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  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 and chief muckety-mucks.” Back in its heyday, the general consensus was that there were two places for great steaks in Phoenix: Durant’s on Central 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.”

  East VB was such a fertile dump that sex workers from cities across the county traveled there to work. Just as it had in its days as a resort destination, it had earned a local and national reputation. On a typical night in the 1990s, a driver could spot twenty to fifty girls, women and men dressed as women pacing the cracked sidewalks. Black, white, heavy, thin, all the clichés were true: they wore short skirts, high heels, big hair, gaudy makeup and tight, low-cut tops that revealed deep cleavage and fatty midriffs. While most were middle-aged, some of the women cops arrested were in their sixties and seventies, old enough to have vacationed there with their parents as children.

  In people’s minds, the street came to symbolize the boundary between the “safe” and the “dangerous,” meaning the white and non-white, the privileged and non-privileged, sides of town. And most people I knew would away from it. Except for one excursion.

  Three friends and I once drove there on a Friday night during our senior year of high school. We were bored. It was late. We’d been drinking. Someone suggested we “yell at the hookers.” Friend 1 found the idea amusing. Friend 2 found it titillating. Being a reliable risk-taker who had yet to develop a more inclusive sense of empathy, the prospect of a dangerous adventure thrilled me. The lackadaisical Friend 3 went along for the ride.

  It might have taken ten minutes to drive from Friend 1’s affluent north Phoenix neighborhood. There, as one car in a series of slow cruisers, we drifted past figures shuffling in front of the neon signs. Men slouched at bus stops waiting for customers, not buses. Women stood beside payphones engaged in pretend conversations. We started yelling out the windows. “What’s up honey?” “Looking for a good time?” I knew it was cruel. We were mocking the unfortunate. It makes me cringe to think how a bunch of us white kids thought this was exciting: the danger, the grime, the empowering knowing that we’d sleep that night on the safe side of town. Knowing it didn’t change my behavior, but every day these women faced actual danger and survived in a culture that perpetually demeaned and repressed them. Whenever some stranger grunted on top of them, whenever they got arrested on Van Buren, they faced the fact of their limited means and thwarted aspirations, sacrificing part of the youthful visions of their future selves in order to make a living. These women probably grew up wanting to do something rewarding or d
ifferent with their lives. Now they were here, enduring the added insult of high school boys’ callous curiosity.

  For some reason, Friend 1 stopped his Bronco beside a tall woman in a miniskirt. The gray spandex terminated along the seam of her butt cheeks. She leaned toward the passenger window and said something about a ride. Then she climbed into the back seat and scooted between me and Friend 2.

  “Who’s going first?” she said. She looked at me, then at Friend 2. Friend 3 wouldn’t turn around. The smell of cigarette smoke and perfume filled the car. I caught Friend 1’s terrified eyes in the rearview.

  Friend 2 said he’d go and the rest of us said no thanks, we’d changed our mind and will let you out right here. “Oh no,” the woman said. “My time is precious. You think you can go wasting it with this shit?” We apologized in whiney voices and told her we’d drop her off wherever she wanted. When I turned to check her out, I noticed the bony cheeks, pronounced Adam’s apple and thin over-treated hair.

  Someone started arguing with her, and soon our overlapping chatter reached a furious pitch: we aren’t paying, we don’t want anything, no something for nothing, get out, please get out now.

  She said, “I got a pistol in my purse, honey, so don’t you sass me.”

  Adrenaline flooded my insignificant body. Her right thigh pressed against mine. I looked at her purse. It sat on her lap. I wondered, was she bluffing? Who would she shoot first: us in back or them in the front? I kept my eyes on her long veiny hands. If she reached for that purse, I vowed to grab her wrists and wrestle it from her. Instead of a struggle, someone said okay and handed her some bills. We pulled into a side street where she lifted her towering frame from the seat, leaning so far over that her square ass passed inches from my face before it slipped into the night.