant had been condemned for four years.
Friends I told this to asked me, “Who cares?” I played Esquivel’s “Mucha Muchacha” on my stereo and wondered how they couldn’t recognize the grandeur of gaudiness. They also failed to appreciate Esquivel’s space age lounge music, so eventually I quit discussing Googie and explored the street alone.
Although this might sound like a line from a B-movie, in the Atomic Era, nuclear energy was touted as the future source of the entire world’s power. Many scientists, boosters, and business people said that one day, not only would automobiles be atomic, but also appliances, medicine, weapons, food preservation techniques, and the entire urban grid. Fanciful as it sounds to our modern ears, back then, nuclear applications seemed limitless, and the American public was enthralled. Thirty-five million people watched the live television broadcast of the 1952 atomic test at Yucca Flat, Nevada. Just as that mushroom cloud had lifted into the heavens, so too would the imagined luxuries and conveniences awaiting the average citizen. People actually believed that large nuclear power stations would soon make electricity so abundant that it would be too cheap to meter. They believed that nuclear energy would do for civilization what coal and oil could never do, and that history would recognize this period as a milestone in human technological and cultural development on par with the first smelting of bronze and the Industrial Revolution.
Like the music on the radio, people were jazzed. Ford Motor Company unveiled its nuclear concept car in 1958. Named the Nucleon, it included a small nuclear reactor in the vehicle’s rear in place of the traditional internal combustion engine. Two booms suspended a power capsule which held the radioactive core. Depending on the size of the core, Ford said cars such as the Nucleon would be capable of traveling some 5,000 miles without recharging. Once the core expired, owners would just take it to a conveniently located charging station, which designers imagined would eventually take the place of gas pumps.
In 1963, the California state and federal governments proposed detonating small nuclear explosives to cut a section of I-40 through southern California’s Bristol Mountains. As unsafe as that sounds now, the idea was one of many proposed by Project Plowshare, a scientific organization investigating civilian applications of atomic energy. Part of the US’s larger Peaceful Nuclear Explosions program, or PNE, one of the group’s principal selling points, was nuclear technology’s low-cost compared to conventional construction methods. A 1964 Time article recorded Plowshare scientists at a Livermore, California laboratory expounding on nuclear devises’ potential use in canal-digging, specifically in widening the Panama Canal and cutting a new Isthmian channel through Nicaragua along what was nicknamed the Pan-Atomic Canal. “Ploughshare men,” the article reported, “are sure that if modern, ‘clean’ explosives are used, the radioactivity that escapes will be of little significance.”
Nuclear medicine remains an active branch of medicine. Companies still irradiate food to preserve it. But, like the Nucleon, the idea of nuclear commercial engineering died on the drawing table, and by the late seventies, atomic energy had assumed a more sinister reputation. Nuclear weapons proliferation increased public fear of cataclysmic war. In 1979, one of Three Mile Island’s reactors suffered a partial meltdown, making it the worst civilian nuclear accident in US history. Chernobyl’s reactor exploded in 1986. Both of these incidents effectively crippled the nuclear power industry and extinguished the last rosy embers of the Atomic Era’s consuming optimism. The audacious names, the heroic plans, the frequent use of the term “modern”—it all sounds so over-the-top now, like society temporarily went nuts. But maybe it’s no different than our world now. Maybe a nuclear utopia is no more outlandish than the modern idea that fast internet connections and shared information will somehow improve all human life, giving voice to the voiceless, eradicating ignorance, and erasing humanity’s religious and political divisiveness so that people across the world all see that we’re far more alike than we are different. Every age has its grand delusions, and every era, like every person, is defined as much by its accomplishments as by its fantasies, the ones we dream and the ones we fail to achieve. As we age, our own dreams wither and our vision of all possible futures narrows. If we live in the same place long enough, the streets we drive, the buildings we pass, will bear the markings of our lives, and sometimes carry painful reminders of our youth, our thwarted ambitions, and people who have died, along with the condemned husks of our former selves. Maybe that’s just the cynic in me talking, the hardened aging realist who has seen the street of dystopian dreams, the place where the future once imagined now lays in ruin, because the future finally arrived.
In the Phoenix New Times article “Tough Row to Ho,” reporter Susy Buchanan accompanied police on a 2004 roundup of Van Buren prostitutes. In a group of handcuffed sex workers, one named “The Troll” sobbed beside a blonde, giving the cops a story about wanting to straighten up her life, pleading with them that, if they’d just let her go, she’d return to school in Colorado and become a beautician. The blonde eyeballed her disapprovingly and said, “You a ho! It ain’t never gonna be straightened up. Once a ho, always a ho. Get used to it.”