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  We deserved much worse. Her time was precious. And you can’t go around treating people like that. My parents had taught me better, yet driving away from Van Buren that night, my friends and I didn’t discuss our failure to respect these women’s humanity. Instead, we laughed about the incident because, terrifying as it was, it made us feel like survivors, tough and triumphantly returning from this imagined battlefield. Like most teenagers, we loathed our hometown for its asphyxiating boredom, and we refused to see ourselves as anything more than victims of tedium, searching for excitement. This is why discovering Googie on Van Buren years later felt like a revelation: finally there was something interesting to do in Phoenix.

  Like most twenty-somethings, I wanted nothing more than to escape to some place cool like San Francisco or San Diego. Googie transformed Van Buren from the skuzziest to the most interesting place in town, which transformed Phoenix into someplace bearable. Granted, VB offered none of the innovative eateries captured in Hess’ book—no Coffee Dan’s to photograph, no bright, verdant interiors like Pann’s or Ship’s. But in Phoenix, looking at the burned out skeletons of vacation destinations seemed better than getting stoned at a friend’s house, watching TV, or going to the mall, which were my usual entertainment options. I imagined a local newspaper headline: “Kid Finds Something Interesting in Capital’s Most Notorious Crime Zone.”

  So I’d park, and men in baggy uniform pants and white tees would change direction to walk toward my car. “What’s up man?” they’d say. If I passed them while driving at my slow investigative pace, they’d spot me peering and think I was interested in them rather than the motels behind them. They’d say, “Whadyou need?” I’d shake my head, say, “No thanks man, I’m good.”

  When I came back with the camera, I photographed the buildings from the sidewalk. Stepping from my car felt dangerous. The whole act felt invasive. It attracted attention. People watched me from motel windows and the steps of nearby trailers. I kept a two-inch knife in my pocket, but the sidewalk offered the red light’s main form of protection: exposure. Cars whizzed past. Sometimes pedestrians: a teen in a wife-beater with a tattooed neck; a grown man riding a child’s BMX. I’d nod. A few nodded back. Eye contact seemed bold enough to double as a warning: I see you, so don’t mess with me. Some people eyeballed my 35mm. It was my grandpa’s. Mom had given it to me when he passed away that summer.

  Other locals greeted the camera with suspicion. They peered from behind curtains, crouched smoking on porches and squinting at me. Since I wasn’t there to make a purchase, I assumed they thought I was a NARC or some unwelcome source of trouble. When one East Indian man stepped from a motel office and into the frame, he waved me off. “No photo, no photo,” he said. I apologized, explaining I was interested only in the architecture. He shook his head and yelled louder, but the sidewalk was public property, so there was nothing he could do about it.

  A skinny shirtless man once leaned out of his unit at the Arizona Motel. “Whata’you up to?” he said. His body was a tangle of sinewy muscle, skin pulled taught across stomach, arms and neck. A large mattress set on the side of his wall beside a few wooden boards. I told him I was photographing the architecture. When he asked if I was with the paper, I said no, and he said he was a scrapper. Not like a fighter, he explained. He owned a pickup and kept regular routes collecting any spare parts or metal he could sell to a dealer. “You want to see something worth takin’ pictures of,” he said, “man, scrapping is it.” Still convinced I was a reporter, he offered to let me ride with him for an article he said I should write. His life intrigued me. I told him I might take him up on that later.

  If motel units’ doors were open I could sometimes see into the rooms. Usually an unmade bed was the most visible detail, the corner of a mattress exposed below ruffled sheets. Other times people sat on the bed’s edge, staring at a TV. Like the prostitutes, these residents were someone’s children. At some point they had recognized how luck determines one’s chances in childhood, and the way circumstance unwittingly narrows one’s options in adulthood, squashing our innocence as we accept the fact that some of our dreams are either no longer feasible, or require too much effort to work for. I recognized this, too, but I’d benefited the other way. When I told the scrapper that I might take him up on his offer, I meant it. I wish I’d meant it more. Now that I see how empty buildings are without people, it’s too late to tell their stories. But back then I didn’t come for the people. I came for Googie, and I favored the details.

  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 simult
aneously 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 we need to adapt, because if we’re not changing we’re dying. Curbing crime meant East Van Buren’s hard-working residents might soon enjoy a safer, more agreeable neighborhood with streets they could walk on, and new business to patronize. It also meant many of the lower income residents would get priced out. This was the start of the area’s gentrification cycle, and that and the erasing of history made me wistful. Unlike hourly rates at the Log Cabin, nostalgia turned out not to be a passing fancy.

  I drove west on VB, through the decreasing addresses toward downtown. In the bright sunlight, ancient images raced through my mind: the Dalmatian, the barbed wire, Newton’s weedy lay out. Familiar buildings flashed on the roadside: the city’s first Denny’s, the drug-dealer Circle K, an old liquor store with a neon sign. Finally, I thought, I get to see Newton’s again, and this time I was going to capture it on film. My heart thumped in anticipation. My fingers drummed the steering wheel, but as I sped up VB, I saw an increasing number of vacant lots, and my fingers drummed less from excitement than fear. Where motels once stood, there was now bare dirt, and weedy squares littered with beer cans and broken glass. Dry, bent palm trees and partial cement foundations broke their desolate monotony, and a deep part of me knew what I would find at 917 East.

  Expecting what I found on 9th Street didn’t make it any less wrenching. Newton’s was gone. My camera lay on the passenger seat, and in the Inn’s place stood Camden Copper Square, a high-end, two-story, gated condo complex. Trimmed palm trees decorated the property, standing sentry along the black metal fence and tan, stucco walls. The copper-colored letters on the sign called it “An Apartment Community.” I knew what it was: the new face of redevelopment, designed to attract the young executives and well-to-dos who’d started frequenting the bars and restaurants popping up throughout downtown as part of the city’s coordinated revitalization project—“infill” and “mixed-used” urban planners call it, “gentrification” to others.

  I turned into the Camden on what was still labeled 9th. A callbox hung from a stucco island dividing incoming and outgoing traffic. When the man in front of me waved an ID before a sensor, an automated security gate entrance opened and his white Acura slipped inside. Rather than follow my natural impulse to sneak in, I turned into the adjacent visitor lot. What was there to see? These kinds of condos were a dime-a-dozen in Phoenix. They’d surrounded me my whole life.

  I parked in a narrow space by the front office. Two white teenage girls sprinted down the sidewalk laughing, trying to make the light. In the park across the street, Hispanic kids in red shorts and tank tops kicked soccer balls back and forth. Three young urbanites in tight black jeans strutted toward Central Avenue and some vision of a downtown night life beyond, maybe a bar, maybe a tour of the galleries in the nearby arts district.

  The Hyatt Chalet Motel across the street, renamed the 7 Motel and fenced for as long as I could remember, was gone too. It was now a dirt lot. Something upscale would soon stand there—a sushi restaurant, a wine bar with polished concrete floors and exposed duct work. The Googie starburst, asterisk, sputnik—whatever name you assign that signature ornamentation for what looks like a fizzing sparkler—were, as Hess described, a symbol of “energy caught in the act of explosive release, like a coruscating diamond.” Yet Van Buren’s energetic vernacular decayed so quickly that it seems never to have existed. Wildwood, New Jersey of all places has the Doo Wop Preservation League, a 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in 1997 to preserve and increase awareness o
f the area’s Googie architecture. LA has the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee. Since 1984, they’ve saved priceless Googie structures like Ship’s coffee shop, Pann’s and the Wich Stand. Phoenix lacked any comparable mobilization.

  I locked the car and walked across the street. I had always told myself that I’d sneak into the 7 Motel to photograph it from the inside. I never did. After the dog cornered me, I quit visiting VB all together, yet I kept telling myself I’d try again next weekend, next month, sometime soon. At least with my camera, I could have fixed local preservationists’ error by filling the historical gap. I was ideally positioned to document it. Now here I was, another thirty-something carrying childhood regrets, a man in a lot staring at a new condo building, trying to stare the past back to life.

  A SECONDARY LANDSCAPE

  We reached the Canadian border at two a.m. with the PCP hidden in Dean’s insulin syringes and the weed buried in the peanut butter.

  During the previous three weeks that July, Dean and I had driven my dad’s minivan from Phoenix up the Pacific Coast. Unshaven, studded with mosquito bites, and stinking of alder wood smoke, we hiked and camped in Redwood, Mt. Rainier, and Olympic national parks. There, far from humanity, we scaled precipitous sea stacks, touched orange sea stars in tide pools, and watched seals watch us from the breakers. While tripping on mushrooms near what was then the world’s tallest tree, I perched atop an enormous fallen redwood log whose upturned trunk stood ten feet off the ground and studied a deer browsing the tangled understory. When I slipped on the mossy bark coming down, I fell face-first into ferns. Dean crouched on a nearby log, snickering maniacally. “I am tripping so hard,” he said.